Marguerite Lewis was a woman who lived to help others, a woman of principle, determination, heart and compassion, a loyal friend and a stalwart Liberal proud of her Acadian roots.

The headline in Cités Nouvelles described her as an iron lady. It is true because she held to her convictions and because she worked tirelessly for the good of others, particularly for seniors who cannot always afford the quality of life they deserve.

Marguerite was a tireless advocate for seniors, including the veterans at her local legion. She founded Aid for Seniors, a program that connects young helpers to seniors in need, and she organized annual lunches where golden agers could come together for a meal and companionship.

For her community action, Marguerite was rightly honoured with the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award and the Lions Club Award for Outstanding Community Service.

We offer our deepest condolences to her daughter Diane and husband Ted, granddaughters Caroline and Robin, brother Réné and sisters Eliza and Léa.

The first fact is that, while there are alternatives to oil, there are as yet no reasonable alternatives to water. The second fact is that Canada holds 20% of the world’s freshwater. The United States has one-tenth of Canada’s water but nine times our population.

At a conference in Peterborough not long ago, Robert Kennedy Jr. said, in reference to the United States:

We are in the midst of a water crisis that has no end in sight, and the place people are looking to solve it is Canada.

If you talk to the engineers and the planning and policy makers in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Phoenix and Las Vegas…they’ll say, “Well we don’t have to worry about this because we’ll just get the water from Canada”.

The second quote is from Citi Bank chief economist, Willem Buiter, who declared in July 2001 his belief that the water market would become larger than the oil market in this century. He said:

I expect to see in the near future a massive expansion of investment in the water sector, including the production of fresh, clean water from other sources (desalination, purification), storage, shipping and transportation of water. I expect to see pipeline networks that will exceed the capacity of those for oil and gas today.

Water is not oil. It is a unique natural resource because of its life-sustaining qualities for humans, the environment and the economy. Water drives our economy, whether it be agriculture or the modern products of the computer age. Water is in high demand to allow those industries to grow and prosper.

I think a little history is in order to give a little more context to my bill.

The first proposals for exporting Canada’s freshwater date back to the 1950s and 1960s. These involved the grandiose schemes for redirecting the natural flow of some of Canada’s rivers toward the United States and other parts of Canada. In fact, in 1951, the U.S. bureau of reclamation undertook an extensive study called, “United Western Investigation”. The goal was to expand irrigation through the diversion of North American rivers.

In 1959, the GRAND Canal project proposed to build a dyke across James Bay to separate it from Hudson Bay, turning the resulting reservoir into a freshwater lake whose water would then be pumped southward into the Great Lakes and parts of the United States and Canada.

In 1964, the North American Water and Power Alliance project proposed damming the major rivers of Alaska and British Columbia to divert water into the Rocky Mountain Trench to create a 500 mile freshwater lake running the length of British Columbia.

In the 1990s, a series of more modest water export proposals made surprising and significant headway in three provinces, namely, British Columbia, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, before being halted by governments responding to negative public reaction.

Despite the reversals of earlier attempts to sell Canada’s water abroad, and in the face of public opinion that today still solidly opposes bulk water exports, calls to export Canada’s freshwater have not subsided, surprisingly. Rather, they may be said to have increased, at times backed by studies by respected think tanks, I would add mostly conservative think tanks, that often combine the language of the human right to water as a means of adding moral impetus and justification to the traditional economic reasons for favouring bulk water exports.

I will give an example. In 2008 the Montreal Economic Institute published a report called “Freshwater exports for the development of Quebec’s blue gold”. The report claimed:

Fresh water is a product whose relative economic value has risen substantially and will keep rising in the coming years. It has become a growing source of wealth and an increasingly worthwhile investment opportunity.

In June 2010 the Fraser Institute released a report entitled “Making Waves: Examining the Case for Sustainable Water Exports from Canada”. The report concluded that the myriad of federal and provincial statutes and regulations effectively banning water exports should be eliminated.

That is obviously the tenor of some of the reports that have come out of conservative think tanks in the last few years. We see a trend. We have the grandiose schemes of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these are not particularly practical because of the cost and the damage to the environment. Then we see, in the second stage, in the 1990s, more modest projects involving tanker ships, projects that actually gained the support of three provincial governments. Then following prohibitions on water exports in the provinces, we still see think tanks proposing the idea and backing up their proposals with economic analysis.

In order to fully explore this issue, we have to refer to the North American Free Trade Agreement. It, of course, changed the trading environment in North America and raised questions about whether water would some day be traded within that common market. In order to fully grasp the implications of NAFTA for Canada’s ability to control its fresh water, it is necessary to focus on three principles that are in the agreement: the principle of national treatment, the principle of investor rights, and the principle of proportionality. These principles govern and constrain the actions of signatory countries to the agreement.

