Mike Sullivan

[Canadian Museum of History Act, June 17th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today in the foreshortened debate on Bill C-49. After only one hour of debate, the Conservatives decided it was time to shorten the debate even further by imposing time allocation.

The minister referred to this legislation as having been on the books for eight and a half months. We are not in control of the agenda; the other side is in control of the agenda. If it chose not to bring it forward over the past eight and a half months, that is not our fault. The minister might want to speak to the government House leader to find out why it has taken so long for the bill to come forward.

Members opposite keep saying that we are creating a museum. This bill would not create a museum. It would destroy one museum and out of its ashes build another. It is a good idea. We on this side think a Canadian historical museum would be a good thing to have, but we should not destroy the Canadian Museum of Civilization, which has an entirely different mandate and an entirely different purpose than a Canadian museum of history.

The mandate of the Canadian Museum of Civilization is:

—to increase, throughout Canada and internationally, interest in, knowledge and critical understanding of and appreciation and respect for human cultural achievements and human behavior by establishing, maintaining and developing for research and posterity a collection of objects of historical or cultural interest, with special but not exclusive reference to Canada, and by demonstrating those achievements and behaviour, the knowledge derived from them and the understanding they represent.

This is a very broad and ambitious goal and the museum has met some of that goal over the course of the past 23 years that it has been in existence.

I have been there. It is an absolutely amazing place. What it puts forward is way more than just history. It is in fact about the culture and civilization of not just Canada, but of many places in the world, and of Canada not just the country, but Canada as it existed before the white man arrived. This is also in that existing human cultural achievements.

The new mandate of the Canadian history museum is

—to enhance Canadians’ knowledge, understanding and appreciation of events, experiences, people and objects that reflect and have shaped Canada’s history and identity, and also to enhance their awareness of world history and cultures.

I emphasize the word “Canada's” history and identity because we now lose the notion of civilization. Canada did not exist officially until 1867. Does this mean we are only to discuss things that happened from 1867 forward, that the contributions of the fact that this continent was peopled by native North Americans long before any of us Europeans ever arrived on the scene? Is that not to be considered as part of Canada's history? It is hard to tell from the statement of mandate of what the intention of this history is.

We have in the Canadian Museum of Civilization an internationally regarded icon of something more than just history, and it is associated with the war museum. In France, there is no museum of war. There is a museum of peace and it too is internationally regarded as a place to discuss something other than historical artifacts leading to war, or historical art leading to war or whatever wants to be discussed. That notion of discussing peace lends itself to an international recognition. The notion of discussing civilization lends us to an international recognition, which I fear we will lose by focusing on only history and only the history of Canada.

In terms of the amendments that were proposed by the various bodies in the foreshortened again committee stage, one of the ones that the minister referred to earlier, was the suggestion that there should be curatorial independence. Curatorial independence means that the museum, whether it is the Museum of Civilization or the museum of history, should be in a position to decide itself what it wants to display, how it wants to display it and whether it should take on controversial displays.

The minister said today in the House, “As the minister, I have never once, nor could I ever interfere with the decision of a museum to put on an exhibit or not”. When he said that, I could not believe my ears, because it was just a few short months ago that an Ottawa museum, the Museum of Science and Technology, put on an exhibit that the minister said, “The exhibit does not fit within its mandate. Its content cannot be defended and is insulting to taxpayers”.

The minister will stand and argue that he did not actually tell the museum not to run it. When a minister gets up and publicly states that something is not within its mandate and is insulting to taxpayers, he is questioning the curatorial independence of that museum. To stand here in the House today and suggest he has never done it is beggars belief.

When the museum put on that display, it was clearly going to be controversial, a display that the museum itself and its curators decided was important and within its mandate, but the minister interfered.

Is that making a statement publicly that something is not within its mandate and is insulting to taxpayers somehow not interfering in the mandate of the museum or in the ability of the museum's curators to have curatorial independence? In my view it does. Whether the minister actually pulled the display off the shelves with his own hands is not really the question. The question is whether the minister publicly went against the decision of the museum itself. That is what we, on this side of the House, want to see more strongly placed in legislation as we get the opportunity because of the events of the past year.

The third point I will make is the concerns we have about creating a museum of history at the same time the government has gone about rewriting history. For example, even today, when the minister said that he never did that, yet he did a year ago, is rewriting history. It is suggesting that it did not actually happen.

However, we are concerned we have a government that wants Canadians to be more focused on battles, on wars, on the War of 1812, on the relationship with the British Crown, on the battles that Canada has been in since Confederation and maybe a little before, because we have been talking about the War of 1812.

Twitter uses hashtags to get people interested in a topic, and the hashtag is, “HarperHistory”. That hashtag was created because the Prime Minister started to rewrite history in the House of Commons in question period by making erroneous allegations about the NDP. That hashtag, “HarperHistory” resurfaced again in the past few weeks when the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage decided to undertake a thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects of Canadian history.

There was a breakdown, a comparison of relevant standards of courses of study offered in primary and post-secondary institutions and there were considerable numbers of people responding to the hashtag “HarperHistory” who were—

[Canadian Museum of History Act, June 17th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to speak. I have lost count now as to the number of closure motions the government has put forward to limit debate, but it is clear the members opposite have virtually no regard for what parliamentary democracy is all about. We are now rushing through debate and consideration of every bill that comes before the House, yet when it comes to the democratic process itself, the government has failed to provide the bill that it has promised for I do not know how many months on reforming the democratic system to allow Elections Canada to have more oversight over spending and how elections themselves are conducted.

The government is only interested in pursuing its agenda in a rapid-fire way, in a way that undermines the very ability of Parliament to study and debate matters, while at the same time refusing to put forward the changes to the elections process that it has promised over and over again. We are at the point where we honestly do not believe the legislation will ever come forward.

