House of Commons photoWon his last election, in 2011, with 53% of the vote.
Human Resources Development February 22nd, 2000
Mr. Speaker, the shopping list that the human resources development minister provided yesterday tells us about the government's targets but it says nothing about what actually happened. That is because the government does not know what actually happened. The assistant deputy minister confirmed this yesterday.
Why does the human resources minister care so little about taxpayers' money that she does not bother to track it?
Petitions February 18th, 2000
Mr. Speaker, I have a second petition which I would like to present. Unfortunately this petition arrived late. It is signed by many Canadians who are concerned about the plight of merchant navy veterans.
As we know, after 55 years of being ignored, this issue has finally come to fruition and has been settled. I wish to compliment and thank the government very much for bringing this sordid issue to an end.
I present this petition on behalf of merchant navy veterans.
Petitions February 18th, 2000
Mr. Speaker, today I take great pride in presenting a petition put forth by 1,551 concerned Canadians, mostly from the province of Quebec.
The petitioners ask the government to affirm that all Canadians are equal under all circumstances and without exception in the province of Quebec and throughout Canada. They wish to remind the government only to enact legislation that affirms the equality of each and every individual under the laws of Canada.
Meningitis February 18th, 2000
Mr. Speaker, today in Edmonton an inoculation frenzy is under way. Meningitis has struck and threatens Edmonton's youth.
Today nearly 300,000 of our children will receive an inoculation cloak to protect them against this evil scourge. My daughter, Kristina, is one of those to be inoculated today.
Two precious lives have been lost and over a dozen more hang in the balance. Meningitis can strike any place at any time and meningitis does not discriminate.
Dr. Gerald Predy, Chief Medical Officer for Edmonton's Capital Health Authority, leads the troops in the battle against the meningitis menace with his army of over 500 nurses.
I want Dr. Predy and fellow Edmontonians to know that the support and prayers of the House are with them during this most trying of times.
Veterans Health Care February 17th, 2000
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleagues for their comments on this very important issue. I believe it is possible to develop national standards. I thank the hon. parliamentary secretary for his comments. He made reference to a comprehensive list that is used now to discuss and to look at each individual veterans health care centre. It would not be complicated to expand that list, to formalize that list so we have national standards.
The reason for national standards for veterans health care is that veterans are not and have not experienced the life experiences of ordinary citizens. This manifests itself on my visits to the veterans health care centres in many ways. For example, the oxygen rooms in veterans health care centres are much larger than in ordinary senior homes. There is also psychiatric difficulties that veterans experience which can manifest themselves in their later days considerably more than with ordinary seniors because some of them had horrific experiences in their wartime service.
I will relate a quick story of my experience in the military as a military policeman being sent to downtown Trenton to pick up a person from a hotel. As I was driving him to his home I thought he was receiving fantastic service for an impaired corporal. I found out why I was picking him up and taking him home.
Halfway home he broke down and started mimicking machine gun sounds. He broke into tears. I left him at his doorstep with his wife consoling him. On my return to the guardhouse I asked the sergeant what had happened. He explained. This gentleman was a tailgunner in World War II. He had taken off, tired and fell fast asleep. The bumping of the takeoff awoke him. He saw a plane in his gunsight and shot it out of the sky. It was one of his own planes. These type of experiences only war veterans have had.
Yes, veterans in veterans care facilities need extra consideration. Yes, they need extra rules. Yes, they need extra protection. This is very clear, whether it is the Perley Rideau Hospital where there are ongoing discussions right now or Ste Anne de Bellevue. Before we devolve more we should develop standards that would reflect the extra psychiatric help. My experience and the experience of others who have been in the military is that we were brought up on cigarettes. A lifetime of that does affect them. There is a substantially higher level of lung problems among veterans.
Yes, there is need for extra provisions for veterans health care centres. How could an ordinary hospital understand all of the problems of veterans? It is very important for these issues to be addressed in special facilities with special rules for the veterans who need it.
I asked earlier for unanimous consent to make this motion votable. This was denied. Therefore, I now seek unanimous consent that the motion be withdrawn and that the subject matter be referred to the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs.
Veterans Health Care February 17th, 2000
moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should institute national standards for veterans health care with maintenance and special needs provisions, and have these standards agreed upon by all provinces before devolving responsibilities to any province for any portion of care.
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Motion No. 13. I will repeat the motion because it is very important:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should institute national standards for veterans health care with maintenance and special needs provisions, and have these standards agreed upon by all provinces before devolving responsibilities to any province for any portion of care.
