Nathan Cullen

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), April 22nd, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have heard a new tranche in the Conservatives' approach to tough on crime. The fact that they want these massive extensions in sentencing is because they need time with the prisoners for rehabilitation programs, those programs which they cut, the literacy programs, the farm programs and the other ones.

As someone has said, we should be as concerned about who comes out of prison as we are about those who go in. It is fact that in almost all cases they eventually come out.

The member talked about reforming the system and bringing justice to Canadians. As New Democrats, we put forward a proposal that would allow for full public oversight of the RCMP, a federal government jurisdiction. I am wondering if he would be in agreement with this.

The chiefs of police, the head of the RCMP and the complaints commissioner have all come forward and said that they need a public oversight model for Canada. Certainly the families that have had interactions in which loved ones have been hurt or killed in custody and there has been controversy, I am thinking of Linda Bush and Mr. Dziekanski, have also made the call and the plea to the government to take a courageous leadership role and do what members of the RCMP are asking for, which is to stop the rules that say they must investigate themselves. That is what all members I speak to request.

The member is obviously someone who has spent a great deal of time on the issue of crime, punishment and whatnot in Canada. I wonder if he has given this topic any thought and if he can definitely say, one way or the other, whether he is in favour of true public oversight, as they have in Ontario.

[Sébastien's Law (Protecting the Public from Violent Young Offenders), April 22nd, 2010]

Madam Speaker, first of all, I appreciated my colleague's speech.

One small concern which I would raise, more as a comment than a question, is that often when we talk about the Young Offenders Act and reform of how to deal with folks who end up in trouble with the law at a young age, we refer to those who are raised by single parents as a category, and it is often a mistake to make too much of a connection.

We know that the circumstances in which young persons grow up are very determinant of what happens if they end up in trouble with the law. But too often in this place, and I am not accusing my colleague of doing this, we say thus equals thus. That if they were raised by a single mom, therefore we know the scenario. It is something that I would caution all members because it is so often not the reality. Single parents are out there raising their kids as best they can, often on very limited means because of the social safety net that has been torn apart, and this goes to my question for my colleague.

There is almost no discussion of prevention. The best way to treat a crime is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place, so that there is no victim and there is no punishment allotted because it did not happen. This government in particular seems to cast aspersions on the idea of a social safety net and would rather have a tough on crime agenda, where spending $100,000 a person in maximum security is a great solution as opposed to $10,000 on prevention

My colleague across the way talked about reforming someone at age 16. We have to talk about age six. We have to talk about early childhood learning, education and programs that set people on the right path from the beginning. Waiting until they are 16 and have run-ins with the cops is sometimes too late.

If a government is only fixated on the moment when a crime takes place and not so much on all the events that led up to that moment, the enticement from the gangs, the lack of opportunities, after school programs, lunch programs and whatnot, is that not an irresponsible way to conduct a government, to conduct any just society, to simply fixate only at the end on the crime and what punishment ought to be meted out?

[Questions on the Order Paper, April 15th, 2010]

With regard to Canada's supply of fossil fuels: (a) what are Natural Resources Canada's estimates of Canada's total fossil fuel supplies recoverable under present economic conditions; (b) what are the government's estimates of international supplies of recoverable fossil fuels; (c) what are the government's estimates for the peaking of Canadian fossil fuel production; and (d) what are the government's estimates for the peaking of international fossil fuel production?

[Industry, April 14th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians want a government that will stand up for our interests, not one that surrenders our natural wealth to every foreign investor that comes along.

The Prime Minister is breaking his own fundamental promise not to export raw bitumen to countries with lower environmental standards. He is exporting raw resources and Canadian jobs. He is helping triple the tar sands production and rubber-stamping more pipelines that will carry unrefined crude to the U.S. and China. Canada will be left with all the pollution and a government only interested in making friends in Texas and Beijing.

Why is the Prime Minister breaking his own promise to Canadians?

[Industry, April 14th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's decision to export raw bitumen means that this government will be exporting our jobs to other countries. Jobs in the refining industry are at risk throughout Canada. This decision also puts our energy security in jeopardy.

Why is the government forcing Canada to deal with all the environmental and social problems related to tar sands operations, but exporting the jobs?

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it should be tough on certain crimes, certainly not white-collar crimes, certainly not crimes that allow $3 billion to go out the door when a government is running red ink all over the place. I would think it would want the $3 billion, but it does not because it does not mind raising taxes, but on certain people, those who it does not necessarily feel are within its constituency. Now the folks who can afford to run these offshore tax havens, tax dodges, those are the folks in whom the Conservatives seem very interested. Compare this to the United States; it offered no such amnesty. It simply said it is going after the Swiss accounts to get the money back for the American taxpayers. In Canada, suddenly the Conservatives said, “Here is a haven”, but if average Canadians missed their taxes by $5,000, would they be provided a haven? Would they be provided an amnesty?

