Mike Sullivan

[Canada Post, October 21st, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, residents in my riding of York South—Weston and across Canada continue to express their opposition to the government's ill-thought-out plan to end Canada Post's home mail delivery.

Yesterday, 11 communities across Canada from Fort McMurray to Calgary, to Winnipeg, to here in Ottawa, lost their home mail delivery. Other communities are to follow in the months ahead.

For a person with MS, like my brother Chris who lives in nearby Kanata, our winter means that from November to April, he will not be able to access his mail. He will become more dependent on others. Canada Post says that for those who can prove their disability and show that they have no one else to rely on, it may deliver their mail once a week.

This loss of mail service further isolates and discriminates against the disabled. Every day, my office receives letters, cards and petitions opposing the government's plan, as do other MPs. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have expressed their wish to keep door-to-door mail delivery.

Why will the government not listen to what Canadians are saying, and provide the service they are asking for?

[Petitions, October 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, residents in my riding are continuing to sign petitions protesting the loss of home mail delivery by Canada Post.

The petitioners call upon the Government of Canada to reject the plan of Canada Post to reduce services and to explore other options to update Canada Post's business plan.

[Housing, October 10th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the minister tried to brag about investments in housing. The trouble is only a fraction of the money is federal for Ontario, it is over five years, and the Toronto Community Housing Corporation is specifically excluded.

This week's Vital Signs report found that 90% of residents in Toronto's apartment blocks are inadequately housed. The waiting list for assisted housing has climbed to 77,000 families. Toronto Community Housing has specifically asked the feds for help.

Why is the government refusing to address the housing crisis in Toronto?

[Social Development, October 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I heard the words “convenient for all parties”. I had to wonder what that really means.

It is faster and more expeditious. That is clearly not the case. We are now talking about legacy cases that existed prior to this new tribunal taking place. There are still 6,000 of them, and at the rate this tribunal is dealing with them, they will never be finished dealing with the legacy cases.

To suggest that one could take 1,000 umpires, referees, and others and drill it down to 70 people and that those 70 people would be able to work just as fast or conveniently or expeditiously as in the previous system is just absolute—well, I cannot use the word, because it is unparliamentary.

The parliament secretary has not answered the basic question, which is this: What are these individuals supposed to do for the period of time they are now forced to wait in order to live, survive, put a roof over their heads, and eat?

[Social Development, October 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, back in June, I asked the minister a question concerning the Social Security Tribunal backlog, where it was discovered that some 10,000 cases of Social Security Tribunal work had been piling up, that the government had not yet filled all the positions at the tribunal, and that the backlog did not seem to be going anywhere. In fact, in the first year of operation, with a 10,000-case backlog, only 450 cases had been heard by the tribunal. At that rate, the backlog will never end. That is what I wish to raise again tonight with the minister.

What we have heard since June, when this was raised with the minister, is that the backlog is not getting any better and, in fact, some of the Social Security Tribunal members have quit, apparently because the government has refused to give them benefits, which is strange, given that is what the tribunal is looking after.

This 70-member tribunal replaced the 1,000 persons who were looking after these cases in the past. All of this was done purportedly to save taxpayers $25 million. Maybe it saved taxpayers $25 million, but what it has done to the persons with disabilities who are looking for answers to their cases is a disgrace.

We have signed the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and that convention says in part that we should do no harm, that we should make the lives of persons with disabilities better at each step of their progress through society. In this case, we have made that much worse.

In one case, an individual, just this past month, finally heard that an appeal would be heard by the tribunal. The application for the appeal was made in January of 2012. That is now two and a half years since the application was made. The individual is now dealing with a delay of two and a half years, plus the amount of time it will take to actually schedule it, plus the time it takes to get a decision. It may be four years before that person hears. What is that person supposed to do in the meantime?

This is money that belongs to the individuals; it is not money that belongs to the government. Canada pension belongs to the people who have paid into it, and the people who have paid into it deserve a way of getting that money out quicker.

Imagine if someone had a car accident and the car insurance company said there were not enough adjusters to handle the person's claim, so the individual should call back in four years, at which time it would see if it had enough adjusters to deal with the claim. People would not wait for four years to get their claims done. They would change insurers, number one, but number two, they would get the work done and then sue the insurer.

