Mike Sullivan

[Combating Terrorism Act, April 22nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak again to Bill S-7. I must agree with my colleagues on this side of the House, the timing is somewhat suspect.

The bill was reported back to the House of Commons on December 12 of last year and it was not until today, more than four months later, that it suddenly appeared. The only notice was given last Friday, by the government House leader, that the bill would be replacing an opposition day motion that dealt with Conservative backbenchers' rights to speak here in the House. Therefore, the timing of the bill is very deliberately political. We could not come to any other conclusion than there is a political method and madness in the timing of Bill S-7.

However, putting the timing aside, we in the NDP believe in the freedoms and rights of individuals in our country. We do not want to see unnecessary and unhelpful changes to our laws that make people in our country subject to unreasonable search, seizure, and detention. That is one of the core problems with the bill that the Conservatives have refused to consider amending. Every step of the way we have suggested that we could support the bill if some of the freedoms that were being taken away by the government were put back or protected in another way. They have refused at this stage to consider any amendment whatsoever.

When the Conservatives bring a bill before Parliament they have all the right answers in their minds. They believe everything they have written is perfect and cannot be improved upon. We take considerable umbrage at that approach. In fact, there are some serious problems with the bill that we would like to correct.

We would like to work with the government in preventing terrorism. No one on this side of the House would like anything more than to prevent terrorism in our country. There has not been a lot of it in our country. Of course, we have the recent events in Boston to remind us just how close it could be. However, the police have been successful, without these changes in the law, in preventing serious terrorist acts in the country and without using its predecessor in preventing serious terrorist acts in the country.

Why then is it necessary to create this new regime? Why is it necessary to withdraw some more Canadian fundamental rights and freedoms? The right not to be imprisoned unreasonably and the right not to have to give evidence against oneself in a trial are two fundamental rights that we believe Canadians think they enjoy. However, the government would take those rights away with Bill S-7 and in so doing remove some of the very fundamental protections that Canadians have.

Bill S-7 is very complicated and technical, so let us bring it down to a more reasonable and understandable level. When we talk about the notion of preventative detention, what the heck does that mean to an ordinary Canadian? What it means is that a peace officer, and that means a police officer, an RCMP officer, a border officer, or anyone who is classified as a peace officer, can, without a warrant, put someone in jail. That is now what the Conservatives would like us to accept, if that peace officer believes that doing so might help prevent a terrorist act from taking place. It is true that after a short period of time—we do not know how long exactly, but they suggest 24 hours—that person would have to go before a judge and the peace officer would have to justify the detention of that individual or, in the words of the act, “the preventative detention”, which means that individual would have restrictions placed on his or her ability to get around, on whether or not he or she could have firearms, for example, and whether or not her or she could leave the country.

We have a situation then, without any trial and without any conviction.

That individual is not a person suspected of being a terrorist, by the way. That is a person who is maybe a relative, maybe a friend. That person, then, would be subject, under the bill, to serious, preventative detention measures.

As it turns out, this kind of preventative detention was there in the previous act and was never used. Police have managed without this kind of measure to stop terrorism. So, what would its effect be?

I would like to refer to good, old Uncle Albert, in Moose Jaw, whose nephew, for whatever reason, is suspected of some kind of terrorist act. And so, because they cannot find the nephew, the police come to Uncle Albert's door, put him in jail for a day, then take him before a judge and argue that Uncle Albert might know where the nephew is, so we cannot let Uncle Albert have any more guns. We cannot let Uncle Albert leave the country because we have to be able to interrogate Uncle Albert, Uncle Albert in Moose Jaw, who has done nothing. The police do not suspect him of any terrorism. He just happens to be the uncle of the nephew they do suspect.

What happens? Uncle Albert says, because he is from Moose Jaw and because he is a farmer and has to keep the varmints off his property, “I can't give up my firearms. I'm not giving up my firearms. I refuse.” There would be no choice, then, but to put him in jail for up to 12 months.

That is the kind of thing that could happen to Uncle Albert in Moose Jaw, who has absolutely no terrorist inclination whatsoever. However, because he is related to somebody the police are only investigating because they suspect there might be some kind of terrorist activity, Uncle Albert would be put in jail for up to 12 months.

