Thomas Mulcair

[The Environment, December 4th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP notes the change of direction by the government, which has done an about-face and given up its weak intensity targets. It was about time. Now that the government has listened to reason, it needs to move on to the next step. Canada must make a commitment to have fixed targets, with the same reference year as the rest of the world: 1990.

Is the government ready to show it is serious about fighting climate change? Will Canada support binding targets with 1990 as the reference year?

[Firearms Registry, December 4th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I will read an excerpt from a letter from 15 women's groups in Quebec to all parliamentarians. It is entitled, “20 years after the massacre at L'École Polytechnique, the gun registry is still necessary.”

The Firearms Act has significantly contributed to decreasing the number of armed assaults in a domestic violence context. The number of women shot with a gun has dropped by more than 50%, going from 85 in 1991 to 32 in 2004. The rate of murders committed with rifles or shotguns has dropped by 70%.

...

Putting an end to violence against women and preventing tragedies takes more than just wearing a white ribbon on December 6, every year. It requires concrete action. Voting against Bill C-391 will contribute to keeping women and children safe and preventing massacres like the one at Polytechnique from ever happening again.

[Quebec Bridge, December 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am in the habit of trying to begin my remarks in this House in French. However, I will be making many of my remarks in English this evening because I think this is an issue that deserves to be understood by all Canadians.

For anyone who has ever visited Quebec City, the bridge we are talking about is the very old cantilever bridge, the heavy steel structure that goes over the St. Lawrence. It is quite an interesting relic of a bygone era. It is the longest cantilever bridge in the world.

Coming across from the south shore into Quebec City, there is a very modern suspension bridge that bears the name of Pierre Laporte, who was a Quebec politician murdered in the early 1970s.

This is the older structure that is to the right heading into Quebec City. Anybody who has ever visited Quebec City has seen it. It was originally just a railway bridge for obvious reasons. It has accommodated carriage way and now has three lanes of road. Depending on rush hour traffic, it can be adapted for that.

It is also a very interesting example of engineering persistence. Anyone who takes the time to look up the history of the Quebec bridge will discover that it fell twice in the long period of its construction, but when they finally got it up, it has managed to stay there ever since.

That is what this is about tonight. We are discussing, as incredible as it might seem, what has to be done to properly maintain an essential piece of infrastructure, not only for the Quebec City area and for the province of Quebec but for all of Canada. The railway network that we built over the past century and a half is still something that is very important for us economically and it ties us together.

I listened intently when the representative from the Conservative government went through the history of it. Almost all the facts he gave are right, but what he has failed to mention, and anyone who has ever lived in Quebec City as I did for many years can tell us, is this subject has been in the news almost constantly for 30 years. It would have been interesting to be able to hear the observations of the member for Portneuf who has had a lot to say about this, going back decades.

Right now, we are discussing a Bloc Québécois motion to essentially take back ownership of the bridge from CN and to ensure that CN properly pays for what it has not done. Do not forget this. The government just explained that there was a court case going on. The words chosen were “judicial proceeding is well underway”. As an attorney what that means is the only people who will be happy with this file are the lawyers. Something like this will go on for decades, again. In the meantime, the bridge is going to continue to rot.

CN had a firm undertaking to spend $60 million and to complete the work on the bridge. It did not respect that undertaking. That land, those infrastructures, those works and things were given over to CN, and it had obligations that it has not met.

The House has powers, and this motion is about this: that the House of Commons, for and on behalf of all Canadians, assume its responsibilities with regard to this essential piece of Canadian infrastructure. The Bloc is to be congratulated for getting it to the floor of the House, because it is an absolute national scandal. I do not think enough people outside of the Quebec City area are aware of this.

I also listened to the Conservative representative give an assurance. It was categorical that the bridge was safe. I invite him to come and see it with me any time he would like. Let him come and see that the bridge is falling apart because it has been neglected for decades. That is on the public record.

I sincerely hope we proceed with the work that has to be done to secure the bridge, to provide the repairs and the maintenance that has to be done. He is never proven wrong as I think he would be if we do not proceed to that maintenance work.

We do not have a culture in our country of maintaining infrastructure. Indeed, we have always had a tendency to try to build the next thing we can cut a ribbon for rather than maintain, on a rationale schedule, what was already there. In Europe infrastructure lasts a lot longer, but the maintenance costs and the consistent maintenance is a way of life. That is sustainability and it is built in.