National treatment could mean, depending on interpretation, that the consumers of one country must have access to the same goods or products as consumers in the other country. In other words, one country may not ban the export to the other country of goods or products already being traded within its domestic market.

The notion of investor rights means that a country cannot directly expropriate the interests of a foreign investor or take actions such as regulations that effectively diminish the earnings from and, hence, the value of an investment, actions that would be considered tantamount to expropriation.

Let us take the example of a hypothetical foreign corporation with a permit to ship water within Canada. If this were to occur, it could argue that a prohibition on shipping water to the United States devalues its investment. Afterward, an arbitration tribunal might agree and invoke the rights of U.S. consumers of water, for example, American farmers and consumers of farm products, to benefit from Canada’s water in the same way as Canadian farmers and consumers of agricultural products do.

I would like to digress before explaining the meaning of the principle of proportionality by mentioning that the federal Conservative government made a very unwise decision recently in regard to a case brought to a NAFTA tribunal by AbitibiBowater, which is a Canadian firm incorporated in Delaware with sizeable U.S. assets.

The firm closed its pulp and paper mills in Grand Falls, Windsor, Newfoundland and Labrador, and then wanted to sell its assets, including certain timber harvesting licences and water use permits. As the House will recall, the Newfoundland government moved to re-appropriate these rights as they were originally contingent on production. AbitibiBowater sidestepped the Canadian courts and challenged the Newfoundland government under NAFTA’s investor protection provisions.

In this particular instance, a foreign company asserted its right to Canada’s water and the matter was headed toward deliberations in a NAFTA tribunal. The Conservative government settled out of court and gave the company $130 million and essentially created a private right of a foreign corporation to Canada’s water.

Now, there are already foreign claims on water. That makes it more likely that a corporation could argue that its investor rights are being infringed upon if that corporation is not allowed to do what it wishes with the water for which it has a permit.

Finally, I wish to speak about the principle of proportionality. If we were ever to export our water in bulk, it would be difficult to prohibit those exports once they had begun. Proportional sharing means that if we were to apply an export tax or levy, for example, on a product that is sold outside Canada, thereby reducing the amount of exports of that product, we would have to take similar action in Canada to proportionately reduce the domestic consumption of that product or natural resource.

It is interesting to note that two types of natural resources were exempted under NAFTA by the previous Mulroney Conservative government. One of them unfortunately is not water. The Mulroney government did not have the foresight to exempt water from the proportional sharing clause in NAFTA. Timber and unprocessed fish were exempted. Proportional sharing does not apply to those two natural resources, but unfortunately it applies to water.

We have a problem. There is a great deal of uncertainty about what NAFTA means with respect to Canada’s right to control its water sovereignty. Nine of our ten provinces have laws for the time being that prohibit the export of water from their jurisdictions. New Brunswick does not have a law but does have a policy against bulk water exports from its jurisdiction.

If NAFTA were to be superimposed on the complexities of the Canadian federal system, that uncertainty would continue because any one of those provinces could lift their ban on bulk water exports at any time. If more pressure builds from think tanks and interest groups or entrepreneurs in different provinces, one could see a day come when there would be pressure to lift those bans.

We need what is called federal backstop legislation and that is what my bill is. It is called the Canadian water preservation act. Its primary goal is to prohibit the removal of fresh water in bulk from what one aquatic basin in Canada to another, and I define bulk as over 50,000 litres per day. The interbasin transfer of water by any means would be prohibited, including but not limited to, pipeline, tunnel, canal, aqueduct or water bag. The basic contours of the basins would be negotiated with the provinces and would be the object of regulations.

What I am saying is that if we cannot take water from one basin and bring it to another and another, and so on until it crosses the American border, then we cannot export Canada’s water and we are protecting the environment at the same time.

The bill would not apply to boundary waters because the Chrétien government had the foresight and the wisdom to protect boundary waters such as the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River and Lake of the Woods from bulk water removal and bulk water exports, in 2001 when it amended the International Boundary Waters Treaty Act.

“Canadians are resolutely against the idea of exporting our water, whether through diversions of waterways, pipeline, tanker ship, water bag, or using any other bulk transfer method,” said the Lac-Saint-Louis M.P. Scarpaleggia added that “the nature and complexities of the Canadian federal system combined with the rules of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have created uncertainty around Canada’s ability to safeguard its freshwater sovereignty.”