That is not the Canada that I want to be part of. That is not the Canada that Canadians have come to expect, to have as part of their rights and freedoms the right and freedom not to be imprisoned without conviction, with a trial, without a judge.

That is exactly what the Conservatives are suggesting should happen. That is one of the things to which the NDP said, “Whoa, that goes too far”, and the Conservatives said, “Too bad. This is the way we like it. We want this preventative detention to apply to anybody, not just people we suspect of being terrorists, but people who are peripherally related.” That would take the bill way too far.

With respect to the timing of the bill, people can read for themselves what The Globe and Mail has to say about the timing of the bill. They can suggest for themselves what the Conservatives are doing to create the timing of the bill.

However, the bill would not do what the Conservatives suggest it would and put Canada in a place where we could prevent the kinds of things that we all want not to happen. The bill would go too far in a number of respects.

The NDP supports the notion that we should be giving our police forces, our border protection people, the powers and the tools they need, and the resources to prevent crimes from being committed in Canada. The border services is having its budget cut. At the same time the Conservatives are suggesting that we want to prevent terrorism and we want to prevent terrorism from occurring overseas. We want to prevent terrorists from being trained overseas. At the same time we want to prevent those kinds of things from happening, we are in the position of having to say our border services it has to make do with less.

The Border Services Agency is already having a terribly difficult time preventing the huge influx of smuggled guns into this country, which I would suggest is doing more to harm our citizenry and to put people in a state of fear than the bill would ever solve. At the same that the bill is being presented as a necessary part of police officers' arsenal, we are taking away money from the Border Services Agency, which is trying to prevent illegal handguns from reaching this country. It is a two-faced system.

We in the NDP believe that there are things we should be doing and spending more time on than this one. This one is seriously flawed.

[Nuclear Terrorism Act, March 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, this is one of the bills put forward by the government through the Senate, unfortunately, that deals with the Criminal Code of Canada, and the current government has touted itself on being tough on crime or making changes to the Criminal Code. However, when we review the history, it is not a very progressive agenda.

In fact, there are numerous actions that the Conservatives have taken over the past little while that would speak to the fact that they are not actually trying to prevent crime in this country. In particular, I am referring to the recent reductions in funding to the RCMP and, in particular, reductions in funding to the native reserves for their policing.

Can you comment on whether this is as important as that to the people of Canada?

[Petitions, March 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I present a petition signed by Canadians from Toronto and all over northern and southern Ontario requesting that the Canadian federal ministers of natural resources, environment, fisheries and transport increase their efforts significantly to halt and reverse the ongoing loss of water from the Great Lakes basin in general and the Lake Huron-Michigan-Georgian Bay-North Channel basin in particular.

The ongoing loss of water has resulted in a drop of four to five feet in water level, with no sign of rebounding and it has caused serious economic, health and safety concerns to the residents of these areas.

[Air Passengers’ Bill of Rights, March 22nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in support of the wonderful bill put forward by my friend the member for Laval to try to put some structure around how Canadians are treated by airlines in our country.

The Conservative government believes that the aviation system has to be protected to the point of legislating private companies back to work even before there is a labour dispute. We can only wonder why the government is not supportive of something that would protect the rights of consumers when it is so eager to protect its corporate fans.

The consumers involved here are people who take flights throughout Canada. Canada being the large and disparate country that it is, the use of airlines is necessary for some travel within Canada and is often the only way to get quickly from point A to point B. This is because we do not have the infrastructure for a high-speed rail system, as some countries do.

Airlines know that there is an oligopoly in the country, with only two major carriers. As a result, they really have Canadians at their mercy when it comes to how they treat them in the event of cancellations, overbooking or lost luggage. There is no formal regulatory system to insist that airlines do the right thing by their passengers. Some do, and we are not here to criticize those airlines, but we are opposed to airlines that treat their passengers shoddily.

We believe that the time has come to create, as already exists in Europe, a passenger bill of rights, such that when an airline treats passengers badly or when an airline chooses to cancel or overbook a flight, it is on the hook for some compensation for those people.

The airline certainly will not put back the missed meeting, the missed birthday, the missed wedding or any of the other things that Canadians rely on airlines to get them to on time. One of the reasons we use planes is that we want to get to a place on time; the airline will not replace those things, but it will offer some measure of compensation. The same is true for businesspeople, who cannot replace a missed meeting or make up for not meeting face to face with the client they had hoped to woo into investing in their company. These things will not be replaced, but they may get a few dollars out of it at least, to help them feel a little bit better about it.