In his speech, the Conservative member managed to mention that Laval University had received money for its football stadium to hold the Vanier Cup, as if to say that the government gave it something. It is a total non sequitur. One has literally nothing to do with the other.

To drive home his point, he talked about money for a library at Laval University. What does that have to do with maintaining the Quebec bridge? To ask the question is to answer it. It has nothing to do with maintaining the Quebec bridge.

This infrastructure has been suffering from poor maintenance for decades. The Quebec bridge represents a real danger to the public and to navigation in the St. Lawrence River if it is not properly repaired and maintained. CN had a firm undertaking and it did not respect that undertaking.

We are speaking with one voice now. I listened to the Liberals, who usually leave room for manoeuvring. Their speeches were very short and, if I understood correctly, like the NDP, they are voting in favour of the Bloc motion because it is a good initiative. That is the right thing to do. It is in the interest of the nation to take back ownership of this bridge and make the necessary repairs to it, even if we have to decide through legislation how much money CN has to pay Canadians in compensation.

It is unbelievable. CN got infrastructure and projects worth billions of dollars in exchange for one dollar and it had a few undertakings, including maintaining and repairing the Quebec bridge, which it did not do. It now has the nerve to drag this matter through the courts. We will resolve this very quickly. We cannot put the lives of people and the prosperity of Quebec City in danger because CN is dragging its feet. It is not right.

Thus, this proposal aims to overcome this deficiency and ensure that the work is done properly. The bridge does not need to be completely re-engineered. We are talking about repairing it and reinforcing its steel components in order to make it safe. There are ways to do this. One only need visit the Eiffel Tower, which was built in about the same era of industrialization, to see that structures like these can be preserved. Something could have been done a long time ago. Rust began appearing decades ago and has been eating away at this structure, which would cost billions of dollars to replace.

It is absolutely inconceivable that successive governments have been so negligent. However, just because the Liberals, who signed the agreement with CN, were negligent, it does not give the Conservatives an excuse to continue doing nothing. I listened carefully to what the Conservatives said earlier. They are dragging this before the courts. This whole mess is going to go on for at least another decade if it stays in court. In the meantime, the structure in question, despite its importance to transportation in Canada, will continue to suffer from rust, decay and deterioration.

It is appalling and unacceptable that the Quebec bridge has fallen into its current state of disrepair. Anyone who lives in the Quebec City area is fully aware of the problem and has heard the public debates on it, which have been going on for years. People just keep passing the buck. Yet this issue was supposed to be resolved with the sale to CN.

Everyone gathered here in the House of Commons can say that we tried. That is the problem with this kind of privatization. We in the NDP have always warned that we cannot trust private enterprise and give it control over assets that once belonged to the Crown, because it will not do the work needed. What happened? We were wrong to trust private enterprise and this should never have been privatized. This another perfect example of how privatization runs counter to the public interest.

I commend this Bloc Québécois initiative. The NDP will support the motion, because it is what is best for the public interest and public safety, and for the economy of the Quebec City region.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, it is simply because they have a guilty conscience. They have something to hide.

The successive contradictory versions from the weakling Minister of National Defence cannot all be true. He contradicts himself from one day to the next. We could conclude that he misled the House with one version or another. While we are at it, if the government is above reproach and have nothing to hide, let us have a commission of inquiry on what really happened and let the public decide.

Do you know what? That is what they are afraid of; being judged by the public. That is why they have the nerve to use our armed forces as a moral guarantor. How scandalous. How shameful. How sad.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, as far as we are concerned, the only way to see clear in this file is to conduct a full commission of inquiry precisely because of the fact that there are interests on that side of the House who are trying to hide what has happened for the past four years.

And of course, with regard to the Liberals, their lack of a moral compass is something that will come back to haunt them. Their current leader, it should be borne in mind, not only used his important and august function at Harvard University to say that Canada was a weakling for not getting involved in the war in Iraq, and we all know how well that turned out, but he also went after Canada for not understanding that basically, as long as we do not call torture torture, we can torture.

He used his position at Harvard to write learned papers to provide Dick Cheney and George W. Bush with the terminology, the Orwellesque terminology for torture. It was going to be enhanced interrogation techniques.

That is exactly what the Geneva accord provides, that we are not allowed to torture, but we are also not allowed to transfer to somebody else who is going to torture. If we are not allowed to torture directly, we certainly cannot do it indirectly. We are not allowed to subcontract the torture.