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague makes a fair point that the very foundation and principle of this place is that we engage in debate with one another. We present opposing views. We discuss those views and try to come to some reconciliation over what is best for the country. The fact is that the government members will not come to their feet, all the members present here today and the members present yesterday. Any of the Conservative caucus who feel so strongly about their government's direction failed to show up and actually speak and support that direction and present why they think it is a good idea to raise taxes on Canadians at airports, and why they think it is such a great idea to eliminate the federal role in environmental assessments over major industrial projects, and why they think it is such a good idea to have no debate whatsoever about selling AECL, for which we have all pitched in to the tune of $19 billion.

If they thought all these things were such great ideas, here is the place for them to describe it, not in their cheap mail-out program, not in the stump speeches they give to partisan crowds, but here in the House of Commons where we all gather to debate these ideas and put our best foot forward. But I see again that, even through the enticement, none of our Conservative colleagues will rise to their feet to defend their government's action.

[Jobs and Economic Growth Act, April 13th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, it is with some pleasure and frustration that I enter into this debate today on Bill C-9. It has been referred to by many of my colleagues as being quite a substantial bill, consisting of some 880 pages.

It is up to us as members of Parliament to attempt, for the average Canadian citizen, a translation or interpretation simply because it is clearly not an expectation for Canadians in their leisure time to read through examples such as on page 416, where it states:

Tariff item No. 7320.10.00 in the List of Tariff Provisions set out in the schedule to the Act is amended by replacing--

It is up to us as parliamentarians to interpret what Bill C-9 actually means in the lives of Canadians. When we in the NDP look through this bill, we find that in fact the government needed so many pages because this bill is, in reality, a Trojan Horse. Within these pages are all sorts of actions the government has taken that it did not actually want to debate in the full and proper light of day. There are many examples.

This from a government, if we recall the Conservatives' election win the first time around in 2006, that was going to bring in new accountability. We have in Bill C-9 nothing but unaccountability to Canadian taxpayers. I will provide some examples.

One is the Environmental Assessment Act. The willingness of the federal government to assess the environmental sustainability or impact of major industrial projects has been stripped down to virtually nothing in this bill. The number of projects that need to be assessed by the federal government so that Canadians can understand their impacts are too numerous to mention in the brief time I have.

Canadians have a sense that one of the roles and functions of government is to protect them from harm, particularly to protect them from projects they may have no knowledge of or nothing to do with. We are talking major industrial projects, oil sands, energy, bridges, highways and all the rest.

In Bill C-9, this Trojan Horse, the government has said it will simply defer to the provinces or, in other circumstances, will give the power to the Minister of the Environment to decide what should be assessed and what should not have an environmental assessment. The irony of this new move is that the minister will somehow determine beforehand what is going to have a major environmental impact.

Canadians know the reason an assessment is done is to find out if something is going to have an environmental impact or not. The minister is somehow being given this divine knowledge and right that he will understand what is going to cause harm to the environment and what is not before the project has even been proposed or implemented.

A second piece is the selling of AECL, Canada's nuclear industry, also contained in these pages, without debate or comment from members of the government. Here they are, the great defenders of the nuclear industry, trying to sell off that same industry, which begs a few questions. Will they bring that in a separate piece of legislation, a bill which is required by law? No, they stick it in a Trojan Horse, threaten the opposition and get the support of the Liberals to do it. Something they could not do in the full light of day they bury in 880 pages. They bury something that Canadians, over the 50 years of AECL, have contributed $50 billion toward.

It staggers the mind that the government would say it is going to selloff a Canadian asset, but it does not want to talk about it. It is going to selloff a Canadian asset that by law says it has to be brought to this place as a stand-alone bill and the government buries it on page 556. This is not a government of accountability, clearly not.

There is the environmental assessment, the burying of AECL, and the raising of taxes at airports. Of course, this is a government that likes to proclaim it is lowering taxes, but here we see it raising taxes, user fees that will garner a 50% increase. A 50% increase for security costs on travellers is also buried within this Trojan Horse of a bill. Are Canadians being asked for their comments or opinions about a tax hike like this? Of course not.

Such was the case when the government raised taxes with the HST, also contained within Bill C-9. The HST will be applied to a whole bunch more services that Canadians use, thereby raising their tax burden again. This is Orwellian at its base, hypocritical at its source, and the government must be held to account.

This is what the debate is about. It is ironic and yet tragic. Government members are so proud of their record on taxes and on this budget, which supposedly is the miracle cure for the recession, yet 93% of the projects did not get out the door. Another 50% showed no effect, and if we believe the Fraser Institute, it actually may have been counterproductive to the economy's recovery.