The best way to speak on this matter is to offer some examples of what happens to real passengers when airlines treat them shabbily.

My family was booked on an Air Canada flight, but it turned out that an American airline was providing a portion of the travel. The American airline, which I will not name in order to avoid finger pointing, decided to cancel the flight. I was travelling with a one-year-old, and we ended up in a very stark and dismal airport for the better part of 14 hours while we waited for the replacement flight they had promised us. We were there from 9 in the morning until almost 11 o'clock at night waiting for the replacement.

All through the day, we were trying to find another way to get to where we were going. When I investigated, the airline said they had had to cancel the plane because of weather problems in the other city. Canadians will accept that weather is a big part of what we have here and that it may in fact cause problems, so I accepted this reason at face value at that point in time. However, I checked later on, and there was no weather in that city. It was a beautiful, dry, sunny, calm day in the city that they claimed had weather problems.

What was going on was what airlines sometimes do. The airline realized that it had a very light load on the plane. When a plane has maybe only 30 passengers but could seat 50 and the next plane to the same city has a similar situation, the airline will combine the two flights. This happens all the time, and the airlines do not tell us they are doing it.

If one looks at the board and sees the planes that go between, say, Toronto and Ottawa, for example, and one of them says “cancelled”, chances are that one of the reasons it is cancelled is that it has a light load and the airline wants to combine flights to save money. That is all well and good, but by bumping people off their scheduled flights, they miss their connections and they miss the meetings, the birthdays, the weddings or the funerals. How does that repay people? It does not. The airlines at the moment do not have any obligation whatsoever when they do this kind of thing. That is one example.

I have another example. When my son in Alberta was coming for a surprise visit last November, his flight from Edmonton to Toronto was going through Calgary. When he got to the airport in Edmonton, there was a big snowstorm in Calgary. Did they say anything to him in Edmonton, before he got on that plane, about the fact that the Calgary portion of his flight had been cancelled? No. They knew it, but they did not want to give him the opportunity to say that he wanted his money back and that he would not go with Air Canada but would go with WestJet. Instead, they assured him that his plane would go. He actually asked, because he knew there was a snowstorm in Calgary, and he was told that it was going and not to worry. Of course, he got to Calgary at 10 o'clock in the morning and was told there would be no flights until the next day, at which point the trip was completely wasted. There was no point in coming.

As one can imagine, there was a lot of chaos at the airport in Calgary as thousands upon thousands of people tried to make other arrangements to get somewhere when weather caused the airport to be messed up. There was only one agent on duty for a very long line of people. To add insult to the injury of not being able to get from point A to point B, people had to stand in line—there were no chairs in the line—for hours to rebook their flights, cancel their flights or go back to where they were coming from. Yes, it is true that it was ultimately caused by weather, but the airline should never have allowed him to get on the plane in Edmonton in the first place.

That is part of what this bill would do. When an airline knows that there is going to be a cancellation, it would be up to the airline to inform the passengers that there will be a cancellation. I can understand why the airline would not want to do that. It wants to keep the money and wants people to travel and use that airline.

The other issue this bill would deal with is lost luggage. I am sure that most of us here have experienced lost luggage at some point in their careers. I know that I have. What is the airline's response when people lose their luggage? People are told to buy more underwear and send the airline the bill. There is no immediate recompense. It does not immediately provide money for people to buy underwear. For kids travelling to university with nothing in their pockets but their student cards, it is a little difficult, faced with no luggage, to keep going to school every day in the same pair of underwear. The airlines do not supply it. They simply say that people have to buy it and send them the receipts. This bill would provide some recompense.

The final part of this bill is the piece dealing with airlines charging extras when they show people the price. The airlines in Canada are very sneaky with this stuff. Air Canada has something called a fuel surcharge. Between here and London, England, it is $206 for people in regular class and $315 for people in business class. If we add up all the people on the plane and all the fuel charges, it is more than for actually filling up the plane's tank. It charges more in the fuel surcharge than the fuel actually costs. The statement on its website is that it is to provide for fluctuations in operating costs caused by varying fuel prices. That is not the case.