That is what the allegations are from very credible people, people who are so credible that the Conservatives named them to the highest position of intelligence gathering in the United States of America at our embassy. That is why they have something to hide. They do not want those emails to be made public. They do not want the Canadian public to know.

However, contrary to the Liberal leader and contrary to the Conservatives, the Canadian public has a strong moral compass. Canadians will continue to demand that this House do the right thing and force the holding of a commission of inquiry, so that they will know what actually happened.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, just so that no one thinks for one second that any one on this side said any of that, I intend to make that point perfectly clear from the outset.

With regard to the varying versions, I will stick with Mr. Colvin. He is one of the most important members of our foreign service who is so credible and respected that the Conservatives promoted him to the top job in Washington, and then the weakling Minister of National Defence attacked him unjustifiably and unacceptably because he dared tell the truth and tell the Conservatives something they did not want to hear.

If they have nothing to hide, let them call a commission of inquiry.

[Business of Supply, December 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, today we are debating a motion introduced by our party, the New Democratic Party, to establish a commission of inquiry, pursuant to the Inquiries Act, into the transfer of detainees in Canadian custody during the current conflict in Afghanistan.

We are focusing on the period between 2001 and 2009. In that period, two governments were in power. It covers a number of years, primarily when the Liberals formed the government and also when the Conservatives governed with a minority in this House.

First it is important to create the proper context for a debate on torture and examine why it is so important to determine whether our armed forces were involved in the transfer of detainees to an authority, the Afghan government, which may have abused or tortured them. We know that international agreements, primarily the Geneva conventions, prohibit the transfer of a detainee in times of war if there is a risk of torture.

First, there is simply the human side of this. Torture is unacceptable. Second, it is a problem, because even if we do not think about other people, we must at least think of ourselves. Our own soldiers and members of our armed forces could end up in the same position one day. It would be very hard for us to invoke the Geneva convention if we have a very bad record when it comes to the treatment of prisoners.

As for the first part, the moral aspect, it is important to put the writings of the current Liberal leader into perspective. When he was in the United States, he had no problem writing a number of justifications for abuse and mistreatment. I would even say that the current Liberal leader, from his exalted position as a professor at Harvard University, became an accomplice to the American government of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, by giving them the terminology they used to justify torture.

The Liberal leader took a page from the book of George Orwell, whose Newspeak is all about changing the terminology, when he said that we should no longer talk about “torture”; we should say “enhanced interrogation techniques”. What happened next? We saw the American president, Vice-President Cheney and other government officials say that water boarding could be acceptable. The former Liberal leader established some criteria. There should not be permanent damage, harm to physical health, and so on.

When someone does not have a moral GPS, they write things like that, and that is unfortunately the case with the Liberal leader.

Torture is torture, period. But it had become a sort of touchstone. Were we tough enough to live in a world where we knew that there was a vast terrorist plot to destabilize our governments? I would venture to say that the thing that has most destabilized our governments is the loss of our moral authority in the world, because our governments, our democracies, are based on values, and one of our values is that we do not tolerate torture and we cannot outsource torture. We cannot leave it to someone else to have it done.

In this case, there are several different versions and sometimes different versions from the same person. The current Minister of National Defence has contradicted himself so much in recent weeks that a commission of inquiry is needed to shed light on this issue.

At one point, the Minister of National Defence said one thing in this House and, later the same day, stood in the corridor behind us and said the opposite for the television news. The public has the right to know two things. First, are torture and the transfer of detainees to people who might torture them still prohibited under Canadian law? Second, will the government comply with international law, specifically the Geneva convention? If so, then we have the right to know what happened in Afghanistan.

Instead of coming clean and admitting that, given the contradictory versions, the best thing to do was to shed some light on this disturbing matter, we heard personal attacks levelled against very credible people of the highest calibre. We were very surprised to hear the government attacking Mr. Colvin. We will have the opportunity to see what the Conservatives do with people who say the opposite of what they want to hear. Putting his own career on the line, of course, he had the courage to write down repeatedly that he was very worried because, according to all available information, it appeared that people were being tortured in Afghan prisons.

No, he was not present during any torture sessions, otherwise, things would be altogether different. The Conservatives keep saying that he did not witness any torture himself. Of course he did not see any, as if a Canadian official would stay and watch. However, according to all the available information, he knew torture was taking place. He therefore wrote about it and appeared here.