The government that claimed so much credit for its economic prowess will not stand up and debate the bill in this House. The Conservatives will stay in their seats and type their emails, but will not engage in a debate about something so fundamental. There must be something in these 880 pages that they like.

I found something that may be of some benefit to Canadians. I am somewhat of a fan of the credit union movement, and if I take one moment to give some small modicum of credit, the government decided to finally allow Canadian credit unions to compete and operate under the Bank Act, which will allow them to go beyond their limited provincial jurisdictions right now. This is something that has been called for by New Democrats for a long time. Credit unions will now be able to compete fairly and competitively with the banking system. We just heard my colleague from Manitoba talk about the exorbitant salaries that senior bank officials pay themselves continuously. These banks just received, not a year ago, a $75 billion backstop from the federal government through Canadian taxpayers.

We can look at the HST. Being a member from British Columbia, I talk to my constituents in Skeena and the northwest of B.C. Just this past weekend I was in one of my favourite barbershops, which I know bears some irony itself, talking to my friend, Klaus Mueller Jr., the good barber of Smithers, B.C., asking him what the impact of the HST was going to be on his business. The HST was not debated, not discussed, and not presented forthrightly or truthfully, either by the Conservative government or the provincial government in B.C. It is devastating and the folks that he is most worried about are those that can least afford it, those who are already sitting on the margins economically of society.

Those on fixed incomes, seniors, those at the lowest incomes, struggling single moms, families, folks who are just trying to make ends meet are being whacked over the head by a government here in Ottawa that throws its hands up and says it has nothing to do with it, that the HST is purely a provincial decision. Yet, it found in a budget $6 billion to bribe, in a sense, the provinces along the path of redemption on the HST route, thereby using taxpayers' money to bribe another level of government to raise taxes on the same taxpayers.

If this is not an offensive, twisted and contorted way to do politics, I have never heard of one. Taking $6 billion of Canadians' own money from across Canada, which was a generous contribution I suppose from the other provinces to this nefarious effort, it shoved it out the door to Ontario and British Columbia, having them raise taxes on their own citizens and calling it good for the economy. All the while we hear this government trumpet its own ability to lower taxes when in fact that is not the case. We see in Bill C-9 880 pages of misdirection and misappropriation.

I want to step back and conclude my remarks around the environmental assessment component of this act because here is something that we will be paying for, for generations. Many of these issues and the damages being done in this bill will be felt for the next two years, but we know, through trial and error and through experience, that when we do not have proper environmental assessments, when we do not have any basic regulations to guide us on how major industrial projects operate, which is the suggestion in this bill by the government, we pay for it eventually. We pay up front or we pay eventually, and oftentimes, paying eventually means paying more.

An example and a case in point, in 2007 we paid $175 million in the district of Yukon alone to clean up old mines, disasters, orphaned abandoned mines, because they did not go through any kind of environmental assessment 45 or 50 years ago. We are paying for them all now, collectively. This is not how Canadians want their house managed. Their affairs are not being benefited by the government.

We need to not have this bill pass. We need to not bring this Trojan Horse to bear because not only will we be paying for it now but for generations to come.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say that it is a pleasure to engage in the debate but unfortunately the circumstances are not ideal because we are talking about something going away that I think there is general agreement worked and was effective, and that was the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

I found myself caught up in the passions of this conversation and frankly the anger I feel about this because I am thinking about the human impact about what we are here talking about tonight.

We are meant to speak to these things in civil tones with one another, understand each other's points of reasons and debate the rhetoric and yet the human side of this conversation cannot be ignored. What will happen to people starting tomorrow when they no longer can find the services that for some folks were what were keeping them alive, that were so vital and able to continue a healing process, of something that we as a country have officially admitted was a devastating impact on an entire culture, an entire people?

In the northwest of British Columbia where I come from there are six service centres operating over a range of 300,000 square kilometres. It was not like we were tripping over them while walking around the northwest of B.C. They were servicing huge areas, some of them as big as a country, and these centres will be closed. The folks who were going to these centres trying to get their lives in order and trying to work through things will not be able to do that anymore.

We have heard from government members that there is some program out there that they cannot produce or show us. It says that it exists but no one believes it because it is a simple trust exercise.

One can forgive the first nations people of Canada for lacking a little bit of trust in the government and, frankly, any government. The simple “trust us” will not cut it.

I really hope the parliamentary secretary takes this back to the Minister of Health who engages with the first nations communities and actually presents them with a plan, shows them where the centres will be and where the resources will be for people. Otherwise we will drop them and, if we drop them, that is worse than anything else.

I hear members saying that it is all there. Where is it ? We are looking for the plan, the dates, the spending and the services that will be there so I can tell my constituents, the people who have been going to these service centres, where they go next when those doors are locked tomorrow morning. Where is the service? If it is not there, then the government should be ashamed.