The bill, based on the work of some of Canada’s foremost water policy experts at the Program on Water Issues at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, would ban bulk removals (defined as more than 50,000 litres per day) of water from one aquatic basin in Canada to another, thereby protecting the environment from the effects of large-scale water transfers, including from the threat of the spread of invasive species that could accompany such transfers.

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For more information, please contact Laura Gareau, Special Assistant to Francis Scarpaleggia, at 613-995-8281 or francis.scarpaleggia.a3@parl.gc.ca.

“The committee is a great example of what parliamentarians from all parties working together can accomplish in terms of calling attention to issues that are vitally important to Canadian families but that do not always attract the attention of the daily headlines,” said Scarpaleggia.

The report, entitled “Not to be Forgotten,” is the product of a series of consultations, discussions and extensive research with stakeholders across the country. One such consultation was hosted by Scarpaleggia in Dorval on December 17, 2010, and brought together local experts from the fields of palliative care, pain management, seniors housing and many others during three informative sessions.

“It was clear from witness testimony, including at our excellent hearings in the West Island last December, that people are deeply concerned with end-of-life care, mental health issues including among our youth, and the rights of seniors and people living with disabilities,” added the West Island M.P.

According Scarpaleggia, “We are extremely fortunate, here on the West Island, to be able to benefit from such a well-developed network of community organizations dedicated to those citizens who need help dealing with the very issues that are the focus of the committee’s report.”

Founded in 2010, the PCPCC is a cross-partisan, ad-hoc committee of the House of Commons. The report can be accessed electronically at www.pcpcc-cpspsc.com.

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For more information, please contact Laura Gareau, Special Assistant to Francis Scarpaleggia, at francis.scarpaleggia.a3@parl.gc.ca or 613-995-8281.

It is vitally important, in a country like Canada, that no citizen living in a community, however small, be without access to potable water. It is impossible to understand how, in a country like Canada, citizens living in a community would not have access to water for sanitation. We know, and it has been said before in this House today and many times before today, that water is central to proper sanitation. Without proper sanitation, we have outbreaks of epidemics, like H1N1, because people cannot wash their hands or otherwise maintain proper sanitation. Therefore, the issue of quality drinking water and quality water for sanitation is not just a question of having access to the immediate household staple of quality water, it is a question of public health.

I must congratulate my hon. leader for sponsoring this motion today on such an important issue. The impetus for this motion comes from a report released in July 2011 called the National Assessment of First Nation Water and Wastewater Systems. Just by way of background, I will mention that the study covered 97% of first nations. Four first nations chose not to participate in the study but 97% of first nations were covered. Although I am not a statistician, I know that 97% coverage is a very strong sample size.

The study found that if we want to bring first nations drinking water up to standard, we need to spend a fair amount of money still. Even though there have been investments in the past, we need to spend $1.08 billion in construction costs and $79.8 million in non-construction costs to bring all existing systems up to INACs protocol standards. The non-construction costs would involve spending on operator training and the development of various kinds of plans.

Finally, the costs of new servicing, including construction, operation and maintenance costs over a 10 year period are estimated at $4.7 billion. As members can see, there is a need for an infusion of resources if we are to do justice by our first nations people.

I will go back to a 2005 report by the Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development , which I read very carefully. From the report, we learned that 460,000 first nations people in Canada live on reserves, that Canada has about 600 first nations communities and that, of those communities, about 78,000 first nations people live in about 90 isolated communities without any year-round road access.

Providing potable water and access to water for sanitation to first nations is not an optional policy choice for the current government or any other government. The federal government has a fiduciary responsibility for the health and well-being of aboriginal Canadians living on first nations reserves. That is without dispute. This fiduciary responsibility includes ensuring that first nations communities have access to safe drinking water.

By way of information, the federal government exercises direct responsibility for first nations drinking water in those communities located south of 60, while the territorial governments do so for communities north of 60.

Again, by way of background, there are two federal departments that are the most directly involved in ensuring first nations communities have access to safe drinking water, one being what was formerly called the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, INAC, and the other being Health Canada. INAC funds the cost of building and maintaining first nations drinking water systems in communities. The department also covers the costs of operating and maintaining these systems, including the costs for training and certifying water system operators. In addition, the department tests source waters that supply first nations drinking water treatment plants. That is very important, and I will get into this a little later.

The efficacy of a water treatment plant depends, not only on the technology in that plant but also on the source water that is feeding that plant. Therefore, it is extremely important that we protect source water in Canada, specifically source water that is very close to drinking water treatment plants.

Health Canada, on the other hand, tests first nations drinking water at the tap. Health Canada works with first nations south of 60 to identify potential drinking water problems, including verification and monitoring of the overall quality of drinking water at the tap, and we are not talking about source water, and reviewing, interpreting and disseminating results to first nations.

