Mike Sullivan

[Multiple Sclerosis, May 9th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the carnation is Canada's oldest and most recognized symbol of hope in the quest to end multiple sclerosis.

Many Canadians living with multiple sclerosis are mothers. Others, either children or adults, have mothers affected by this disease, because women are diagnosed with MS three times as often as men. That is why every year the MS carnation campaign takes place over Mother's Day weekend.

From May 10 to May 12, thousands of volunteers in more than 280 communities across Canada will be showing their dedication to finding a cure by selling carnations on street corners, at malls and other public spaces.

Today there is renewed hope for MS victims as new treatments are being discovered and validated.

I know that members on both sides of the House will join me and the many families that have been touched by MS in supporting the research necessary to bring hope into reality. Let us support this effort by purchasing a carnation. Today, together, we can end MS.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it certainly appears to me and to most casual readers to be a violation of NAFTA. However, will we be accused of being anti-Canadian if we ask our friends in Washington to suggest that the government should have given notice to both Washington and Mexico, the partners in NAFTA, that it was about to downgrade its environmental protection system? There certainly should be some involvement by our partners in all of our so-called free trade agreements, some of which we actually did support.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, these changes and the speed being proposed for their adoption are at the nub of what is going on here, particularly with the environmental issues. May 14 is now the deadline. Why is May 14 the deadline? There must be a project in the works that needs this kind of non-environmental assessment and that cannot begin until the government has passed this bill. My suspicion is that there is some other agenda that we have not yet heard about. Is that not the way that the government has behaved so far?

We did not hear about the cuts to the OAS until somebody in Davos decided to leak the information. We did not hear about the evisceration of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act until we saw it in the budget. This certainly was not campaigned on by the government, yet here we are, so I suspect we have more surprises in store from the Conservatives and their hidden agendas.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP as well has determined that this portion of the bill—and perhaps several other portions, but this portion in particular, which deals with the environmental assessment changes—has nothing to do with budgets. It has nothing to do with whether we tax people or whether we give people back their money. It has to do with protecting the environment, and it ought to be studied in much greater depth and by the right parts of the government, meaning by the environment committee and the environment departments rather than by the finance department. It has nothing to do with finance and everything to do with the environment, and yes, it ought to be hived off.

[Jobs, Growth and Long-Term Prosperity Act, May 3rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, on the issue of the assault on democracy, one could not even read this bill in 28.5 hours. The bill is enormous. It touches on more than just how much money we are going to tax Canadians, which is what a budget is about. It touches on the environment, fisheries, pensions and so many things that are not supposed to be part of a budget, but they are.

I note the comments by my colleague for Winnipeg North about this being an “ominous” bill. I think that was a slip of the tongue as it is an omnibus bill, but I also think it is an ominous bill for Canadians. The bill is missing some things. There is nothing here for the burgeoning demand for public transit in this country. There is a huge infrastructure deficit, but the bill is completely silent on whether the government is going to attend to the problem.

On immigration, my colleague for York Centre suggested that we are just getting rid of the people who are on the faint hope list. However, this has nothing to do with getting rid of people on a faint hope list. This has to do with people who have discovered that the government gives them faint hope because it changed the rules after their application was in. After a couple of years, it decided to cut them off the list and give them some of their money back. These people have spent countless sums on legal fees, tests, police checks, et cetera, that they will never get back. The Conservative government is completely uncaring about the huge devastation it is causing those would-be immigrants from other countries by leaving them on a list for 10 years and then cutting them off.

The bill has nothing on the huge increase in fuel prices in my riding in the past few weeks and months. I hear about this daily. Ordinary Canadians are worried that they will not be able to afford to get to work and that seniors will not be able to afford to get to the doctor. Seniors' pensions do not go up by the amount that fuel prices have gone up in the last little while. The government is completely silent on it.

The government suggests that the bill is about jobs. Well, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, whose reports the Conservatives do not like, the bill would actually cost the economy 43,000 jobs. That is a lot of jobs. The Conservatives' oft-touted figure of how many jobs they have created since the recession ignores the fact that they have been in government for much longer and the number of people looking for work has gone up. The percentage of people in the workforce who cannot find a job has gone up significantly since the Conservative government took office. It is all well and good to say that there was a recession and we are back, but we have done nothing about creating the structures in this country to create full employment. This budget does nothing more about it.

On pensions, the Conservatives talk about how there is a crisis. There is no crisis. In fact, the crisis they claim is because baby boomers are retiring. However, their solution exempts most baby boomers from the solution as baby boomers would continue to get the full OAS and GIS. It is the people who come after the baby boomers who are going to be shortchanged. They will be penalized doubly: they would have to pay for the baby boomers because the government says it is a crisis, but they would get nothing in return.

