Murray Rankin

[Sir John A. Macdonald, April 29th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to speak this afternoon on behalf of the official opposition. Perhaps I was asked to do so because Sir John A. Macdonald was the member of Parliament for Victoria, a little-known fact, between the years 1878 and 1882, although I am told he did not actually visit the riding until considerably after that.

It must be said at the outset that Sir John A. Macdonald was truly a product of his time. He was a complex man. His contribution to creating Canada cannot be overstated. On the one hand, it is inconceivable that we would have a country without Sir John A. He had an amazing amount of what people today might call emotional intelligence. That intelligence shone at the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences. Together with his friend, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, he forged alliances that resulted in what today we call Canada. On the other hand, contemporary Canadians must contextualize, not condone, certain beliefs and actions that history has rightly condemned.

Driven by the impossible dream of threading the world's longest railway through some of the world's most inhospitable land, Macdonald transformed a young nation into a continent-spanning dominion. Yet, he did so by what Professor James Daschuk called in a recent book “clearing the plains”, starving indigenous communities until they traded freedom for food and made way for the railroad.

He did so by importing Chinese labourers by the thousands for the hardest and most dangerous jobs. Hundreds died to unify Canada. Yet, with the railway nearly finished, the House passed laws to deny Chinese people the vote and to set a punitive head tax on immigrants from China.

Believing Chinese and Caucasians to be inherently different, Sir John A. Macdonald defended his xenophobic policy in the language of racial purity and political expediency, warning that Chinese Canadian MPs from British Columba might foist on the House “Asiatic principles, immoralities and eccentricities which are abhorrent to the Aryan race”.

Mr. Macdonald was well known as a skilled mediator with a unique ability to strike a balance between competing interests, bring people together at the negotiating table and bring together huge groups of settlers from different backgrounds and different faiths.

When Mr. Macdonald learned that the last spike had been driven into the Canadian Pacific Railway, he declared that the railway united us as a nation. A week later, however, Louis Riel was hanged in Regina, creating a new division in the country.

Mr. Macdonald created a country that was different from its powerful neighbour, America, and that left behind its British imperial origins. He blazed a completely new trail, one that was unprecedented in modern western history, proving that a colony could become an independent country peacefully.

Yet, within this nation, he established a system of residential schools to remove aboriginal children “as much as possible from the parental influence...and to assimilate the Indian people in all respects...as speedily as they are fit for the change”. The last of these schools closed within our lifetime, and their legacy of neglect, abuse and death haunts us, as it should, to this very day.

Macdonald was a product of his time, and yet in some ways he was ahead of his time. He extended voting rights to aboriginal men, a remarkable and short-lived reform that would not be reinstated until 1960. He advocated women's suffrage decades before it finally became law. His Trade Unions Act of 1872 recognized the legal rights of unions in Canada for the first time, and by intervening in a strike by Toronto typographers, he won the support of Canada's emerging working class in an election where, for the first time, the industrial future of Canada was the chief issue.

Mr. Macdonald's personal life was no less complex than his public life. At his peak, he was extremely popular, charming and charismatic. He was a clever and empathetic politician and an unrivalled negotiator. At other times, he would be consumed by despair and frustration. He was of course a man who enjoyed his drink, and had to be carried out of the House on more than one occasion. Fortunately, there were no cameras here at the time.

He was very funny. One of the witticisms that he made when he was asked to provide his occupation for a hotel ledger book, he wrote “cabinet maker”. At home, he cared deeply for his severely disabled daughter, Mary, with whom he spent time every evening telling her stories of the day's drama in Parliament.

These details and many others have emerged from recent scholarship that give us a finer portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald as we mark the bicentennial of his birth. I pay particular tribute to Professor Donald Creighton and Mr. Richard Gwyn for their remarkable works on Sir John A.