Environment Canada is a third department. I said that there were two departments principally involved with the issue of first nations drinking water but Environment Canada is also involved. It is involved in giving advice and guidance in the area of source water protection.

A fourth department that is also involved is Public Works and Government Services Canada. Already we can see that this is a complex problem. Yes, it is a problem of money and a problem of political will but it is also a problem of the structure and the processes of government. I will come back to that a bit later.

What does Public Works and Government Services Canada do? Public Works and Government Services Canada provides Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development with technical services on the design of water treatment plants. If the government were putting out tenders to build water treatment plants, obviously this would go through Public Works and Government Services and it would supply some technical specifications. We already have four departments involved.

I mentioned money and money is important. In fact, one of the reasons that first nations were against Bill S-11 was because it proposed a regime for creating regulations to govern drinking water on first nations reserves but there did not seem to be any money attached to that law. A law without the resources to implement the law is not much of a law at all. It is just wishful thinking. I would point out that spending on first nations water needs has not kept pace with the growth of the aboriginal population in Canada.

There is another problem with government when it comes to ensuring quality drinking water on first nations reserves. Yes, there are the four departments. They have complex relationships among themselves. Yes, there is the problem of not having enough money to solve this problem. There is also the problem that it is fundamentally a scientific issue.

Water policy must be based on science. Water policy requires that the government have the scientific resources to identify problems that need to be solved. I talked about how Environment Canada looks after the protection of source waters on first nations communities but it needs to have scientists to do that job properly. What we have seen in the last few years, and even more so at an accelerated pace, is that the government does not seem to have the resources to hire scientists. In fact, the talk at Fisheries and Oceans and at Environment Canada is that not only are scientists not allowed to speak and are muzzled and discouraged from doing their work, but we see that there will probably be, as a result of budget cuts, fewer and fewer scientists working inside Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans.

The atrophied state of federal water science is a component of this problem. It is not something that we notice right off the bat. We said that it was a question of money, of political will, and, yes, it is a question of those things, but when we scratch under the surface we cannot have good water policy, whether we are talking about water on first nations reserves or any other aspect of water policy, unless we have good science.

Here is what is extremely interesting and sadly ironic. There are no laws and regulations governing the provision of drinking water in first nations communities, unlike other communities in Canada. This is a situation where the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to guarantee adequate drinking water to first nations and yet there are no laws or regulations governing the provision of drinking water in first nations communities.

What is even more ironic is that if people are nurses employed by the federal government working in a nursing station on a first nations reserve, or if they are employees of the Department of Foreign Affairs working in an embassy somewhere around the world, they are governed by regulations. The government must provide them with drinking water that is up to standard.

This is not me speaking. It was mentioned by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. I will read a passage from his 2005 report:

Under the Canada Labour Code and the Occupational Safety and Health Regulations, every federally regulated employer has to provide its employees with drinking water that meets the standards set out in the Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality. Federal employees working in First Nations communities are covered by these regulations.

Is that not ironic? Aboriginal Canadians living in these communities are not covered by regulations but federal employees working there are. I will continue with the quote:

We found that in 2002 Health Canada installed small water treatment units in nursing clinics and health stations in at least 20 First Nations communities that were regularly experiencing drinking water safety problems. This was a result of Human Resources and Development Canada intervention to ensure that federal employees working in these facilities would be provided with safe drinking water as prescribed under the Canada Labour Code.

This is an irony that cannot be allowed to stand much further. This is obviously a glaring problem.

This is a complex issue and there is a scientist, Dr. Hans Peterson, who works in the north and who has dedicated a tremendous amount of time in his career to helping first nations communities solve their drinking water problems. He has found that water filtration is by no means a simple and straightforward matter. It is not a question of just installing, plugging in, and activating a filtration unit. The kind of filtration system a community requires depends on the quality of its source water, which I mentioned earlier.

This comes back to the issue of lack of coordination. In many cases, filtration system designers, who may even be located in an engineering firm in another country, have limited knowledge of the characteristics of source water in the community in question. Obviously, this is ironic.

According to Dr. Peterson, Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, which was INAC at the time, appeared less than interested in the complexities of the relationship between source water type, filtration system design, and the quality of the treated water at the tap.

In the case of a water treatment plant being built in Saskatchewan, which goes back a couple of years, Dr. Peterson stated:

–INAC’s only criteria for building a water treatment system in Saskatchewan is still an ‘engineering stamp’. To the best of SDWF’s knowledge, and in discussion with the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, engineers have also not been given the opportunity to advise INAC on the most effective systems for different source waters, as INAC is only interested in requesting bids for, and purchasing, specific conventional water treatment systems that are chosen based on the cheapest bid.

