Mike Sullivan

[Safer Railways Act, May 1st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to again speak to Bill S-4, the Railway Safety Act, at third reading and report stage today.

This bill, as others have mentioned, originates from a previous Parliament, and the good member for Trinity—Spadina had a lot to do with putting forward the bill in the first place. I want to congratulate her and others who have worked on this bill, and congratulate those in the industry, in the unions and in the safety agencies who have contributed to what will be a great improvement to the bill.

Unfortunately, it has taken us six years from the commencement of the study on whether or not the bill needed to be improved until today, when we hope the bill will pass the House. That was way too long. When we are talking about safety, six years is way too long for something as critical to Canadians as the safety of the railroads, as has been mentioned by several members here.

These railroads travel through dense urban areas. In order to ensure the safety of not just the railway workers and not just the patrons of the railway but also of the people who live around these railroads, there needs to be a regimen in Canada that provides for the safe operation of these railroads, which the bill goes a long way to providing. It does not go all the way, and I will get into that in a few minutes.

Every school child knows that railways built this country and that railways play an important role in transporting goods and people from coast to coast. We believe that railways should actually provide a much greater role in transporting people in this country, and perhaps in transporting goods.

Railways are a more efficient way of transporting people than cars. Railways are a more efficient way of transporting goods than trucks. It would take some of the pressure off our highways and cities if we were to move more goods safely by using rail. However, I emphasize the word “safely”, and that is what the bill would, in part, do.

There are 73,000 kilometres of track, and as the member for Trinity—Spadina noted, track has been removed. We have lost 10,000 kilometres of track as the railroads have moved out of transporting. The most recent loss of a railroad was the CP secondary line between Ottawa, the nation's capital, and North Bay. One of the reasons for removing that track was that CP wanted the steel; it was not because it was an uneconomical piece of railroad but because it needed the steel for replacing rails in other places.

It is a shame that the railbed could not be used for public transit or could not continue to be used for the transportation of goods, because generally speaking, the rail line from here to North Bay goes through no cities. It does not go past any homes or businesses that would be endangered by a railway spill.

Last year, railways moved some 72 million passengers and carried 66% of all the surface freight in Canada, so railways are a very important part of the infrastructure of this country.

However, there are some places where we are actually still building railroads. We are building railroads in my riding in large numbers. We are expanding the capacity of a rail corridor that runs through my riding from 40 trains a day to 464 trains a day. That is one of the reasons I am anxious for the bill to pass, because I want to ensure that the government has some power to make sure that railroad is operated in a safe manner.

Some of that railroad may in fact be exempt from this legislation, becausegovernment will decide, for whatever reason, that some of that railroad is not a federally regulated railway. I want to ensure that all of the railroad systems in Canada, whether they are passenger rail or heavy freight rail—and we are talking heavy rail, not the little light rail streetcar systems in some cities—are all run in a safe and efficient manner.

According to the Transportation Safety Board, in 2009 there were 1,081 rail accidents, including 68 main track derailments. If rail traffic continues to grow as anticipated—and the rail companies tell us that it will grow at roughly the same rate as inflation, meaning 3% a year—in 10 years there will be 40% more rail traffic than there is today, and the potential for accidents will increase.

The rail industry believes that the way to prevent accidents at rail crossings in particular is to remove the rail crossings. The idea is to just close the road. That is the easiest way to prevent rail crossings. There will not be any cars crossing the tracks, and the tracks will reign supreme.

That does not work in many urban centres in this country. There is some money, a very small amount of money—about $12 million a year, according to the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister—that is set aside by the government to remove rail crossings in this country. I assume that means putting in grade-separated rail crossings so that either the roads go under or above the rail corridor or the rail corridor is dipped below or above the road.

The trouble is that $12 million might pay for half of one of those, and there are hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands—I do not have the number in front of me—of railroad crossings in this country, each of which has the potential for a fatal accident. In fact, there was a fatal accident on the railroads in Toronto just two weeks ago. A pedestrian was killed on a railbed in Toronto. We do not need any more of those.