When we speak about him today, we do so neither to praise him nor to bury him. To simply chastise him and to lay the legacy of discriminatory policies against first nations or Chinese Canadians entirely at his feet would be to absolve ourselves of our obligations to right these wrongs, and to overlook an opportunity to build a better, fairer Canada that we know is possible. If we can instead be honest about our past and about this key figure who played such a central role in it, we can begin to tell a more inclusive story about our country, one that inspires us all to better it.

The problems of Macdonald's days are still alive in Canada and they deserve the attention of the House. More than a century ago, John A. Macdonald spoke about the inevitable recognition of women's equality, yet still today that equality is not recognized with equal pay or a national effort to stop the violence that threatens Canadian women every day. More than a century ago, Macdonald was the architect of xenophobic laws, yet still today we struggle to live up to our image as a multicultural nation, to welcome new Canadians to our social and economic life, and offer a haven to families fleeing violence and persecution. More than a century has passed since Macdonald built residential schools, yet still we have not closed the shameful gaps in health, housing, income and freedom from violence that separate aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians.

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir John A. Macdonald will not make the debate on his legacy any less polarized, but it does give us the opportunity to take stock and reflect on the progress we have made as a country and the obstacles we still have to overcome.

If by taking stock we can take any inspiration from Canada's first prime minister, I hope that it will be from his visionary spirit. He believed in overcoming obstacles that others thought insurmountable. The obstacles that we face today are not mountain ranges or rivers; they are in our cities and small towns, in workplaces and on reserves, but they are no less daunting.

As we approach a milestone for Canada, let us remember that the project Sir John A. Macdonald began is not finished. Let us still dream big dreams, and as we seek to make them real for all Canadians, let us move forward with the wisdom that can only come from an honest and complete understanding of our history.

[Health, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the government's behaviour is simply inexcusable. Five months after the House voted unanimously to provide thalidomide survivors with full support the Conservatives have offered them nothing but half measures and broken promises. Survivors need financial certainty now. They deserve to know now that their needs will be met, but the government is flatly refusing to answer their questions and there is no sign of the annual compensation the government promised.

Why are the Conservatives failing to keep their promise? Will the minister announce today that she will fully implement the program approved by all of us in the House?

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, most Canadians understand that we have a crisis in our major cities with crumbling infrastructure and particularly problems with transit.

I noted that the Ontario finance minister referred to the transit part of this budget as “crumbs”. Recognizing that we need help now, the government, wanting to balance the budget at all costs, has decided that this stuff will start after the election, and the $1 billion is two years after that. Then all of a sudden we are supposed to be happy. Let us not forget, we have to work with P3s, private-public partnerships, which often cost more money and reward friends of the government.

It is a happy package for everybody but the people who need transit services now.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I can do no better than quote the headline of The Globe and Mail editorial to which I referred. It states, “This budget was designed to win an election”. I think the member for Winnipeg North and me understand what that is about.

Imagine a government that spends a decade with deficits, huge debt, and all of a sudden, on the eve of an election, announces that, there is a surplus. Then we are told that we are getting it by way of raiding a contingency fund, selling shares and using the EI fund.

I think Canadians understand that this is really about an election promise. Much of the goodies that we are hoping will happen, goodies that are essential in places like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and my community of Victoria, to deal with transit, for example, will not happen for many years.

All of the good stuff is back end loaded with these great promises but, hallelujah, the government has balanced the budget. I am sure Canadians see through that.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the government is famous, and Canadians see right through it, for what we call the poison pill strategy.

What it does is it puts a lot of things in a budget that would appear to be things we could support, and then it puts poison pills in that no serious opposition could ever support. That may be an example of that, I do not know.

Let us remember this. What I was saying about the employment insurance fund was not me talking, I was talking about The Globe and Mail saying how the government, “has quietly been taking in several billion dollars more than it pays out”.

That is another nefarious way the government has used to create this mystique of a balanced budget. It has raided a contingency fund, used the EI fund as a piggy bank and sold GM shares just in time to create this magical illusion. I think Canadians understand what is going on.