It is not just a question of money or political will, it is a question of coordination among the various government departments that have something to say about first nations drinking water.

Again I will quote Dr. Peterson, who in this particular quotation seemed to be pointing to the lack of coordination between Health Canada and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. It is an old quotation. He stated:

INAC and HC do not appear to share data for source and treated waters and, as such, are unable to make sound decisions on effective treatment processes–

The list goes on and on.

There was a report published maybe three or four years ago which was published following consultations with first nations communities. What came out of that report was the recommendation that a first nations water commission be created where members of first nations could be brought together to share information relating to the provision of potable water in these communities. To my knowledge, the government has not acted on that recommendation. I think it is a good recommendation. It gets first nations communities involved in decision-making about water treatment in their communities. I would heartily recommend that the government pursue the issue and implement that recommendation.

Lastly, it is very important that the government not take the easy way out. Through legislation and regulation it should not impose provincial drinking water standards on first nations communities because not all provinces have drinking water standards that are at the level of the national drinking water guidelines. By doing so, it would skirt its federal responsibility, which would not be fair to the first nations people of the country.

It is my duty to point out that I am also very disappointed that the government imposed a gag order this morning before the debate had even begun. This debate focuses on an issue that is at the heart of a broader debate on the type of society in which Canadians want to live. I am convinced that this bill, this ill-conceived plan to eliminate the firearms registry, will undermine Canada’s public safety in the long term.

My constituents in Lac-Saint-Louis and the Montreal area feel very strongly about the issue of gun control. In the past 25 years, Montreal has experienced three massacres, all at post-secondary institutions. For those who are not familiar with the island of Montreal’s urban geography, I will point out that these three tragedies occurred in a fairly small area of downtown Montreal: the École Polytechnique of the Université de Montréal, Concordia University and Dawson College are all located within several blocks of each other.

Furthermore, I believe that there are only about 10 streets between Dawson College—where I myself taught some 15 years ago—and Concordia University. The École Polytechnique is clearly a little further north on the other side of the mountain, but all of these institutions are located within a fairly small area.

This, at least for me and my party, is not about the integrity of gun owners. The vast majority of long gun owners who I know are sterling citizens. They are community volunteers. Many would give the shirt off their back. They believe in community and in a safe community. They believe in safe streets. Some are first responders and I am proud to know them. That gun owners are respectable, responsible citizens is reflected empirically in the fact that 90% of gun owners have registered their firearms. In other words, despite their sometimes annoyance and, in many cases, strong opposition to the requirement to register their firearms, they register them all the same. That speaks volumes for their character. They are lawful citizens who do their duty. Some gun owners even voted for me, despite our differences on this contentious issue, which speaks volumes about the open mindedness of voters in my riding of Lac-Saint-Louis.

Why does the gun registry work? It is because of gun owners themselves. It is because of their deep sense of responsibility. I believe that gun owners’ inherent sense of responsibility is reinforced by the requirement to register their firearms. This sense of responsibility further translates into a heightened sense of the need for proper and safe storage of firearms. There is a logical connection, therefore, in my view, between the registration of any object and the proper care of that object. If vehicles were not registered, people would feel free to abandon their old jalopies in a field somewhere at the end of the car’s useful life knowing that no one would come knocking on their door later on to say, “Hey, you left your car on the street there, taking up space. Please cart it away or you’ll be fined”. I think the fact of registering makes people feel much more responsible for whatever the particular item is.

I would submit that the type of gun owner we have in Canada is changing. It is no longer necessarily farmers who are working to keep animals that should not be on their land or off their land.

Jeff Davis in the Edmonton Journal of October 25 wrote:

The consumer tastes of Canadian gun owners are fast changing, as shooters eschew vintage hunting rifles in favour of the latest “tacti-cool” military-style weapons – many of which appear in movies and popular video games, such as Call of Duty. As a new generation of young men become interested in shooting, but not hunting, retailers are trying to meet the growing demand for sleek firearms. Canadian authorities, meanwhile, facing the repeal of the long-gun registry by the federal government, are worried about the trend. 

These non-restricted, because they are long guns essentially even though they are replicas of military-style weapons, military-style long guns are referred to as civilianized versions of military assault weapons. In some cases it is possible to modify what are essentially stylized long guns into a gun that is more dangerous and would meet the criteria for being classified as a restricted weapon.

It is entirely possible, and it has happened quite recently, that a long gun is allowed into Canada and it is allowed to be sold as a non-restricted weapon, only for the RCMP on second thought to say, “It is a little too dangerous. It can be modified. We will now classify it as a restricted weapon. We had better get hold of those copies that were previously sold as non-restricted weapons”.