Keeping people and trains apart should be an important part of what the transport minister strives to do in the implementation of this act.

One of the new key points in the legislation is the requirement for railways to obtain a certificate for operation. The certificate must include a safety management system acceptable to Transport Canada. It is a key element of this legislation that the safety management system be acceptable to Transport Canada so that Transport Canada actually understands and accepts that the railroad applying for a certificate for operation has in place measures that will prevent accidents, that will prevent overwork of their employees—which is why the unions are in support—and that will prevent trains from colliding with one another.

We recently had such a collision involving a passenger train in Burlington, Ontario. No one is really certain yet of all the causes, but speed was definitely a factor. This train went way too fast through a switch. The switch was rated for 15 kilometres an hour, and the train went through at about 60 kilometres an hour and derailed. There was loss of life and there were injuries.

What will prevent, in large measure, many of these kinds of accidents is something called positive train control. In this system the speed of the train is not controlled just by a person watching lights, which is how it works today and which is the same way it worked 160 years ago. A person runs a train by watching lights in order to know when they should go slower and when they can go faster.

Positive train control is widespread in all of the world except North America. It is already in place in some parts of the United States, but it is not present in Canada. It is a system whereby the train's speed is controlled externally. If a switch is closed and the train should slow down, the train's speed is controlled automatically if the train operator does not do it himself or herself.

It makes all kinds of sense, but it is not a system that the government is prepared to impose on the railroads yet. Why?

We would immediately start preventing accidents. It is true that it would be an expense to the railroads, but it is part of the cost of doing business. Railroads that operate in the United States will already have to comply with the positive train control system in the U.S. They already have to build their infrastructure to deal with positive train control. CN and CP and VIA Rail trains that travel across our border will have to do this, yet for some reason the government is not prepared to impose it in Canada.

I wonder why we always wait for the accident or the problem to occur before we act. Most people can see that this would be a good addition to the rail safety system in this country.

A number of problems were identified with rail safety that did not have to do directly with this bill but instead had to do with the oversight that Transport Canada applies to rail safety in this country. In a 2011 report, the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development identified serious deficiencies in the transport of dangerous products.

It is up to the minister to ensure that his officials at Transport Canada are actually enforcing the laws that it already has regarding safety. If it is not, something is wrong with the system.

The commissioner stated that 53% of the files he examined had instances of non-compliance and, of those files, an astonishing 73%, nearly three-quarters, little or no corrective action was taken. We have a law that tells us how to transport dangerous goods. We have a system in which Transport Canada is to actually monitor and enforce that law. We have a commissioner who looked at it and said that Transport Canada was not enforcing it and we have silence from the government. We do not seem to know how to enforce the laws we already have.

Bill S-4 contains a lot of very generous provisions toward the minister who will make decisions about how this law will be implemented. The minister needs to take the most protective and precautionary stance possible with his officials in Transport Canada and with the safety of Canadians because to do otherwise he would be derelict in his duties.

What we are saying about the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, which is already in force, is that if it is not being enforced by the officials who need to enforce it, the minister and his staff, then could S-4 face the same thing? We cannot sit here and pass laws that nobody enforces. The Conservatives believe that laws are to be enforced and enforced to the letter of the law. We heard yesterday from the Minister of Foreign Affairs that, no matter where Canadian companies operate, they are to abide by the laws. The same should be true in Canada but it is up to the government to enforce those laws.

Bill S-4 has quite serious penalties for failing to comply with the legislation. Those penalties are now administrative penalties where the minister would not need to take a company to court. The minister could impose a penalty without actually having to file suit against an individual or company for failing to comply.

We would hope that Transport Canada would actually impose those sanctions when it finds violations. It is no good to have a bunch of sanctions in a law if we do not apply them when there are violations. We hope that corrective action is only necessary very rarely, but we want that corrective action to be taken when it is necessary. We do not want a situation in which the government, as it apparently has done with the transportation of dangerous goods, ignores the law or the enforcement of the law.