Could the government tell us when the reforms to the elections process will be coming?

[Rail Safety, June 17th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, VIA train 92 derailed last year, killing 3 and injuring scores. Last week the Transportation Safety Board made three recommendations: that railway cabs be made safer so that engineers are better protected; that recorders be on board so that investigators can find out what happened after a crash; and the most important recommendation, that railways be required to put into place automatic braking systems to prevent these crashes.

Recorders were recommended 10 years ago. There has been no action from the Conservative or predecessor Liberal government. Safer cabs are mandatory on new locomotives, but too many are grandparented. Automatic braking systems, the norm in most of the world, are not even on the minister's radar when he talks about the reports of the safety board.

The board said the conditions that resulted in the Burlington crash happen once a month, a frightening statistic. It recommended action on the part of the government to prevent future deaths.

We in the NDP are calling on the government to act to implement these sensible recommendations. To do otherwise is to fail to stop a ticking time bomb.

[69th Anniversary of D-Day, June 11th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, last Sunday I attended the service in remembrance of the 69th anniversary of D-Day. In attendance were members of the Mount Dennis and Silverthorn branches of the Legion, veterans, politicians of all stripes and air cadets from the 700 David Hornell VC Squadron.

In a very moving and poignant service, the Reverend Canon Allan Budzin remarked that we, as Canadians, ask a lot of our soldiers. He said we give our young men and women rifles and ask them to go to foreign lands and fight our enemies. Then when they return, we give them pencils and ask them to go and fight our bureaucracy.

It is a shame that we, as parliamentarians, cannot put aside our partisan bickering for a few moments and begin fixing the bureaucratic nightmare that awaits our veterans and their families as they grow old.

For some, it will be a minefield of government lawyers to fight, as it was for disabled vet Dennis Manuge. For others, it will be discovering too late that they fought in the wrong war to be given all the rights and privileges they deserve as our protectors.

Let us fix it now, lest we forget.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague did not deal with the issue of the failure of some of the existing tax treaties to deal with the changes in Canadian tax law. For example, the tax-free savings account is not part of what is reciprocated in the U.S. so people who have to pay U.S. taxes have to pay on any money that they invest in a tax-free savings account in Canada.

However, of more concern to me as the deputy critic for persons with disabilities is the disability tax credit, which is not available to those people who file taxes in both Canada and the U.S., who live in Canada, whose children live in Canada but who, by reasons of the U.S. government, are deemed to be U.S. citizens. As a result, those individuals are paying tax twice. I would think that the Conservative government would be working hard to try to resolve the issue of double taxation with our biggest trading partner, the United States.

I would ask the hon. member what the government intends to do about that.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, cutting CRA at a time when the Auditor General says there is $29 billion out there that needs to be collected is a very strange move indeed.

If a government finds that there is money to be collected, it should increase the size of the tax-collecting agency and actually go after the very people who are hiding this tax.

The money in offshore bank accounts is not the money of ordinary working Canadians. It is not from the person running a mom-and-pop store on the corner of a street in Winnipeg or from people who are working for a living by putting in plumbing; it is from those with the ability and the wherewithal to hide money offshore.

Those are people much richer than you or I. Those are the people who are able to hide money, and we are allowing it to happen. The government ought to be spending a whole lot more money on the CRA to make sure those kinds of things stop happening.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there are always good questions from that corner.

When a former prime minister admits to pocketing $300,000 in cash and not paying taxes on it until many years later, it calls into question some of what our tax system is all about.

The people being complained about are apparently not avoiding taxes, because eventually they paid it. The same is true of Mr. Duffy. If Mr. Duffy has received money in the form of a gift that he has not reported to the tax department, there are serious consequences.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is one thing to park money offshore and avoid taxes, but it is quite another situation for individuals such as those the member referred to, who are in fact paying their taxes.

There was a dispute, and they are paying the taxes. There is no question that the money is getting paid.

Ordinary working Canadians are paying taxes. These people are paying taxes, as any ordinary working Canadian could and should. The issue is not that; it is that the $29 billion that is not being paid to our treasury would go a long way toward alleviating some of the difficulties the government is in after losing track of $3.1 billion.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

That is completely unfair. This legislation does not actually deal with that, but it does deal with the notion of taxes, taxes that should be fair and should be treated fairly. People should not be doubled-taxed, yet the woman and her son in Calgary are being double-taxed because they will pay tax in the U.S. that they did not have to pay in Canada, which is not fair.

There is also spectre of the government now deciding that it is going to use technology, as the member for Don Valley East suggested, to go after the tax cheats. I had a phone call from a constituent just last week when he heard about the great tax cheats out there who made the mistake, he thinks, of writing to the Prime Minister because shortly after that he was audited. This is a senior on a fixed income.

That audit determined he owed $80 from three years ago. He got a letter from Revenue Canada saying that if he did not pay that $80, he could go to jail for five years. If he agreed with the CRA, he could pay the $80, he would be fined and maybe not have to go to jail, but if he disagreed, he certainly would go to jail. That is what he thought was going to happen. He ended up paying the $80 and a $150 fine. Why are we going after this little fish in this big fish pond? There are so many more people who are evading taxes by so much more than that. By spending the resources to go after a poor senior who apparently did not pay $80 three years ago is doing ourselves a disservice.

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2013, June 10th, 2013]

Not that much, no.

Under the Conservative government, the uber-rich in Canada actually pay less as a percentage of the overall tax pie than they did in 2006. The people in the 1% are getting hit less and less and the rest of us, the 99%, the ordinary Canadians, the ordinary working people of our country, are paying more.