Canadians are going to wake up and smell the coffee at some point, and realize that the Conservative government has got it wrong and there is not a crisis. There may be crises in other countries that spend significantly greater amounts of their budgets on pensions, but not here in Canada where we spend a small fraction of what is spent in other countries on basic OAS.

What I really want to tackle the government on, and I should not be doing this in the context of a budget bill but it is in there, is the elimination of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and the replacement of it with the Canadian environmental evisceration act. The decision by the government to incorporate this in a budget bill has nothing to do with budget, it has nothing to do with spending of money. However, the government's suggestion that it is stronger is absolutely wrong, and I will give some examples.

The definition of an environmental effect in this budget is significantly different from the definition in the old act. The old act suggested the environment is land, water, air, et cetera, and that has not changed, but the environmental effect is the effect of any change on such things as wildlife, critical habitat, individuals, health and socio-economic conditions of human beings, physical and cultural heritage, and the current use of land and resources. That is not in the new bill. The new bill talks about environmental effects as being: fish, as defined in section 2 of the Fisheries Act, which is changing; aquatic species, as defined in section 2 of the Species at Risk Act; migratory birds, as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Migratory Birds Convention Act; and any other component of the environment that is set out in Schedule 2.

I will read Schedule 2. That is a moment of silence for the environment because Schedule 2 is empty. There is nothing there.

The government suggests that it would protect the health and environment of human beings. It is not in this bill. It has left it out. The minister can make regulations under Schedule 2, but he can also change them. He can also decide not to have any regulations. It is very clear that the old act was very specific. It protected the environment, not just of fish, birds and the air but of human beings, their culture, heritage and dwellings. That is missing from this bill. It does not go unnoticed by this side of the House that it is a reduction in the protections that would be available to the environment by the government.

There is another big change in this act. The old act talked about needing environmental assessments any time there were projects, which included any physical work, proposed construction, operation, modification, decommissioning, abandonment, undertaking and proposed physical activity. There is a good definition of what a project is. The new act talks only about designated projects. The minister would get to decide what a designated project is. He would make regulations under section 84 for the definition of a designated project. Therefore, not everything that we have come to expect would be assessed. That is gone. The minister would get to decide which things will be environmentally assessed. As a result of that discretion being left to the minister, based on the current minister, woe betide the environment. That is not very helpful to the environment, abandonment of what can go on.

I do not have enough time to go into the machinations of what this bill would do in many other areas. Unfortunately, I will not have time to do that in part because time allocation has been applied by the government, which, with its majority, is determined to cut off debate. That debate would be cut off before I could even read all of the portions of this bill that would affect Canadians in an adverse way.

We now know, and it does not take much reading to discover, that the government's agenda is about helping its friends in the oil patch. In particular, with the definition of “designated project”, I am willing to bet there will be a whole bunch of things that will not need an environmental assessment any longer. When those environmental assessments happen, the government has said that they will be streamlined. They will take two years, no more and no less. If a project takes longer to study it, if it is that big, if it crosses all of Canada and takes longer, should we not do it right rather than rushing to do it wrong and harming the environment?

The definition of “sustainable development” is still the definition that existed in the previous act. However, it is not going to be possible to have sustainable development under this act if the government, as we suspect, abandons its responsibility to study many of the projects that are now being studied and if it abandons its responsibility to study those elements of the environment that are important to human beings and not to just fish, birds and other wildlife.

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the demise of the Ontario Northland is something that should be prevented. The Ontario Northland is a vital part of the north's transportation infrastructure.

Northern Ontario is subject to bad weather for nine months of the year, maybe ten, and highways are just not safe. They are not the safe way to get around in northern Ontario. By getting rid of the Ontario Northland, we are removing a safe option for the transportation of people and potentially of goods. It should not close.

The Conservative government should be looking at rescuing the Ontario Northland from the ravages of the Ontario Liberal government.

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, in the discussion leading up to this amendment to the Railway Safety Act, there were a lot of consultations with a lot of stakeholders, including community groups, transport activists, unions and other interested stakeholders, including the railroads.

That is a good sign for the government. In the minority Parliament that preceded this one there was a sense of collaboration that was necessary in order to make the bill into the best bill it could be at the time.

These bills generally get reviewed every five years; it has been six years since this review was started, so we really should have been starting the review of the bill last year. I do not know when a review will be started, but there are always improvements that can be made to safety.

There is a need for voice recorders in the cabs of all the locomotives and a need for positive train control. Those things should be a part of the government's agenda; they are not; currently, but we can certainly hope that we and the communities we are talking about will put enough pressure on the government to make this part of its agenda going forward.