[The Budget, April 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to stand in this place to discuss the budget that is before the House. I only have a few minutes, so I would like to divide my remarks into, first, some general comments specifically relating to seniors, second, to speak to the health aspects of it, as I am the official opposition health critic, and third, to focus on British Columbia and the city of Victoria, which I represent.

On the general points, we have heard much this morning already about the income-splitting regime in this budget and the TFSA going from $5,500 to $10,000 a year. On top of that, of course, we have $4,400 in new federal debt that every newborn child has and our grandchildren are going to have another $15 billion or $20 billion in debt created by the TFSA. It may be a laudable policy, but doubling contributions, or virtually doubling them, certainly will be helping wealthier Canadians more than others.

That has been the subject of much commentary, and not just by opposition politicians. It is important that Canadians know it is the Parliamentary Budget Officer who, just a day or so ago, drew attention to the disparity. My colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley pointed out yesterday that these handouts will cost tens of billions of dollars a year and the doubling of the TFSA itself will give the wealthiest 20% twice as much as all other Canadians combined.

The Globe and Mail, of course, has brought to our attention just what this document is. It is designed, as it says in its editorial of April 21, to win an election. That is really all it is. This is a document designed to give gifts to the Conservatives' wealthiest friends and donors in the hope that the rest of Canadians will not notice what is happening to our country in the meantime.

The Conservatives talked at one point about having a leaner, meaner tax code, cleaner and simpler. Of course, that has not happened. It is rare for me to stand in this place and agree with the Fraser Institute, but in a report that it put out just this week, it pointed out how the tax code has become bigger and bigger and more and more complex. It is great work for accountants and lawyers, I am sure, but it is incomprehensible to many Canadians. That is not the result of these little tax breaks and credits here, there and everywhere, what are called boutique tax credits, which litter this budget.

In addition, members have heard my colleagues talk about the fact that the contingency fund cupboard has been raided and it has gone from $3 billion to $1 billion in order to balance the budget. We have heard about the fire sale of GM shares in order to get more money to balance the budget, the holy grail of re-election.

The Globe and Mail said:

...one category of taxes remain far higher than it should: Employment Insurance premiums. These premiums are, basically, a tax on jobs. For years, Ottawa has quietly been taking in several billion dollars more than it pays out. The budget promises a long-term plan to lower premiums....

Guess what? That, like so much in this budget, does not happen until 2017, 2018, 2019. We will hear about that in the context of transit and so many other issues. It is bad public policy. It is simply a gift for re-election purposes, and I am confident Canadians will see through this.

A day or so ago, the Canadian Alliance of United Seniors, which brings together dozens of seniors groups, talked about this budget in very unfavourable terms. It pointed out that income security, including restoring the old age security and GIS to age 65, should be enhanced. The Prime Minister went to Davos, Switzerland, and announced that the government was going to change the age for OAS to 67, which seems to me a little unfair to people who had the misfortune of being born after 1958, and no change to the Canada pension plan. That is a payroll tax, although it is not a tax at all, and that is why we cannot fix for the next generation the inequities. Nothing in the budget would deal with that. EI, of course, is okay, but CPP improvements are not.

Health care reform is the second thing that the Canadian Alliance of United Seniors has talked about. It asked for increased funding for issues such as home care and a national pharmacare plan. That notorious radical group, the Canadian Medical Association, has called for a seniors strategy on care and health care, something which, of course, the official opposition has been very much in favour of. The government has done nothing whatsoever on that score in this budget.

A national housing strategy is the third thing it asked for, a strategy to allow seniors stay in their homes or move to purpose-built affordable housing. There is very little, as so many critics have pointed out, on the affordable housing front in this budget.

There is very little for fighting inequality to assure all citizens, including seniors, can get out of poverty. That is a bit of a sleeper issue in the budget.