It also charges a Nav Canada surcharge, which is to reflect the fact that it is an airline and has to fly. Nav Canada does not charge per passenger. It charges per plane. It is $5,000 or so per plane. It does not break it down per passenger. The airline does. It tries to make it sound as if these are government charges. I am sorry, but we are not in charge of this. The government is not in charge of whether there is an insurance fee to be paid or a Nav Canada fee to be paid by the airline. That is a private matter between the airline and Nav Canada.

This is a good bill. This is a bill that would give Canadian passengers some footing in their debates with airlines and would give them some rights. I am proud to support it.

[Pensions, March 22nd, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, instead of defending his budget, the Minister of Finance has run away from it in his new shoes. There is no action in this plan for seniors. The Canadian Association of Retired Persons said that seniors “will be disappointed that the federal budget contained little to address their priority concerns”. Too many Canadian seniors are struggling. Cheaper hockey gear will not put food on the table, a roof over their heads or pay for prescription drugs.

Why are Conservatives failing Canadian seniors and pushing ahead with their reckless cuts to income security?

[Business of Supply, March 20th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague for his speech. It points out the need to continue what we started to do on climate change, and under this government, have systematically abandoned. The Conservative government appears to want to ignore scientists who would tell us that the continued use of fossil fuels will forever change the climate and cause floods, famine, water shortages, drought, wildfires, tornados, rising seas, et cetera, which may result in millions of refugees.

The Conservatives have also killed Kyoto. They have decided that Kyoto is not something worth pursuing. They have removed environmental assessments from the Canadian landscape. Even where environmental assessments remain, they do not study human health as part of their assessment process.

In the words of a senior scientist at the University of Victoria: “I suspect the federal government would prefer that its scientists don't discuss research that points out just how serious the climate change challenge is”. That is in regard to the muzzling of scientists, as the member referred to earlier.

Under the previous government, we did not do a lot of work on climate change. Under the Conservative government, the members talk the big talk, but they are not going to do anything, and they have killed Kyoto. What is it that we have to do in the future to actually deal with this looming spectre?

[Consumer Protection, March 6th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, cellphone theft is a serious problem in Toronto and across Canada. It is a growing and troublesome street crime, particularly when young people are mugged on their way home from school.

The industry is implementing a national database to log stolen cellphones to stop their reactivation. However, we need legislation to stop criminals from tampering with cellphone identifiers. Yesterday, I tabled a private member's bill to do just that. Will the government support this crime-fighting bill?

[Criminal Code, March 5th, 2013]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-482, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (telecommunication device identifier).

Mr. Speaker, cell phone theft is a crime problem in my riding of York South—Weston and across Canada. Cell phone theft is a growing and troublesome street crime, particularly for young people being mugged for their cell phones. It is a crime of opportunity, because stolen cell phones can easily be reactivated by a different carrier.

The legislation I am proposing today is the result of an initiative I took last summer in response to muggings of high school students in my riding for their cell phones. At that time, I called on the CRTC and the industry to develop a national database to track stolen cell phones. That is now being done, and this bill is the last step.

By making it illegal to tamper with cell phone identifiers, the unique number that is assigned to each cell phone, this legislation would make more effective the national database of stolen cell phones being developed here in Canada by cell phone carriers. It would prevent the reactivation of stolen cell phones and so remove the incentive to mug people for their cell phones.

I hope all members in this House will support this important crime-fighting initiative.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Airline Safety, February 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, there are risks associated with hiring foreign pilots, particularly when it comes to understanding Canadian safety regulations.

Why is Transport Canada rubber-stamping wet leases and letting potentially unqualified foreign pilots fly Canadian flights? Does the minister consider this an acceptable practice?

[Airline Safety, February 28th, 2013]

Mr. Speaker, that is not actually true. There are risks associated with hiring foreign pilots, particularly when it comes to understanding Canadian safety regulations.

CTV reported that a CF-18 had to be scrambled when a Sunwing plane from Paris to Toronto went missing for an hour. It is a good thing we were not relying on an F-35; they are grounded. The reason was that Sunwing's foreign pilot had made a mistake.

Why is Transport Canada rubber-stamping wet leases, letting potentially unqualified foreign pilots fly Canadian flights? Does the minister consider this an acceptable practice?