To give an example, the Norinco Type 97 rifle was initially classified by the RCMP as a non-restricted weapon, and about 50 were sold in Canada. The RCMP firearms directorate later re-classified the Type 97 as a prohibited weapon. Letters were sent to 50 owners who already had them, asking them to turn the new guns in to their local police stations.

As a matter of basic logic, if these guns are not registered when they are first sold as non-restricted firearms, how would the RCMP send letters to the owners asking them to turn their guns in? In this case, we can see that the registry would be useful.

Rifles and shotguns were responsible for half the police officers killed in the line of duty over the past few years. We have been talking a lot about common sense and intuition. The previous speaker said that for him it was a matter of intuition. I can understand that. There are some common sense arguments in debates like this because we are not dealing with hard science, we are dealing with social science, research in social science studies, so indeed we have to at times resort to a kind of moral intuition.

Let us start with a recent study by Étienne Blais and Marie-Pier Gagné of the University of Montreal, who studied the data and looked at the enactment of Bill C-51 in 1977, requiring gun owners to obtain a firearm acquisition certificate. They looked at Bill C-68 in 1995, which set up the gun registry and so on. They found, in doing their analysis, that these pieces of legislation were responsible for a 5% to 10% decrease in homicides committed with a firearm, depending on the province.

Studies have also shown that those who live in a home with one firearm have a higher risk of being victims of homicide. The risk quite obviously goes up if safe storage requirements are not respected in the household.

The Conservatives would say, echoing the rhetoric of the National Rifle Association in the United States, that it is not guns that kill people; it is people who kill people, and that removing firearms would simply cause a one for one shift toward another means or another weapon of homicide. However, this argument has been rejected by solid research, namely by Philip Cook in his 1981 study entitled “The Effect of Gun Availability on Violent Crime Patterns”. He said: 

A decision to kill is easier and safer to implement with a gun than with other commonly available weapons- there is less danger of effective victim resistance during the attack–

I think we can understand the logic behind that:

–and the killing can be accomplished more quickly and impersonally, with less sustained effort than is usually required with a knife or blunt object.

Let us remember another thing. Homicides committed with a firearm are not, as the Conservatives would have us believe, premeditated acts. They are often impulsive acts committed under the influence of alcohol. This makes the safe storage of firearms and measures like the registry, which are intended to encourage safe storage, all the more relevant, in my view. However, there is an issue that has not really been discussed in this debate to date, as far as I can tell, and that is the issue of firearms and suicide.

We just had a debate on suicide a couple of weeks ago, in which members weighed in with very earnest and well-motivated speeches. However, in this debate on the gun registry, we have not heard much about suicide, at least from the other side. Suicide accounts for nearly three-quarters of all firearm-related deaths in Canada. Last year a Quebec National Institute of Public Health study found that male suicide rates declined notably following the introduction of firearms legislation.

As a matter of common sense, removing the means of suicide will naturally affect the suicide rate and the means of suicide can vary according to country. For example, in China and India death by pesticide intake is more common. Subsequently, the development of strict controls on access to and storage of pesticides and industrial poisons has resulted in a reduction of suicide rates in those countries.

The government also likes to talk about how it stands up for victims, yet l’Association canadienne pour la prévention du suicide, l’Association des familles de personnes assassinées ou disparues, l’Association québécoise Plaidoyer-Victimes, and the Federal Ombudsman for Victims of Crime are all calling for the gun registry to remain in place.

This brings me to another point and it relates to a point I mentioned earlier. We can get into a battle of duelling studies, we understand that. We are in the realm of social science. Sometimes the same set of data yields very different conclusions. Just a couple of weeks ago an emergency medicine academic, Caillin Langmann, published a study. He looked at the major pieces of gun control legislation: the 1977 bill that required criminal record checks, the 1991 bill that imposed mandatory safety training and a 28-day waiting period for purchase, and the 1995 long gun registry legislation. What he came up with as a conclusion was that he failed to definitively demonstrate an association between firearms legislation and homicide between 1974 and 2008. I would mention that the study does not cover suicide.

Members on the other side will be saying, “We told you so”, there is a study that says that none of these pieces of legislation work. One of the pieces of legislation that did not work, according to this study, was the legislation requiring a firearms acquisition certificate or, in other words, licensing in order to be a firearms owner. By this logic, the government should not stop at getting rid of the registry. It should be getting rid of the licensing provisions in Canadian law as well, but we know it is not doing that. I believe that, with all due respect to my colleagues on the other side, they are cherry-picking the evidence in some ways.