Yesterday, Mr. Ian McGugan wrote in The Globe and Mail that there was a disparity increasingly among seniors, among the wealthy and the less wealthy. There was a lucky elite that could take advantage of TFSAs and the like, but that there was another group, a growing mass of retirees who must patch together their own safety net. Their prosperity or lack of it hinged on how much they could stow away in RRSPs, TFSAs and defined contribution pensions. If they happened to be in the wrong industry and suffered prolonged periods of unemployment, their retirement nest eggs would suffer through no fault of their own.

It is a tale of two cities among seniors in our communities. There is no doubt that the budget works for the wealthy seniors. We just have to ask the Parliamentary Budget Officer. However, for the vast majority of seniors who struggle to get by, with the low interest rate environment and so forth, it is a very different part of the world in which they live.

On health care, the College of Family Physicians of Canada talks about the federal budget as “a missed opportunity to advance health care”, and that is what it is. It, like the official opposition, are pleased with government's commitment to a Canadian centre for aging and brain health innovation, but it says what is needed is “higher-level leadership for the entire spectrum of health care”, not a patchwork of single programs, and that is the point about the budget.

There are lots of little goodies here and there, boutique tax credits here, announcements there, innovation centre there, but on the main event it is a notorious and continuing lack of leadership on so many fronts.

Regarding the Canada health transfer, Conservatives keep talking about how much money is being transferred, and there is a lot of money being transferred, but much less than there would have been if they had not killed the Health Council a few years ago. The government sees no benefit in doing anything that involves leadership and working with the provinces to achieve better results for our population.

There is much more about health that needs to be said in this context, and not only the fact Conservatives are sticking to the unilateral formula for the health transfer, axing the Health Council and showing no leadership in public health issues for Canadians. However, the one good thing is that the mandate of the Mental Health Commission of Canada has been renewed. We need to see a lot more leadership in that area. I salute the government for that aspect of the health care issue. However, money is really what has to be important.

I promised to talk about British Columbia. It has been said over and over again that climate change is a foreign concept in the budget, it is a word that dare not be mentioned by Conservatives. I think they do not believe it exists. The word “Victoria” did not get mentioned and for British Columbia, pretty thin gruel. British Columbians will remember a few weeks ago, when the government in its zeal to save $700,000 thought it was sound public policy to close the Kitsilano Coast Guard. That $700,000 should be matched in people's minds with the $7.5 million Conservatives will spend to advertise the budget.

Budgets are about priorities. Governing is about choosing. The government chose to put our coastline at risk for a small savings. We see the results. Thank goodness they were not worse, but $7.5 million for feel good ads is what will happen.

What is not in the budget? Money for transit that comes forward many years later. There is nothing for local roads and bridges, nothing for the Belleville Street terminal in my riding, which everyone agrees is the number one infrastructure, not even a signal that it might occur sometime, no money in gang violence prevention and so forth.

This is a budget that works very well for the wealthy. It does not make the kind of long-term investments in health care that will be necessary going into the future. Seniors groups have understood that it helps only a small segment of their population. For British Columbia, it reflects priorities that British Columbians simply do not have.

[Ethics, April 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, evidence from the trial of former Conservative senator Mike Duffy has given rise to new questions about the Prime Minister's Office and its involvement in unreported lobbying and communications between Mike Duffy and Enbridge executives.

Why did the Prime Minister ask Mike Duffy to send him a note on “Enbridge Line 9 problems” on February 17, 2012? What was contained in the note Mr. Duffy sent to the Prime Minister's chief of staff and Enbridge executives on February 20 of that year?

[The Environment, April 22nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the finance minister openly admitted the budget would put a burden on future generations, which is just unacceptable. However, the irony that a budget that does not even mention climate change was introduced a day before Earth Day is not lost on British Columbians.

There are no significant investments in housing or infrastructure, no reversal of cuts to the Coast Guard, yet today the Conservatives are busy congratulating themselves, despite the fact that last month alone B.C. lost 5,700 full-time jobs.

