Mike Sullivan

[Social Development, November 19th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, behind every one of those numbers is a person who needs to put food on the table and pay the bills.

People cannot wait years for the government to get its act together. Nearly 10,000 Canadians still waiting for an appeal are living with a disability. In many cases the uncertainty and stress of financial insecurity makes their medical conditions worse.

Will the minister commit to eliminate the backlog and finally give these Canadians the justice they need and deserve?

[Committees of the House, November 17th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I have asked this question twice before and I have not had a straight answer either time, so I will ask it again and hope for a straight answer.

In the 2013 budget, the finance minister announced that one of the conditions of government spending on infrastructure would be the creation of apprenticeships through the procurement process to create infrastructure in cities, towns, and provinces across the country. However, the new Canada building fund of $14 billion has nary a mention of apprenticeships anywhere in it.

I would like to know why the government will not put its money where its mouth is. It said very clearly that it would be a condition of the creation of infrastructure in this country, yet the provinces and towns that receive this money are under no obligation to create apprenticeships. That would be a tremendous way for the government to create the kinds of jobs that young people need. It would create the kinds of employment that young people need. It would do a tremendous service and give a great example to the provinces and municipalities for how to use government spending to create jobs.

[Committees of the House, November 17th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am going to ask my colleague basically the same question I asked his colleague. Two budgets ago, in 2013, the then finance minister stated that this government would introduce the concept of attaching apprenticeships to infrastructure spending. In other words, they would put their money where their mouth was with regard to creating jobs for young people. To date, that has been an empty promise, because nothing has been done.

We have tried to get the provincial government in Ontario to do the same thing, but it has failed.

More concerning here is that the finance minister actually put in a budget that infrastructure spending would include the ability to create apprenticeships as part of the requirement for the infrastructure spending.

I wonder if the member would comment on why his government has failed to follow up on that budgetary promise made by the previous finance minister.

[Committees of the House, November 17th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this report.

One of the things that the government put in a budget two years ago would have done a lot to help youth unemployment, particularly in my riding of York South—Weston. We have the Central Ontario Building Trades in our riding, which runs the hammer heads program. It gives unemployed youth an opportunity to have a leg-up on apprenticeship programs, but requires that at the end of the 12-week training program that there be an apprenticeship job for them.

Two years ago, then finance minister Mr. Flaherty said that the government, as it spends infrastructure money, would encourage the contractors it hires to create apprenticeships to fulfill the need for student jobs in these programs. That was in the 2013 budget. To date, the government has not introduced any such motion or any such provision. In any of the budget implementation bills, there is no indication of that.

We have been asking the Government of Ontario, which is spending billions on infrastructure, to do the same thing. Thus far it has failed to provide a link between the infrastructure spending and apprenticeships.

Would the member like to comment on why the government has failed to introduce such legislation?

[Housing, October 29th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that federal investment in housing has declined by 46% over the last 25 years, leading to a shrinking supply of affordable housing. Communities and municipalities are struggling to meet the demand for affordable housing, which is essential to ending homelessness in Canada.

Why will the Conservatives not restore long-term housing funding to address Canada's growing homelessness and housing crisis?

[Incorporation by Reference in Regulations Act, October 24th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, first, I want to thank the government for not bringing forward Bill C-42, which was originally to have been debated. It is a bill to relax gun regulations in this country, and it is an inappropriate week to bring such a bill forward. I am glad we are not debating that.

On this bill, I am the critic for persons with disabilities and the word “accessible” has a particular meaning to persons with disabilities. It means that if someone is blind, it is available in Braille. It means that if someone is partially sighted, the fonts and the contrast online are such that he or she can read it. The term “accessible” has a different meaning.

I wonder if the government could tell us whether or not the word “accessible” includes those meanings.

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, clearly it is in the best interests of all Canadians to have a health care system that is roughly equal everywhere one goes. We do not want to discover that if we get sick in one province, we are worse off than if we had that same illness in another province.

However, that is how our systems have started to devolve over the years. There has been very little effort on the part of the federal government to enforce the Canada Health Act. This is yet another example of the government's central role in ensuring that the standards, the practices, and, in the case of infectious disease outbreaks, the protections that are necessary to protect the public and health care workers are actively followed and are at the best possible quality across the country so that we do not have situations in which people are better off in one province than another.

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, clearly it is in Canada's best interest as a country and as a people to ensure that diseases such as Ebola are contained where they break out. However, they will not be contained if the places they break out in do not have adequate resources and a public health system in place.

The U.S. government has started supporting the creation of public health systems in third world countries, but we have not. Our approach has been to give money to mining companies in those countries to create systems that are not related to public health.

We need to be ever mindful and ever vigilant that these diseases, which are springing up in more than the usual number, need to be corralled and controlled in the locations where they break out.

[Business of Supply, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity to speak about a world crisis.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert.

Eleven years ago, Toronto was overwhelmed by a virus, which arrived from Hong Kong, called SARS. I want to give the House some appreciation of the impact. It is estimated that it cost the world $40 billion in health care and productivity costs. We are coming close to that figure now for the Ebola crisis. Estimates of a $30-billion cost, just to try to corral the disease, have come to light, and Canadians are telling us in great numbers that Canada should be doing as much as it possibly can, including sending military response teams, which so far the government has refused to do.