The basic concern behind the motion is that the federal government has been too quick to rid itself of its health care responsibilities for veterans by devolving responsibility to the provinces, and that further devolution of responsibility for our veterans' health care should be reviewed with caution.
The government used to fulfill its responsibilities to veterans through a federally funded and administered regime of military hospitals and veterans homes. Over the last several years many of these hospitals and homes have become the responsibility of provincial governments and subject to provincial standards of health care. Yet the provinces are often in the midst of their own cost cutting initiatives.
I have visited many health care facilities for veterans throughout Canada. I have seen firsthand the effects of downloading and consolidation. I have spoken to veterans who have been left to sit in wet and soiled diapers for the better part of a day due to staff shortages and institutional indifference.
Those military veterans who are sick and disabled are subject to two government imposed hardships: standards of health care which are no longer consistent across the country and growing erosion in the quality of veterans health care. A further hardship to which our veterans are exposed is the indifference of the active military to the health care concerns of recently discharged veterans.
On December 16, Colonel Joe Sharpe released the report of his board of inquiry into the health care of our peacekeeping veterans in Croatia. He described the Canadian military's care of sick peacekeepers from Croatia as disgraceful. His chilling comment was that the military showed more care and concern for its airplanes than for the sick veterans.
Many of our veterans do not have access to military standards of health care either because the health care responsibilities have already been devolved to particular provinces, or because a disbelieving military, fearful of being seen to favour large numbers of disability claims, denies at the outset that the veteran's health problems relate in any way to his or her term of military service.
Hearing loss from the sound of artillery, cancers as a result of exposure to radioactive toxins in the theatre of war, and psychiatric challenges as a result of exposure to the carnage and inhumanity of war are examples of very different conditions experienced by our veterans from those experienced by the civilian population.
Our political leaders make sure that those whom they send to theatres of war are completely healthy and they do not arrive at a battlefield with disabilities. Our healthy men then return changed by war. Some are damaged physically. Others are damaged psychiatrically. Some return with mysterious but persistent ailments for which there is no identified cause and for which there is no clear cure.
Our veterans should not be subject to civilian levels of health care since their exposures to the theatres of war are far from being the normal civilian experiences of most Canadians.
The Ste. Anne de Bellevue military hospital outside Montreal provides long term care to veterans. The hospital is currently in a limbo status in terms of its proposed devolution to the province of Quebec. The Quebec government, while having the right to act to effect the devolution from the federal government, has not yet done so.
The veterans who are cared for in this institution plus their many supporters prefer that the hospital remain under the jurisdiction of veterans affairs rather than the responsibility being devolved to the province. Veterans are concerned that they will be subject to a lower standard of care if the hospital is administered by the province of Quebec. Veterans are also concerned that they will lose service if their first language is English.
If this hospital were to be devolved to Quebec, there is fear that no Canadian flag would be permitted to fly there if the recent policy resolutions of the Parti Quebecois on flag management were to be implemented, specifically that no Canadian flag be permitted to fly in front of any building under Quebec jurisdiction.
For these reasons alone, quality of health care plus potential effects of separatist politics, I suggest that further devolution to the provinces of health care responsibilities for our veterans should be viewed with extreme caution.
A growing number of veterans who return from contemporary theatres of war with unexplained ailments are more likely to be regarded as malingerers by their military superiors.
Louise Richard, a military nurse in the gulf war, comes from a family with a famed military history. Her father was a general in the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos. She returned from the gulf suffering from multiple ailments including tuberculosis, chronic fatigue, blurred vision and severe pain in her muscles and joints. Her appeals to the military were met with scepticism. Post-traumatic stress indeed.
Captain Terry Riordon had 23 years of military service. He went to the gulf war and returned with multiple disabilities which were categorized by the military as merely epilepsy or psychosis. At the time of his death nine years after his gulf war service, tests showed that his body contained depleted uranium. Captain Riordon was exposed to depleted uranium during his service and now he is dead.
Despite their claims to the contrary, Canadian military leaders clearly knew there was something seriously wrong with Captain Riordon's health. After his death, his body was medically defined in Canada as contagious and then taped shut in an orange toxic bag. Post-traumatic stress again. Captain Riordon's wife had asked the Canadian military to do a tissue analysis but they refused. She turned to U.S. researchers for help.