That is not an option that is available to these individuals, who are among the poorest in the country. These are people who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves to be disabled and have fallen through a crack in the system, and that crack appears to be getting wider with every passing day.

I would therefore ask the minister what these people should do, given this delay. These are not people with huge portfolios of money that they can survive on for four and five years. These are people, generally, who are living paycheque to paycheque and are now unable to survive. Does the government think they should now beg on street corners? Should they stand outside the minister's office and ask for handouts while they wait for this tribunal to actually get around to their cases?

This is a disgrace and it needs to be fixed. We should not have taken a system that was slow but not broken, and then broken it. I would ask the minister to respond as to what the government intends to do for the thousands of individuals who are waiting for way too long.

[Rolling Rampage, October 9th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, in Canada today there are over two million people living with physical disabilities. Many of them have specialized needs for housing, education and treatment. They require assistance for retraining, employment and recreation. The need is great, but public awareness is low.

Today on the Hill we caught a glimpse of the wealth of talent and ability in Canada's disability community through the Rolling Rampage event held here this morning. The 10 kilometre race featured top wheelchair athletes from around the world, and there was a 1 kilometre race involving parliamentarians. It is an effort by the Canadian Foundation for Physically Disabled Persons and its partners to show to the world that people with disabilities are every bit as gifted and accomplished as their able-bodied peers if given a chance. These athletes are inspiring examples of determination and strength.

While many of us enjoyed this event today, let us not lose sight of what these athletes are trying to show us: that we should not take disability for granted and that there is potential for achievement here, even world-class achievement, if we were to provide a helping hand.

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I am not confident that the current wording of the bill would provide the protections necessary so that this park could achieve its fullest potential. Although we are agreeing to support the bill at second reading, that is one of the reasons we will be presenting significant amendments to the bill, in order to reinforce the notion that the ecological integrity of the park is something that requires protection, not merely consideration.

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will not get into specifics about the actual width of any particular corridor.

My comments were that if the park can be expanded to include lands to the north that connect the park to the moraine, which is the source of the water that flows down the Rouge River, then it would provide us with a better opportunity to protect what eventually flows down into the park. It would provide us with a better opportunity to study, to enhance and to hopefully preserve what is a wonderful ecological piece of the city of Toronto that requires a protection that is currently not provided.

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I do not disagree with the member opposite that this is a different kind of park, but I do disagree that we cannot strive to do more than just consider the ecological integrity of the park. I believe that we need to preserve the ecological integrity of the park, and that ecological integrity includes a lot of human activity.

I am concerned that human activity could increase exponentially to the detriment of the park and the legislation could not stop it.

[Rouge National Urban Park Act, October 8th, 2014]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Davenport.

The notion of ecological integrity is one that may be foreign to some of the members opposite. Certainly it is foreign to the way the government has approached many of the issues that have arisen over the course of its term in office in terms of protecting and enhancing the environment.

The member for Thornhill, who most recently asked a question, was at one point the minister of the environment when one of the worst pieces of legislation, as far as the environment is concerned, was introduced. That was the budget implementation bill of 2012, which in fact eliminated environmental protection through the environmental assessment act and replaced it with an act that basically does very little to protect the environment.

This same government then, in another budget implementation bill, removed the protection for Canada's water systems, the watercourses, for the rivers, the lakes, the streams that run all over our country. Some 250,000 of them used to be protected and now we are down to something like less than a hundred. Therefore, ecological integrity is not top of mind for the members opposite.

That said, we support and we will fight for the notion of creating an ecological preserve in the heart of an urban area, in particular in Toronto, where I live. It will hopefully set a precedent for the creation of other urban area ecological integrity preserves in many urban areas in Canada. As the member for Beaches—East York said, all of the population growth is going to happen in the cities in the next 40 years.

We need to get it right. We need to design our park systems to protect the integrity of the ecology. We need to design them to provide access to the burgeoning populations of these great metropolises, while not allowing that access to degrade the park. We need to be able to use these systems for the creation of parks to provide us with the necessary climate change adaptation that we are now going to be facing.

There are members opposite who used to talk about climate change adaptation. In fact, it was the member for Thornhill's favourite words over the course of his term in office. He said we were not going to protect against climate change; we were going to adapt to it. That seems to have fallen off because someone discovered it costs money to protect us against climate change, but we still need to do it.

