Sheila Malcolmson

[The Budget, April 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I want to touch on a couple of the parental and family issues the member mentioned in her speech.

I give them credit for the new employment insurance caregiver benefit. That is something New Democrats also promised in the election, but we are discouraged that the Liberals are committing less than they campaigned on. I am pleased to see the extended parental leave, but I am discouraged that there is no new money for families. People would have to be pretty well off to live on one-third of their salaries for a year and a half. It would be nice if they could do it, but it is not a way to bring more people out of poverty.

The most disappointing part, and I would like to hear from the member on this, is that during the election campaign, Liberals said that the New Democrats' child care plan was inadequately funded. Had New Democrats had the honour of forming government, there would have been $1.2 billion for new child care spaces. In fact, last year's Liberal budget and this year's Liberal budget have zero for new child care spaces. Why?

[The Budget, April 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I represent a community that felt the double hit of the cancellation of the public transit tax rebate. On the marine side, ferry fares have gone through the roof in my province over the last 12 years of a user pay philosophy around public transit. Commuters were able to apply for a 15% tax rebate. Public transit commuters also use buses and so on. The working poor who rely on this transit rebate are very disappointed. It is all over social media how many people are disappointed about this.

I would like to hear more from the member, from her local government leadership experience, on her perspective on whether the transit tax program was sufficiently communicated and what the government might have chosen to do to increase ridership and increase take-up of this tax rebate.

[Finance, April 4th, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal budget removed an important transit rebate. In Nanaimo—Ladysmith, coastal ferry users were greatly aided by this tax credit. Given that the B.C. Liberals have hiked coastal ferry fares at over ten times the rate of inflation, the federal rebate cut the cost of daily ferry travel and helped make ends meet.

For a government that talks a lot about how it supports the middle class, this move does not make any sense. Will the Liberals reconsider and restore this important rebate?

[The Environment, April 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I was asking about a permanent ban, not a moratorium, so I would like to hear more from the member about that. There is an abundance of science and an abundance of community requests. This would be absolutely in keeping with the government's commitments.

I would also like to know this from the member. We agree on the broad intention, but I really need to know the specifics. When is the government going to move beyond words and into action on these other items, such as oil spill response time and legislation to solve the abandoned vessel problem? When will the commitments of the oceans protection plan be enacted in law?

[The Environment, April 3rd, 2017]

Madam Speaker, I have just pulled myself away from the Senate, a House which I do not usually get to be in. I heard Dr. Buffy Sainte-Marie talk about her vision for the country that we want together. She said, “We truly want to move our country forward.” It was a beautiful presentation and a great honour to be a member of Parliament and to hear words like those in these Houses.

I will pick up on some of the conversation we were having about four months ago about marine protection and how to move our country forward toward a sustainable way to protect our coastline and sensitive environments from oil spills, and a recent success story that I heard about in my own riding of Nanaimo—Ladysmith. It was a fantastic presentation by local innovators.

In south Nanaimo, Ace Innovation Solutions is designing oil spill response equipment that might address some of the immediate needs we have when a small or large spill happens. It has a barge. It has a large extractor that floats, a small extractor that can fit inside a bilge tank, a very common source of oil spills on our coast, and also a portable unit that has a three metre collapsible boom that can sit on a dock or on a boat and can pick up 500 litres of diesel per hour.

There was a very concerning spill that happened around one of the fish farms up in Echo Bay north of Vancouver Island. This was in the news about three weeks ago. The proponents of Ace Innovations said that their machine would have been able to act quickly and in a very responsive way without waiting for outside equipment if the fish farm had had this equipment on hand. Their machinery skims the surface of the ocean and picks up diesel, motor oil, gasoline, crude oil, and any other type of oil immediately.

It was very encouraging to see this small business finding innovative solutions. We very much hope that the federal government wants to partner with that business, work with it, and especially tighten the response times so that anybody spills oil is required to have the equipment available to take fast action.

It has been five months since the oceans protection plan was announced by the government. I wish there were more we could point to that would show that our country is truly, actively moving forward.

We do not yet have a legislated tanker ban on the north coast. That was one of the announcements. We do not yet have more certainty around bitumen response. This is a sticky oil. When it hits the water, the Minister of Transport said in January it is not known what it does. In fact, there have been a number of studies that have said it may well sink. However, the minister was willing to approve the Kinder Morgan pipeline and its associated bitumen oil tankers in the absence of his having confidence that there was a way to clean it up, which is extremely worrying. We have not seen anything on abandoned vessels in the budget.