Why are the Conservatives abandoning B.C.?

[Business of Supply, April 20th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the word “urgent” is used in the motion before us, and there is no doubt that is the correct word.

I would like to begin by quoting from Kai Nagata, who wrote in the Dogwood Initiative blog the following:

One week ago Vancouver residents woke up to the news that a grain freighter at anchor had leaked bunker fuel into English Bay. No reason to panic, right? Conditions were sunny and calm, there was hardly a breeze: a golden opportunity for the federal government to demonstrate its “world-leading” spill response.

It’s pretty clear now what a meaningless phrase that is. After watching federal officials trip over themselves for the past seven days, one thing is clear: it makes absolutely no sense letting Kinder Morgan run 408 crude oil tankers through Burrard Inlet every year. What spilled from the Marathassa was equivalent to 17 barrels of oil. Aframax tankers carry 800,000 barrels of oil.

So what do everyday British Columbians do when we're told to expect more and more oil to keep washing up on our shores? We grab our clipboards and get to work, channeling our frustration into something productive.

Something productive would be to get rid of a government that has disdain for the coast of British Columbia, whose priority is to save $700,000 in closing down the Kitsilano Coast Guard station but has no trouble spending $7.5 million to tell us about its budget and political triumphs.

We get it in coastal British Columbia. I live in an island riding. A number of people over the last two weeks have brought to my attention their disdain for the government. Its priorities, as my colleague from Skeena—Bulkley Valley has said, are skewed. On October 19, or as soon as possible, we have to get rid of a government that cares so little for coastal British Columbia.

Closing a coast guard station might not sound like a big deal to people in central Canada. It is a big deal. It closed not just the Kitsilano Coast Guard station, but the one in Ucluelet, the Ucluelet marine communications and traffic services centre. It will soon close the Vancouver and Comox marine communications and traffic services centres, cutting 25% of the coast guard staff in British Columbia.

What does it mean in Ucluelet, not far from where I live in Victoria? It means, in the case of that particular station, an officer in charge, 17 marine communications and traffic services officers, 5 electronic technicians, and 2 administrative support people gone.

This was a minor spill in the grand scheme of things, and it was a wake-up call for everyone on our coast. Those stations cannot be closed in good conscience. The cost-benefit analysis is simply ridiculous. It is lunacy, and people get that.

Do not just take our word for it. The commissioner for sustainable development proved it 10 years ago. He said there is no way that we are prepared to deal with even a moderately sized oil spill. With the incredible increase in tanker traffic that is expected, how could we possibly cope if the government continues to close these stations down? Its priorities are skewed.

The Kitsilano Coast Guard station was the subject of an opposition day motion. I want to commend my colleague, the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam, for his leadership on this. He brought an opposition day motion forward back in June 2012.

The official opposition has been all over this issue. What has the government done? It has done nothing. In fact, the Conservative member for Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge—Mission, in responding to a question from another of my colleagues back then, assured the House that safety would not be affected by the closure. He boasted that the newly acquired hovercraft would “better service this area”. Apparently hovercrafts do not do oil slicks, as we have now discovered. They just do not work. The government found that out, thank goodness with a small spill, relatively speaking, of toxic bunker fuel oil.

The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans told Parliament that “the level of search and rescue service in Vancouver...will remain the same”. The folly of that particular claim was exposed last week. The spill response did not take the six minutes we were told by the former base commander it would have taken to get the ship out and put the booms on the spill, et cetera. It could have taken 35 minutes from Sea Island station. That did not work either. It took six hours.

Finally, twelve and a half hours later, they told the people in Vancouver who are responsible for public safety and beach closures that they had a tiny problem. “Houston, we have a problem. Vancouver, we have a problem. Canadians, we have a problem”. This was directly traceable to the choice the government made to close down, for a $700,000 saving, a Coast Guard station.