One of the ways to do it is to design and protect the integrity of watercourses that flow through our urban areas. One of these watercourses is the Rouge River. The Rouge River gets its start in the headlands north of Toronto in the Oak Ridges Moraine and carries fresh water from a huge area of drainage to Lake Ontario, thus protecting that watercourse.

Protecting what flows into that water and protecting the lands around that water will also protect the integrity of Lake Ontario. Lake Ontario is the drinking water source for several million Canadians. Ultimately it flows down the St. Lawrence toward Montreal and becomes the drinking water source for many more Canadians. Therefore, protecting the integrity of that water system is something that we should be paying careful and close attention to. We cannot do it by removing protections, which is what the government has done in the past.

The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act now basically does not protect the environment at all. That was back in 2012, more than two years ago. Schedule 2 has yet to be published. We still do not know what an environmental assessment will do in terms of human health. A number of pieces of what is to be protected by the environmental assessment is still not defined because the government has still not published the regulations.

It is that kind of laissez-faire attitude that we on this side of the House wish to correct. One of the things we hope to do by giving Bill C-40 support is to bring these flaws to the attention of its drafters in the environmental committee over the course of the next few weeks and months, so that we can make the corrections that are necessary to make the bill much more robust and a better example of a precedent for other cities in the country.

With this bill we need to provide for a way to adopt the long-standing vision that has been around for many years for the Rouge Park. We need to strengthen and implement the existing environmental protection policy framework and that includes protecting the watercourse. The removal of the watercourse from the Navigable Waters Protection Act, some may wonder what difference that really makes in this day and age. Surprisingly, a meeting between the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and Enbridge about Line 9, which flows across this park and across the Rouge River, advised the conservation authority that the removal of the watercourse from the Navigable Waters Protection Act meant that they no longer had to put shut-offs on an oil pipeline as it crossed the river. This is one of the consequences of removing the protection.

Was that a deliberate act on the part of the government? I hope not, but it is a consequence of that act and it is a consequence that we cannot sit idly by and let go on. Imagine if we create this wonderful park and Line 9 bursts over the river? What utter degradation. What utter devastation to the Rouge River would happen then.

In addition, the whole notion of will give consideration, which is part of what the bill is about, is one of the things that we have serious reservations about and the Province of Ontario has serious reservations about. That phrasing is in keeping with the government's general approach to the environment, which is “we will give it some thought but we are not going to be held to anything, we are not going to actually guarantee that we are going to do anything”. That is one of the reasons the Province of Ontario has withdrawn its support at the moment for transferring its lands into this set of lands. It is afraid that the word “consideration” will mean that the park's ecology can be degraded in a manner that it would not have allowed.

I believe that the Province of Ontario may have it right. We do not always agree with the way the Province of Ontario behaves, but in this case it may have it right. We need to correct the bill in order to make sure that the integrity of the park and the integrity of the entire system is protected and maintained.

In addition, there is an opportunity with something called Pickering lands, which are lands that are north of this park, that presents itself to the drafters of the bill and to the government to include a much bigger area in the protections that this park legislation is meant to provide. We should not bypass that opportunity to try to find a way to protect more of the Oak Ridges Moraine, to connect this park to the Oak Ridges Moraine, because right now the town of Stouffville has way too much development in it to connect it otherwise. Therefore, connecting it through the Pickering lands would be a good additional step.

Finally, I want to say something about what was referred to in part by the member for Beaches—East York and that is the notion of the potential for flooding, the potential for climate-change-wrought, weather-related devastation to parts of the city of Toronto. One of the things we discovered in my riding is that despite the actions of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, some devastating flooding took place in the July 8 storm in which more water fell than in Hurricane Hazel and it fell in shorter time. That flooding is a direct result of the massive changes to the weather systems that we are seeing and we are not prepared for it. The cities are not prepared for it.

The creation of this park could give the federal government, the provincial government and the city of Toronto the opportunity to study ways to prevent the kind of disaster that happened on July 8, 2013, and to find ways to make sure that water flow is managed in such a way that it does not affect human habitation around it. The alternative is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in redirecting water through giant sewers and creating a whole new set of infrastructure that the city cannot afford to do. It would be turning to the federal government to afford to do that and the federal government has already said there are limits in how far it can go.

In closing, we do appreciate the effects of the bill, but we wish to see it go to committee so that it can be seriously amended in such a way as to give the land the protection it deserves.