The government should only hope and pray that it has evaluations on its programs, like the evaluation it received on the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, an evaluation that came back and said, “Great work, effective, taking on a difficult problem, a challenging problem of how to heal a people, not just at the individual level”, which the government says is the only cure, “but at the family and community level”, which first nations have said time and again that this is the path forward and have asked that we listen to them. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation was a program that did this.

I am not sure if there are many hon. members here tonight or have been engaged in this debate who have actually attended an Aboriginal Healing Foundation forum. This is a powerful, moving and humbling thing to go through when one stands side by side with somebody who day in and day out listens to difficult, tragic, impossible stories and yet goes to work the next day to help folks out.

In the strangest of ironies, the day the Prime Minister stood in his place here, that in my riding, in my region it was the Aboriginal Healing Foundation that hosted forums for first nations people, feasts and discussions to talk about the apology, to discuss it and in fact to celebrate it, despite all the years of evidence showing that the Government of Canada may not be trustworthy.

We all remember that when the Prime Minister stood up, a circle was made here with the leaders of the first nations, Inuit and Métis communities of Canada. The Prime Minister sat with them in the circle along with the Leader of the Opposition and said, in words that felt sincere, that we apologize and that we are sorry. When the apology came forward it was an honest and normal expectation for people to have who were affected by this that there would be action to follow.

My friend from Vancouver East read out the many accolades for this program, The government spent money on this program and it did an assessment of the program. The assessment came back showing that the program was cost effective and was helping to reduce the amount of suicides in a community. The natural inclination for any government, right wing or left wing, it should not matter, should be to say that a cost effective program that is keeping people from killing themselves should be supported and continued, regardless of what was said in 2005.

It is working, and tomorrow it stops working.

I am thinking of the people who go to those programs, the people who attend those sessions. They do not have anything else. That is the point.

Members of Parliament can talk all they want about protocol and discussion and civility, but they should go out into the communities and sit in the villages. I represent communities with 85% and 90% unemployment. It is devastating. My colleague from Vancouver Island faces similar circumstances. If the city of Ottawa were in a similar circumstance, I would give it three months before there was chaos, before there was a tragedy. Can we imagine Ottawa, Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal having 80% unemployment? Yet the communities are somehow managing to survive, despite extremely difficult financial circumstances and social circumstances, some of which was put upon them, such as the residential schools. The Aboriginal Healing Foundation is meant to be a mark of that.

This Truth and Reconciliation Commission is going across the country, including to some of the communities in my riding. The idea is that is going to open things up. Part of the idea was to support the healing that was going to be required once these truth and reconciliation meetings happened. The community-based, family-based counselling is simply not going to be there.

I think we can stand together on certain things. Oftentimes in this place people look to right and left, but oftentimes there is right and wrong. Tonight we are faced with a question of right and wrong.

We have a program which, by the government's own admission, works. It is effective. For the life of me, I will not be able to explain to the constituents I represent, the people who are attending those programs, who are getting the help that they need, that their government has a plan in place but it just does not seem to have it ready. How will I explain to them that the counsellor they have been working with for years and with whom they have developed trust, support and safety is just not going to be there? The government said that yes, the program worked and yes, it was effective, but it did not want to release the report until the day after it cut its funding.

I am sorry, but it is difficult to tell Canadians that this is some sort of circumstance of timing and a date on the calendar, that we held this report for so many months, this report that said this was effective, but we had to wait until we had the budget and cut the funding to that program in order to tell people about it. Come on. We can do better than that.

At the end of the day, the dignity that first nations people present themselves with, the struggles they are going through on a community-by-community basis, on a family-by-family basis, they need support. They are willing to work with us. They are willing to trust again and again and again, but it is difficult when a government comes forward with a program that works, by every admission, a program that is effective and then turns to the aboriginal people and says, ”Trust us again. We cut this out from under you. We are going to replace it with a 1-800 line and some program that we haven't articulated, but you have got to trust us. We will be there for you”.

It is a bit difficult and it is a bitter pill to swallow for first nations people from coast to coast to coast.

The government must reconsider this position. It must reconsider what it has done. It can afford this. We can do this. We can continue this program and effectively service aboriginal people who are dealing with the most trying circumstances. I implore the government to see reason.

[Aboriginal Healing Foundation, March 30th, 2010]

It is fascinating, Mr. Speaker, that the ire of the government has been raised by a parliamentary procedure and yet it is cancelling the funding to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation when, by its own assessment, it is doing vital work. This is baffling. In one breath the government says that this was one of our most successful programs, that it worked and that it was cost effective, and in the second breath said that it needed to cancel it and replace it with something else that will not work as well.

Before my colleague gets the speaking points from the centre here, did he manage to do any cost assessment of what cancelling this program means to the Government of Canada--