I want to commend my colleague for his leadership in bringing this up over and over again, with the current government saying, “No problem. Do not worry, be happy”. Well, we are not happy in coastal British Columbia. We are very concerned. Why? As Professor Tollefson of the UVic Environmental Law Centre has noted, this was an easy one. The vessel could have been much larger, the conditions far worse, and the response time much longer.

Let me explain. First is the location. Even setting aside the proximity to the shuttered station at Kitsilano, the spill occurred remarkably close to a Coast Guard station at Sea Island. What if it had happened midway between Victoria and Vancouver, at Turn Point? Turn Point was identified at the National Energy Board hearing as the most challenging section of the route from Vancouver to international waters. The tidal conditions and the currents in that area can be devastating.

Second is conditions. The spill occurred in daylight in calm, protected waters. What if it had happened at night when the currents were running strong? What if it had happened in a storm?

The Marathassa is a brand new Japanese-built grain carrier. It is large, but many vessels that transit the waters are much larger. What if, instead, this had happened to another vessel in a port that day, the 340-metre long container ship Hyundai Global, a vessel twice as large as the Marathassa in gross tonnage? Of course, there is the catastrophic scenario of a tanker full of bitumen.

The Marathassa was flagged in Cyprus and owned by a Greek company, which is apparently fully co-operating with Canadian authorities to pay the cleanup costs. However, the prevalence of flags of convenience makes it very difficult to hold owners accountable. Who pays? Do I need to remind this House that the cost of the catastrophic oil spill in the case of the Exxon Valdez was $7 billion? Currently, maximum liability is $1.3 billion, but after that, it is the public that pays these costs. I am not just talking about cleanup costs; there are the ecological costs as well.

The substance was bunker oil. I grant members that it is a serious toxic substance as well, but diluted bitumen is far worse. It would sink, and it contains chemical dilutants that are highly toxic.

One of the many failings of the National Energy Board's rubber-stamped review of the plans to expand the Kinder Morgan pipeline in Vancouver was its refusal to assess just how a number of chronic spills that could happen would increase the risk if there were a problem with tanker collisions.

There has been a complete breakdown in communication, which we saw in Vancouver. We had the silly response by government officials that the response was excellent, that they were going to get 80% of the English Bay spill. As the former Coast Guard base commander Fred Moxey said, that is simply not true. It is likely false; they are not going to get anything near that amount.

There is another point that Dr. Ross, of the Vancouver Aquarium, discussed. He was one of the many DFO scientists fired by the federal government as it cut millions of dollars in funding from the DFO in 2012. Dr. Ross said that there is no official clarity as to who is to monitor the effects of a spill. Yes, it is the Coast Guard's job to respond to the immediate aftermath, but we do not know who is supposed to be monitoring it. He is, on his own, with the Vancouver Aquarium, doing the monitoring. One hopes that the government has woken up and is doing its own monitoring. However, with more than 50 scientists having lost their jobs, including Dr. Ross, whose marine toxicology program was shut down, one wonders whether that is going to be the case.

Monitoring is a problem. We clearly find that this excellent response was nothing of the sort.

The motion started with the word “urgent”. I commend to this House this motion. We have to open those coast guard stations and not close the others. We have to move on in British Columbia to protect our sacred coastal environment.

[The Senate, April 1st, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the unelectable, unaccountable, under investigation Senate is at it again. There is news today that at least 40 current and former senators have been asked by the Auditor General to account for questionable expenses. Sources have told the CTV that at least one Liberal senator has been unwilling to co-operate.

Also, let us not forget about the growing investigation into Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin. The RCMP is now gathering information from the Canada Border Services Agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about her travels.

Canadians have become tired of the endless Liberal and Conservative scandals in the Senate. They do not believe that an unelected body from the 19th century should be part of Canadian democracy anymore. Now, more than ever, we need a comprehensive approach with the provinces to abolish Canada's Senate. We will get that later this year when we elect Canada's first NDP government.