The other portion of this law deals with the emissions of pollutants into the air. This is of great interest to the residents in Toronto who would be faced with a rail corridor that will have 464 trains per day or a train every 90 seconds going past. These are diesel engines of 4,000 to 5,000 horsepower emitting huge clouds of black smoke. People want to know that something will be done to limit that pollution.

The bill provides mechanisms whereby the minister can demand that these emissions be reduced, curtailed, regulated or monitored. It will be up to the minister to actually impose those regulations and enforce them.

The people of the city of Toronto are watching this with some great interest because one of the issues that has raised a huge storm is the issue of the amount of pollution that comes from train engines. When people looked at it, because they did not look at it until someone said that we would have 460 of them, they discovered that there were carcinogens, nitrous oxide and particulate matter in that exhaust that can cause grave harm to individuals. To increase it by tenfold, without also putting in some kind of limits, has people in my riding and in other ridings in the city of Toronto demanding that trains be made electric.

In 1908, in the city of New York, the use of fossil fuel burning trains was banned. As my time as run out, I will continue that thought when I come back.

[Business of Supply, April 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to something the parliamentary secretary said a little while ago, that it was too bad we could not have debates in the House about the environment. That is exactly what we are doing here. I want to thank members for raising it. However, we are faced with a situation in which buried in a budget bill are some good things and some bad things, but mostly bad things about the environment and about what will happen to the regulation system in Canada's environmental regulatory structure.

Could the member comment further on some of the very bad things that are coming to us as a result of this being in a budget bill, not in an environment bill?

[Weston Collegiate Institute, April 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, my riding of York South—Weston has an amazing gem of a school in Weston Collegiate Institute. When principal Deborah Blair arrived three years ago, the school was plagued with non-stop bullying, especially among girls. She led students and staff through training in a remarkable program called “Restorative Practices”. It is a whole school approach based on the belief “not to penalize, but to restore. Victims are empowered to play a key role in addressing the harm that has been done”.

Victims and the accused are brought together in restorative conferences led by peers and attended by parents and staff.

The program has been so successful that these conferences are now rare. In three years, office referrals of students have gone from 80 each day to just 5. Suspensions are down from 151 to just 46. As a result of the declining suspensions, student achievement has gone up and the numbers of credits earned has increased.

Sometimes the most effective way to change behaviour is not to punish but to restore. There is a great lesson at Weston Collegiate Institute for all of us.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I believe this is too big an issue to be tossed away in a comment in Davos, Switzerland by the Prime Minister and then become buried as part of a much larger budget. This issue will be rammed through by the government in the passage of its budget because it has a majority. There is no attempt to have the dialogue with seniors, and not just seniors but with the children of seniors. I do not think our seniors want to leave the country worse off than they found it, but that is what the government will do.

I do not think this dialogue needs to be with seniors only. It needs to be with their children and their children's children. We will not have that dialogue when the budget is rammed through in the next few days.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, we do have a plan to solve this crisis, and it is not a crisis, but a blimp or bump. Part of the spending of the government is on guaranteed annual income supplements. If, as we suggest, the Canada pension plan were to be doubled, as it should be, it would end those guaranteed income supplement payments to a lot of seniors and that would reduce the government expenditures by enough to continue the system.

We do not need to move the ages from 65 to 67. What we need to do is ensure that the systems that are in place are sufficient to provide people with a standard of living at age 65. Right now those systems include a lot of government support and we suggest that the Canada pension plan take over some of that slack. This then would actually improve the government's financial position when the baby boom generation finally exits the earth.

[Business of Supply, April 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Newton—North Delta.

I want to bring to the attention of the House that this is only the first of many changes that need to be made to our pension system if the Conservatives are to have their way. This is only the beginning of what will be an ideologically-driven reduction in the amount of benefit that individuals would expect to receive from their government after working a lifetime in Canada and expecting a reasonable ability to retire.