I want to come back to the SARS experience. My wife had a very personal experience with the SARS outbreak. She was diagnosed with breast cancer just after the hospitals started closing in Toronto. The hospitals started closing in Toronto because the SARS outbreak was impossible to corral. People did not really understand it and did not know what to do. All of a sudden, her surgery to remove part of her breast was cancelled, because the hospitals were no longer accepting patients. Now she had a rapidly growing tumour in her body that could not be removed.

Somehow our family doctor managed to find a doctor willing to do the operation at a hospital in Toronto. It was one of the most eerie and disturbing experiences anyone could hope to imagine. Late in the evening, I had to pull up to the outside of the hospital and let her go in on her own. I was not allowed in. She had to check in with the security guard and then find her own way to the 11th floor, where she was the only person. She had to go to her own bed and wait there in the hope that someone would show up. That is how empty that hospital was. The next day, a surgeon and a small surgical team operated. That experience was repeated over and over again in Toronto as Toronto tried to deal with the very real problem of trying to maintain a health system while the health system itself was under attack.

Something that I am not sure everybody here understands is that one of the potential problems with this disease is that it is so easily spread that even health care workers who are taking extreme precautions, as has been the case in Dallas and Spain, have become infected. No one is really certain why these health care workers became infected, because they should not have. They had been taking precautions. If that is the ease with which this disease can spread, how are hospitals in my city of Toronto going to cope when and if cases of Ebola, and I do not think it is a matter of if but of when, start arriving in greater numbers than we have already experienced?

There are currently 9,000 or so reported cases of Ebola in West Africa, and there is no travel ban. There is no limit on people travelling out of that area. The incubation period for this disease before any symptoms arise is between two and 21 days. That means that people can be travelling while infected and not know it. We are apparently conducting some voluntary screening of some passengers who are coming from these affected places, but I am very afraid that we are going to have a very serious problem should this disease make its inexorable travel to more countries, including Canada.

The mayor of my city has learned, as have I, that the government has declared at least one hospital in Toronto and 10 in Ontario as special hospitals for dealing with potential Ebola cases. In a letter to the Prime Minister that I do not believe has been responded to yet, the mayor asked for more details on the Government of Canada's plans to protect residents of Toronto and the GTA should any cases of the Ebola virus be positively identified in Canada and in Toronto.

A Toronto hospital has been designated to care for Canadian responders if any become infected in the Ebola zone in West Africa and are transferred back to Canada for care. We have a situation in which the government has decided, absent the City of Toronto, that it will designate a hospital, with all good intentions, I am sure. However, the people of Toronto should know what is going on. There should be some transparency. The mayor has asked for that transparency. We, too, would like that transparency.

The member for Vancouver East has asked similar questions of the Minister of Health, questions about who is responsible for ensuring quarantine and about who is responsible for making sure that the hospitals and medical practitioners have the appropriate equipment.

It has become clear that the equipment that we thought was appropriate is not working, because 20% of the victims of this virus are health care workers. That means that they are not able to protect themselves. As we have found out, two, one in Texas and one in Spain, became infected while caring for a patient with all of the west's most modern equipment. Something is wrong with the approach we are taking.

There are a number of other questions I will not go through, but those questions deserve answers. The Minister of Health needs to respond to our critic for health so that we can have a dialogue, so that we can begin the process the Liberal opposition day motion would like to continue, which is to continue the process of providing information to members of Parliament, through the committee, on a twice monthly basis.

That, in itself, is not enough. There will need to be a whole lot more done, but it is a good start. We will be supporting this motion.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that in my riding of York South—Weston, there is a company called Tagg Design that two years ago developed a system for hospitals to use to protect themselves, to protect health care workers and others, from the transmission of infectious diseases inside a hospital. That system was a system of signage, a system of making sure that doors were sealed and that doors had signs on them to say that the patient behind the door required this kind of protection for the health care workers.

We wrote to the Minister of Health at the time and asked for a meeting to discuss this kind of system, which the WHO is very interested in and which Canadian hospitals that have tried it have found to be effective.

We asked the minister for a meeting to discuss how the Government of Canada could assist in promoting this kind of inside-the-hospital protection against the transmission of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the minister refused to meet with us. We had an indication from the government that it was really not interested in proactive measures to protect health care workers from the spread of infectious diseases, and not just health care workers but other people who use those hospitals.

We know that the government would rather just let things take place. Apparently it has designated a hospital, and we do not know which one, as the place where people will go. We do not know whether that will then require the closure of that hospital.

If a hospital is declared the place where Canadian health care workers go if they contract Ebola, and that hospital is in my city, I would like to know. The medical staff of that hospital would probably like to know that the hospital has been so designated so they can start planning around it, so they can start determining whether it has to rearrange the schedules for surgeries and other care for patients who are there. It is quite likely, given the experiences in Texas and Spain, that if a number of patients with Ebola arrive at a hospital, we are going to see it close. We are going to see that hospital become, itself, quarantined.

That is an effect of this disease that has yet to be discussed in any form. It has been asked about, by our mayor and others. What are the government's plans? As of this moment, we do not have answers, and we need those answers. This motion will help give us those answers.

[Canada Post, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, when the government signed the UN charter on the rights of the disabled, it promised to improve things. By ending home mail delivery and telling the disabled that they should be satisfied with weekly delivery, the Conservatives are breaking that promise. It is not right.

Canadians living with disabilities have now joined with others to challenge this decision in the courts. Will the minister agree to delay the end of home delivery until the court rules?