I would like to know from the minister's representative, what good news do we have to celebrate regarding actual changes on the ground that will help coastal communities prevent an oil spill?

[Social Development, April 3rd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals continue to show just how out of touch they are with Canadian families. They say they are helping by making parental leave longer, but families will not receive any additional money, meaning that families with new babies would have to live on just one third of their normal income.

What is the government's defence on why it fails to help low-income families? It is that wealthy parents need more support. That is unacceptable.

When will the government finally deliver on real change for everyday people and not just those at the top?

[Status of Women, March 23rd, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, while the government's gender budget sounded good, the budget lacks real action for women: not a penny to legislate equal pay for work of equal value; not a cent for child care this year; zero new money for shelters for women fleeing violence; nothing to make birth control more affordable; and only a fraction of what is needed for a strategy to end violence against women. Once again, women are being asked to wait.

If gender equality really matters to the government, why were women shortchanged again?

[Adjournment Proceedings, March 21st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague's intervention. However, I did not hear anything about how to make women in this Parliament safe from sexual political harassment that will interfere with their jobs.

I also want to say as loudly as I can that although we are ringing the alarm on this kind of harassment, I am concerned that it will have a dampening effect on the enthusiasm of other women to volunteer for this work, to put themselves forward, young women in particular. At the United Nations, and on some of our Canadian panels, we heard ministers from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Alberta, and Ontario all describe very personal experiences of being harassed in the job because of their gender.

The government voted down my colleague's bill, the member Burnaby South, which would have created incentives to elect more women. It voted down proportional representation, which would elect more women. Therefore, I would like to know the measures—

[Adjournment Proceedings, March 21st, 2017]

Mr. Speaker, I had the great pleasure and honour of representing Canada at the United Nations last week for a full week. The convention carries on this week as well. Women from around the globe are part of the annual convention on the status of women. This is the 61st year of the UN Commission on the Status of Women to end discrimination against women.

I was very glad to be included in the Minister of Status of Women's delegation. We were able to absorb a lot of the teachings from around the world. We heard, more than anything, in every single session, which were all focused on women's economic justice, what we can do as leaders in our countries to remove barriers to women's economic success. Every time the solutions of pay equity and child care kept coming up as ways to alleviate economic and domestic pressures on women and allow them to participate more fully in the economy.

We heard a lot about the disproportionate load of unpaid care that women tend to take on in families, whether it is early on looking after infants, or looking after aging parents near their end of life or helping with palliative care, or the in-between domestic housework, although certainly in Canada men are really stepping up on that front. We heard again and again from other countries that a significant piece of the economic problem for women is having to take part-time work so they can accommodate the in-between work.

We heard about the impact of political gender-based violence against elected women. There were a number of sessions on this. It was raised in question period in 2016, on the occasion when Sandra Jansen, a member of the Alberta legislative assembly stood in that House and in a very powerful way described the misogyny and sexism that she has faced in her job and particularly online.

During the course of the convention last week, the Inter-Parliamentary Union tabled a report, a global look at the kind of sexual violence women parliamentarians around the world face in the course of their public service. It was extremely troubling. Of the women parliamentarians from 39 countries who were surveyed, 41.8% have received extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves through social media. Social media has become the primary place in which psychological violence is perpetrated against women parliamentarians.

The IPU also reported that 65% of women parliamentarians said that they had been subjected often to humiliating sexist remarks during their parliamentary term. This is a problem, of course, because we are trying to encourage more women to get into politics and government. Just two weeks ago, all the seats in the House, except for one, were filled by women who took the place of MPs. More women were in the House than had ever been in the entire history of Canada.

I would like to know from the government, following on our conversation from last year, what it is doing to protect women parliamentarians from this kind of political harassment that can affect their ability to serve the public.

[Operation UNIFIER, March 20th, 2017]

Mr. Chair, I would like to invite my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona to expand on some of his comments about the role of civil society.

In 2012, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress testified to the foreign affairs committee of this Parliament, saying:

Canada can help foster NGO sector development, especially groups working in the areas of human rights, education, and law reform, as a vibrant civil society is one of the best guarantors of Ukraine's long-term democratic evolution.

Could my colleague talk a little more about the role of civil society in supporting a strong democracy?