There are some people in Canada at the moment, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and others, who would like to see gun licensing eliminated and would probably use a study like Mr. Langmann’s to justify the cost-saving push to eliminate licensing, which, of course, must make farmers, hunters and law-abiding gun owners feel like criminals, according to the government’s logic.

What strikes me the most about some of the arguments I have heard on the other side of the House is the statement that has been made often over the last few months that the gun registry has not saved one single life. That is quite a sweeping statement. Now we are in the realm of government omniscience and absolutism. I could never make a statement like that about pretty much any kind of phenomenon that cannot be measured scientifically.

How do we know it has not saved a life? For example, in the Dawson tragedy the police were able to use the registry to remove firearms from a potential copycat who might have committed the same crime after witnessing what Kimveer Gill did.

Would the government admit that it is at least possible that there is even a 1% chance that the gun registry may have saved at least one life? I believe the members opposite speak in good faith on this issue, and any member in good faith would have to admit that there is a possibility. Then the question becomes, how much is one life worth? Of course, the government does not want to go there because that opens up a whole other can of worms, which is why, I guess, the government makes categorical statements like, “The registry has never saved even one life”.

I want to commend the hon. member for Toronto Centre and the leader of my party for showing such vision, wisdom, compassion and humanity by making the urgent need for our government to establish a national suicide prevention strategy the topic of today’s debate on this Liberal opposition day in the House of Commons.

I also want to commend all my colleagues who have contributed to this debate by sharing their accounts and allowing us to better grasp and understand this troubling problem, the scourge that is suicide. I would like in particular to acknowledge the very moving speech by the hon. member for Scarborough—Guildwood who made us think about the priorities we set as a society and as a government. We cannot help but think about the government’s crime agenda and the resources it might take away from our efforts to combat suicide.

I would like to dedicate my speech to the memory of a young man whom I unfortunately never had the honour and pleasure to meet, but whose doings throughout his far too short life were known to me because his grandparents and parents are long-time friends of my own family.

This young, brilliant, athletic and talented man who was deeply loved by his family and friends was named Jack Windeler. He was in first year at the prestigious Queen’s University in Kingston when tragically, at the age of 18, he took his own life. That was just under a year and a half ago, when his life was so full of potential.

Jack’s tragic passing highlights a public and mental health problem that to date has received much too little attention, that being the vulnerability of our young people who, despite appearances, are often in a difficult transitional period from late high school to college or university and to independent living generally.

In his honour and memory, as well as to help others in trouble before it is too late, Jack’s loving parents Sandra Hanington and Eric Windeler have launched the Jack Project. Its goal is to transform a painful personal loss into positive transformational action that helps our society achieve meaningful progress in combatting the scourge of youth suicide.

Before I go on, I would like to comment on the mental health of our young Canadians.

The image that we have of young people—the image portrayed by advertising and the media in general—is of a dynamic, fulfilled, connected generation that is open to the world and walking or even running toward a promising future. However, one-quarter of young Canadians are dealing with mental health problems.

In fact, 50% of mental health problems begin before the age of 14, and 75% begin before the age of 24. Based on objective measures, 6.5% of young people between the ages of 15 and 24 have experienced major depression in the past year. In addition, only 25% of young people with mental health problems were able to obtain the help they needed from a mental health professional.

Unfortunately, of all the age groups, 15- to 24-year-olds have the least access to the help they need to overcome their mental health problems and the pain that these problems cause them.

The mission of the Jack Project is to help our young people achieve and sustain their optimal mental health as they transition to independent living, which often occurs during the move from high school to college and university. The Jack Project is innovative. It does not work to reinvent the wheel. It focuses on two realms of particular relevance to young people: the online world and, of course, school.
There are many fragmented services available for those contemplating ending their lives. However, because of funding constraints, many are not available in the world where today’s youth live: the world of computers and cyberspace.

First, the Jack Project works to interlink, and here I quote:

–Key youth-oriented and youth-servicing partners together in a coordinated online support system to pioneer e-mental health technologies in Canada. Invest in online chat and mobile applications linking teens and young adults to the trained professionals at the Kids Help Phone.

Second, the Jack Project is working with leading mental health organizations, namely, content developers, service providers, researchers and educational professionals, to create a mental health “model of care” and a best practices “toolbox” for transitioning teens and young adults across secondary and post-secondary environments. The goal is for this model of care to become a national standard to be introduced before too long in as many as 300 high schools and 30 colleges and universities.

I imagine that most of those would be in Ontario, but the potential for expanding this national standard, this model of care, beyond of Ontario to the rest of Canada is enormous. In fact, a national suicide strategy would probably help in the goal of making this model of care more widely available from coast to coast to coast.