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is a very good point that rail actually built this country in large measure and opened up cities like Sudbury. The community that I come from, Weston, owes its size and diversity in large measure to the fact that the rail corridor was encouraged to come through the town back in 1852, with the building of a huge trestle over the Humber River. That trestle is still in existence. The original brick and the original pillars at the bottom of that trestle are still there, exactly as they were placed in 1852. They just do not build them like they used to.

However, the member's point is about what the government needs to do to encourage the use of passenger and freight rail as the medium of choice for travellers. For passenger rail, the service has to be frequent, convenient, on time and reliable. That currently is not always the case.

Certainly in a place like northern Ontario, where it is difficult to get around by any other means, rail is essential. In the case of freight rail, we have to realize that it is the way we have to move. We have an undertaking to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2050; that is not going to happen unless we move a lot of our goods transport away from trucks and onto trains. The only way we are going to manage all of that is if the current government is part of the investment into our rail system in Canada.

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Railway Safety Act on its own would merely determine that a railroad had become unsafe, but that having been determined, I think it is incumbent upon the federal government to determine the best mechanism for reinvigorating it or making that section of rail useful again to the public

. In the case of the Gaspé and in the case of the Vancouver Island passenger rail service, both of those corridors are now owned by small local community groups. They are not owned by the big powerful rail companies, which handed them off knowing that they were in a deteriorating state. The federal government needs to assist with the maintenance of these rail corridors financially. I am not suggesting that it needs to pay all of it, but when a rail corridor is owned by small local municipalities, there needs to be a sharing of that responsibility federally, provincially and locally, and there needs to be some recognition by the government that those infrastructure improvements are for the good of Canada and for the good of those communities.

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to continue my discourse on Bill S-4.

As I suggested earlier, the new Bill S-4 contains some amendments to the environmental protection portion of the bill which would give more power to the minister to enforce environmental protection. As I started to say earlier, one of the things that gives residents in urban areas, and in particular in Toronto, significant worry is the exhaust from diesel trains.

New York City is 104 years ahead of Canada because it banned fossil fuel-burning trains from Manhattan Island in 1908. Since that time, only electric vehicles have been permitted to operate in Manhattan, to the point where engines actually have to be changed on the way in. That has resulted in a much cleaner and more manageable environment in the city of Manhattan.

The citizens of Toronto would like the same courtesy. As such, they are pushing GO Transit in particular but ultimately all the other train operators, CN, CP and VIA, to use electric vehicles wherever possible.

I note that environmental regulations are currently stronger in the United States than they are here and I hope the minister will make Canadian railroads adopt tier 4 standards for all their engines in 2015, as is the case in the United States.

The other piece of safety worry for residents in the city of Toronto is derailments. One only has to witness the kind of destruction that takes place in adjacent areas when there are derailments.

In the city of Toronto rail corridors traverse significant residential populations. The rail industry requested that this bill be amended to allow it to have some say over how close houses can be built to the rail corridor.

In Toronto the rail corridor is being moved closer to homes by the rail company itself. It beggars belief that it would actually do this, but that is happening. In one case, CP Rail expropriated the backyards of several homes in order to move its rails 20 feet closer to the homes. If a derailment occurs in that piece of my riding, the devastation will be unimaginable.

Therefore, what does the rail company do? It is now building a crash barrier for protection, but it will not protect the homes. The crash barrier will be between two sets of rail corridors so if a crash happens, CP freights will not damage CN and VIA rails, but nothing has been built to protect the homes. The bill should provide the minister with the power to look into this. Why are we protecting against a crash if the crash happens toward the rail corridor rather than toward the homes?

A school is right on that rail corridor. The play yard is literally five feet from the rails. When that was criticized, the rail company said that people should not build schools so close to a rail corridor. The trouble was the school was there first and the rail company just did not know that.

One cannot talk about rail safety without saying something about the deteriorating infrastructure of our railway system. My colleagues in the NDP from coast to coast see rail service being closed for safety reasons as a result of deteriorating tracks and a lack of adequate maintenance. Clearly, track maintenance is an issue in rail safety. Significant investment needs to be made in rail infrastructure across Canada, not only to improve rail safety but to continue to provide, and hopefully expand, rail service both in terms of passenger service as well as freight service.

Passenger and freight services were closed recently in the Gaspé and on Vancouver Island as a result of deteriorating rail infrastructure. These services were handed to the local authorities by the big rail companies in what was almost an unfit state. The local authorities do not have the funds to keep them up the way the rail companies did. Therefore, we need federal action to create rail safety on these and other such rail corridors.