He is being mercilessly attacked by the Minister of National Defence. What a shame. The Conservatives had just appointed the same Mr. Colvin to a very important strategic intelligence position in the United States. And now they are telling us that he has no credibility and we should not believe a word he says. No problem. They simply found another senior Canadian diplomat and dragged him by the scruff of the neck before the parliamentary committee. It was something to see. That other diplomat knew what the government expected of him, but he nevertheless managed to say that Mr. Colvin's concerns were valid and well founded.

An authority was set up to deal with such matters. That authority within the Canadian armed forces is the Military Police Complaints Commission. In accordance with an act of Parliament, it has a very serious responsibility to keep a critical eye on what our soldiers are doing and to make sure that their actions obey the rules governing ethical conduct in time of war. So what happened? The government engaged in systematic obstruction to the point that the chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, which examines the actions of our armed forces, has been forced to suspend the commission's work. But are they ashamed of that? Not at all. What are they doing now? They are saying that he was the one who decided to suspend the hearings. He explained that he could no longer hold hearings because he was being blocked at every turn.

What happened to the noted scientist responsible for nuclear safety who sounded the alarm by saying that there was going to be a shortage of isotopes? They fired her. What happened to the person in charge of investigations at the Competition Bureau who revealed what was going on in the oil industry? They fired her. Last week, the person responsible for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's ethics review dared to say things that the government did not want to hear. They fired him. That is how the Conservatives have operated time after time. Anytime upright people dare to say what the Conservatives do not want to hear, they try to fire them. They did the same thing with Mr. Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who dared to tell the truth and who was always right.

In closing, for all of these reasons, the only way to be sure of anything is to hold a proper public inquiry. That is how we will find out who is telling the truth—the Minister of National Defence or other very credible individuals. I am eager to find out.

[Criminal Code, November 23rd, 2009]

Madam Speaker, the question was addressed to someone else, who has not made her speech yet. My colleague will be more than able to answer it because she was right in what she said.

Speaking of my colleague from Edmonton—Strathcona, having witnessed the sexist remarks by the Minister of the Environment today, I can only say that if these big, strong defenders of rights were only interested in defending charter rights, including the equality of men and women, perhaps we would hear less sexist remarks like the one—

[Criminal Code, November 23rd, 2009]

Madam Speaker, my colleague is quite right and it makes a lot of sense.

We can understand that if people have been incarcerated for, let us say, a 25 year term, behaving properly and not behaving violently becomes one of the things that can give them, and this is the reason why it is called the faint hope clause, a faint hope that perhaps by making life easier on people around them, by making the carceral milieu one that would be safer, they have the possibility not to drag the victims back before the courts as they would suggest on the other side, but to go before a judge, to go before a jury of 12 people. They have to be unanimous that he or she can even make the application.

The fact is, contrary to what the Conservatives would have it be, this is about providing a way to have an influence on people's behaviour once they are in prison. There are very few cases where this has been applied successfully. They are extremely rare, but at the very least, we should listen to the men and women who work in the penitentiaries and do everything we can to make their lives safer. Removing the faint hope clause makes their lives more dangerous.

A lot of this is based on misinformation. It is not just us who are saying it. It is also the Canadian Bar Association.

[Criminal Code, November 23rd, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I would prefer to stay within the subject matter before us today, although the subject of fetal alcohol syndrome is such an important one. I sincerely hope that the work being done, for example by people such as Brian McInnis in Toronto, to ensure that alcohol bottles contain proper warnings with regard to the possible effects of alcohol continues. However, it is another debate for another time with regard to what we are doing today.

Today we are dealing with something called the faint hope clause, where the Conservatives purport to be changing the bill to provide tougher sentences for the worst crimes. The people who have taken the trouble to look at the bill have concluded that it does nothing with regard to what it purports to do. That is why the Canadian Bar Association has told the government that what it is doing is based on misinformation. Those are tough words coming from the Canadian Bar Association and the government should listen to it, but of course it will not. This has everything to do with playing to its Reform Party base and nothing to do with public protection.

With regard to the long gun registry, it is the same thing. Police across Canada have been saying, “Please maintain the registry”. The very people who are in charge of law and order are asking the government to keep the registry. The government that claims to be in favour of law and order wants to scrap it, saying it costs too much. That is a ridiculous argument. Now that it has cost probably far too much, because of the incompetent Liberals who put it in place, the last thing we should do is scrap it because that is adding insult to injury to the taxpayers who paid for it in the first place and to the police who are using it every day.