I am one of those baby boomers who is the problem. We were constantly being told that, as a result of the improvements Canada was making to our standards of living, as a result of automation and as the result of all kinds of advances in medicine and in science, not only would we have an easier life, with fewer working hours in each week, but we would all be able to retire earlier and that we should not have to worry about retiring later.

The Conservatives are ensuring that those advances are being stopped and, in fact, they are moving backward. They want to take the country backward and that is so wrong.

I am the opposition deputy critic for persons with disabilities and the Conservatives have not yet said what they intend to do to the Canada pension as it pertains to persons with disabilities.

Two individuals from my riding, who are both on a Canada pension disability pension, have written to me. They are younger than the age at which this change to the OAS will not affect people. Therefore, they will be affected by the change in OAS. They have already realized that they will have an enormous gap in their income because their Canada disability pension ends at age 65. They are both permanently disabled, cannot work and cannot do anything to change their situation. Their income is such that they do not have enough money to save more for their retirement. The Conservatives have said over and over again that they are giving people plenty of notice so they can save more for their retirement and bridge the gap between 65 and 67. However, those two individuals and many more across Canada are not able to do that. Physically and financially, they cannot manage between 65 and 67.

What is the answer? There is no answer from the government. Its answer is to give the provinces some money. Those individuals would be forced to apply for welfare when they turn 65. We are telling our disabled people in this country that they now must accept a lower standard of living. That is in violation of our signature on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and that is unacceptable to this side of the House.

That is one of many side effects of the government's single-minded, ideologically-driven agenda of reducing what the government gives back to its citizens. This is not about some crisis in the aging of our population. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has said that it is sustainable in the long run.

All of the figures show that this baby boom generation is a temporary blip but the government is proposing to make a permanent change to Canada's retirement system. We cannot and we should not move backward and take the country backward with each step of the current government.

The member opposite suggested that a person's life expectancy is growing and he used the number 82. Eighty-two is really only the number for females. It is considerably less for males. However, let us say that life expectancy is growing. Part of the reason life expectancy is growing is that we are investing money in our medical system. The current government has decided to stop increasing the amount of money we invest in our medical system, limiting it instead to increases relative to inflation.

That will have the impact of shortening our lives, in particular, those people who are in the 20% lowest category of income who already have a lifetime that is shorter by 20% than the rest of Canadians. We are telling those people that it is too bad, so sad, that they are going to have to work two years longer. They cannot as they are physically unable to.

The government has failed once again to warn Canadians that this is but the first salvo in what will be a domino effect of moving to age 67 for the old age security system. That system is the underpinning of every other retirement system in the country, save and except for those individuals who make way too much money to need the OAS. Those individuals who are making more than $120,000 a year in their pension do not need our protection. However, the government has created a domino that will affect every individual who makes less than $120,000 a year. They will need something to make up the difference between 65 and 67 or they will have to wait until 67 to retire.

The government has not said yet, but I am sure it will, that it intends to change the Canada pension plan to make it dovetail with the OAS. Has anybody here had any on that debate? Have we had any discussion on the Canada pension moving to age 67?

It necessarily must follow. We cannot leave a gap and say that one set of pension plans has an age of 65, but the underpinning of all of them has an age of 67. It does not work. Financially it does not work, societally it does not work and it does not work in determining what one's retirement will be. One cannot now plan for retirement at age 65 when a big chunk of the money is missing between 65 and 67. Therefore, not only would the Canada pension plan have to change, and the government has not said anything about how it would do that, but all employer pension plans would have to change.

Employer pension plans are based on what a person can reasonably expect to live on when they turn the age of retirement. The age of retirement in every employer pension plan is 65. That will have to change to 67. The normal age of retirement that is stated in almost every employer pension plan in the country, and I have dealt with lots of them, is 65. However, it could not continue to be 65 if the other income support that it depended upon disappeared. Therefore, it would have to become 67 years of age.

This is another creeping piece of the puzzle of how the government would force all young people to wait to retire at 67 and work an extra two years. They would have a 45-year work life instead of 43. We are going backward and we do not want to do that.