Other veterans who have become ill after having returned from recent peacekeeping arrangements have indicated that they also want to be tested for the presence of depleted uranium in their systems, but the military says that such tests prove nothing since depleted uranium is not harmful. What the military fails to acknowledge is that depleted uranium outside one's body has very different effects than uranium particles that are ingested in a theatre of war. In such circumstances I have been advised that the inner body acts like an open sore permitting the radioactive effects of depleted uranium to directly affect cells.
In my capacity as opposition critic for veterans affairs, I have proposed that an annual medical assessment be made available to any member or veteran of our armed forces who requests it so that no one would be compelled to wait for the results of tissue sample tests in the United States.
Any member of the military who has reason to believe that he or she is exposed to toxins in a theatre of conflict would have a legal right to a determination of the nature and extent of such exposure. Such procedures would also facilitate annual documentation of developments of physical ailments and ongoing effects of environmental exposures which would assist in future health and disability assessments.
It defies logic that so many returning soldiers could all be categorized as suffering from stress related illnesses. This is the case with many of the disability claims resulting from service in Croatia, including that of Colonel Matt Stopford. To say that these claimants are suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress does grave disservice to the bravery of these men and women. Any categorization of the illnesses of these soldiers as resulting from a nervous condition castigates all soldiers as potential malingerers even though many are career oriented soldiers with distinguished military careers.
When soldiers bound for Rwanda raised questions concerning the effects of anthrax vaccine and its relationship to gulf war syndrome, they were compelled to take the vaccine under threat of court martial. Such is the case of former Sergeant Michael Kipling whose court martial has commenced in Winnipeg this week despite his resignation from the military. The military relentlessly and shamelessly hounds Kipling through the courts to this day.
Some illnesses defy medical categorization based on the current state of medical knowledge. The gulf war syndrome is suspected to be caused by the anthrax vaccine or more likely by exposure to depleted uranium. It may be caused by both.
Whatever the cause, our soldiers are returning from these theatres of war with very serious illnesses and reportedly high levels of radioactivity in their bodies. Their claims for assistance must be given the benefit of the doubt and not have doubts cast upon them through the insult of categorizing most such problems as stress related.
The motion before the House is one step toward more formal recognition that throughout their career and afterward the men and women of our military bravely face experiences that most of us do not. Their bravery, when face to face with the dark side of humanity, calls for them to be treated differently upon their return to Canada or their retirement from the military. We must acknowledge that their lives are different from the lives of most of us in terms of what they have had to face.
National standards of veterans health care referenced specifically to the unique experiences of our military are but one step. We must recognize that the devolution of the health care of our veterans to the provinces should be approached with extreme caution and safeguards, if it is to be continued at all. We owe a great debt to our veterans. Surely we must provide them with the best of health care at all times. We must never forget.
I would seek unanimous consent to make this motion votable.
Petitions February 16th, 2000
Madam Speaker, I take great pride in presenting a petition put forth by over 2,000 concerned Canadians, mostly from the province of Quebec.
The petitioners ask our government to affirm that all Canadians are equal under all circumstances and without exception in the province of Quebec and throughout Canada.
They wish to remind our government only to enact legislation that affirms the equality of each and every individual under the laws of Canada.
Petitions December 10th, 1999
Mr. Speaker, today I take great pride in presenting a petition put forth by 1,780 concerned Canadians, mostly from the province of Quebec.
The petitioners ask our government to affirm that all Canadians are equal under all circumstances and without exception in the province of Quebec and throughout Canada. They wish to remind our government to enact only legislation that affirms the equality of each and every individual under the laws of Canada.
Equality December 10th, 1999
Mr. Speaker, in November over 1,000 Canadians gathered on Parliament Hill to voice concern for their legislated loss of equal rights in Quebec.
Together, they brought a petition of over 16,000 persons asking our government to affirm that all Canadians are equal under all circumstances and without exception in the province of Quebec and throughout Canada. They wished to remind Canada's government to only enact legislation that would affirm the equality of every individual under the laws of Canada.
Today in Canada, we see equality once again being legislatively degraded in the Nisga'a treaty. Equality in Canada is paramount to our freedoms. Special status for some over others is regressive. We must stand up together to reaffirm equal rights for all. We must not enact legislated segregation for any group in Canada. Equality—
Nisga'A Final Agreement Act December 6th, 1999
moved:
Motion No. 133
That Bill C-9, in Clause 20, be amended by deleting lines 38 to 43 on page 6 and lines 1 to 5 on page 7.