Employer long-term disability plans all end at 65 or death, whichever comes first. Now those employer disability plans would have a gap between the age of 65 and 67. What are those individuals supposed to do? Will the employers magnanimously start paying more money into those disability plans in order to continue to pay people until 67? I highly doubt it. I think there would be blood on the street before that happened.

Will the employer life insurance plans, which all end at 65, suddenly become amended and end at 67 so the life insurance plans would continue? Will provincial welfare plans, which now end at 65, be suddenly amended to end at 67?

The government has said that it would help the provinces. However, we have a government that is saying that it cannot afford to keep this system up, but it has lots of money to hand the provinces so they can keep the system up. There is a bit of hypocrisy going on there.

Finally, the provincial disability plans have exactly the same problem as the Canada pension plan and disability plan in that the provincial disability plans end at age 65. Therefore, if someone says that we can change OAS without changing the Canada pension plan, employer plans and all the rest, they are either lying or dreaming in Technicolor.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 25th, 2012]

Yes, Mr. Speaker. Part of why I am bringing this up is to try to draw attention to the fact that this bill creates a knowledge, appreciation and clarification of the laws around self-defence. We are trying to ensure the laws that talk about self-defence are not used by people to create a vigilante system that will end the lives of many of our young people.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 25th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I absolutely believe there should be a zero tolerance for weapons in schools. That goes without saying. I am not suggesting that these individuals are bringing firearms to school. I am suggesting that there is a proliferation of firearms of which parliamentarians should be aware. Certainly, in lower-income ridings, such as mine, poverty and desperation take us to a whole different level. We also have a situation in which illegal firearms come into our country through a very porous border and we should not support a government that wants to reduce the protections at the border and make it easier for firearms to get in.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 25th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am really glad the member opposite raised that issue. I asked the same high school students if they were afraid of being incarcerated with mandatory minimums for the possession of firearms and other crimes. The answer I got was what I expected. They do not read the law before they commit crimes. They do not determine, as somebody has suggested, that there is a mandatory minimum for growing six pot plants, which they were all surprised to learn. That is not how the criminal system works in Canada. The criminal system works because of desperate people doing desperate things or people who feel they have to defend themselves and do desperate things. That is not the kind of Canada we want.

If the member opposite suggests the law that creates mandatory minimums will somehow reduce the number of victims of crime in our country, he is very much mistaken.

[Citizen's Arrest and Self-defence Act, April 25th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I thought I did mention the point. The point is we do not want this bill to become a further direction. We do not want it to take us further toward a “shoot first, ask questions later” situation. Part of the bill is about self-defence and the definition thereof. I was trying to point out that I already had a situation in my riding where many young people believed that owning a firearm was a matter of self-defence. They believed they had the right to own firearms. I am sure we have heard some members opposite talk about that right. There is no such a right, but members opposite have said that.

Now these children, having heard this, believe it is their right to have a firearm to defend themselves. Part of the bill is about changing the definition of “self-defence”. It is in the news. It is something we cannot avoid. We are now facing this explosion of very young individuals who believe they need to own handguns. They get it by illegal means, I will grant that, because it is not legal.

However, I was astonished, as I think the members opposite should be, to discover that half of the 13- to 15-year-olds in that classroom had handguns or knew somebody who did. This is an astounding number of individuals of that age group.

Those same people are now being made victims, and that is part of where this is coming from. The bill starts with the premise that the person who is being robbed is a victim and should not be the offender. What we are trying to establish, and what I am trying to point out to the government, is that many of the bills it has brought forward in fact create victims of people who do not need to be made victims. We are trying to protect victims.

One of the things we are doing is trying to help pass this law, which would actually protect victims. However, there are other laws that have come to us that would make victims out of ordinary law-abiding people, and we are opposed to that.

It was the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance who brought us to that portion about victims versus offenders in the discussions on the bill.

What we hope to do with this law should not become something more than it is. We hope to allow individuals to protect their personal property and to hold somebody, but we do not want to create a system of vigilante justice where individuals believe they have the right to use firearms on other individuals.