To say suicide is a complex phenomenon is a profound understatement. Like all complex challenges we face as a society, preventing suicide requires a comprehensive, strategic and co-ordinated approach.

In Canada, that means federal leadership. It is leadership at the level of government that takes a national view of issues and that has the experience of bringing other levels of government together in common purpose to achieve goals of interest to all Canadians.

We need a national suicide prevention strategy in Canada to gather our resources and insights together for the purpose of saving lives threatened by mental health challenges, among others, that too often lead to the ultimate end.

Almost 17 years ago, at a conference held under the auspices of the United Nations in Calgary and Banff, held in these locations precisely because of Alberta’s recognized leadership in the area of suicide prevention, a solemn commitment was made among nations, many of them G8 nations, to give priority to creating national suicide prevention strategies. Sadly, we still in Canada have not developed and implemented such a strategy.

The message of today’s debate is that it is never too late. We lost Jack, but hopefully with greatly and urgently needed political will encouraged by the courageous and visionary work of his parents, Sandra and Eric, work further aided by this debate today, Jack’s life and memory can help all of us save others.

Joan was a pioneer. She sought respect and recognition for the rights of the intellectually handicapped and those experiencing mental health problems. Among the organizations Joan helped establish are the John F. Kennedy School, the Gary Taylor Centre, the West Island Association for the Intellectually Handicapped, Omega Community Resources, and the Lakeshore Vocational Projects Association, now known as the Centre de réadaptation de l’Ouest de Montréal.

In 1976 she founded West Island Citizen Advocacy, a group that advocates for the rights of people with special needs, creates one-on-one matches between special needs clients and volunteers, and provides supervised housing for people with mental health challenges.

In recognition of her contribution to building a better Canada, in 2004 Joan received the Order of Canada from then governor general Adrienne Clarkson.

Joan will be greatly missed, but her memory and spirit will live on and inspire future generations of community activists and volunteers.

Pointe-Claire was originally an agricultural parish built around a windmill on the St. Lawrence River, and it helped spawn a handful of neighbouring municipalities that now form a large part of what is known as the West Island.

Good public administration under the leadership of mayors like Art Séguin, David Beck, Malcolm Knox and Bill McMurchie, combined with a commitment to excellence in sport and culture, are the hallmarks of this city of 30,000.

You can find everything in Pointe-Claire: a hospital, schools under two linguistic school boards, an excellent community centre, the first indoor Olympic-sized pool in Canada, a multi-sport artificial turf field, as well as the National Field of Honour, a veterans’ cemetery.

Pointe-Claire is called home by Olympic diving medallist Anne Montminy, internationally renowned violinist Chantal Juillet, former CBC hockey broadcaster Dick Irvin, Canadiens’ great Elmer Lach, and Juno award-winning musician Sam Roberts.

I ask all members to join me in wishing Pointe-Claire a very special happy birthday.

The first is that refugees are not queue jumpers. There is a misconception across the land that when refugees come to Canada and claim refugee status, they are depriving others who would like to come to Canada of their right to do so. I say sadly that it is the government that has actually fostered this notion. Do not take my word for it; I will quote from an editorial in the Ottawa Citizen which stated the following:

Back in 2010, [the] Public Safety Minister…said the government needed to crack down on human smuggling because “we know that jumping the immigration queue is fundamentally unfair to those who follow the rules and wait their turns to come to Canada.”

This is the opposite of what is true about refugees.

Of course, no one likes queue jumpers. We all have a natural aversion to the idea of someone cutting into line. However, refugees are not queue jumpers. By letting a refugee into Canada, we are not slowing down or otherwise causing a regular immigration application to be sidelined. It is very important to make that point.

The second point I would like to make is related to the first point. There is a process for determining who is a legitimate refugee and who is a person whose claim is without proper merit. That process goes back at least 20 years, if I am not mistaken, or maybe a little less than 20 years. We know that that process is embodied in an institution of government that we call the Immigration and Refugee Board.

The third point I would like to make is related to the first two. The reason there is a refugee crisis in this country, the reason there is a backlog of refugee claimants, has a lot to do with the way the government, unfortunately, has undermined the refugee determination process that is embodied in the Immigration and Refugee Board.

We all know that the government failed to fill vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board for quite a long time, to the extent that the lack of desire to move in terms of appointing new members to the IRB was having and impact and creating the backlog in refugee claims. In fact, the Auditor General in 2009 expressed her concerns about timely and efficient appointments and reappointments to the IRB when she looked at the matter of the refugee backlog.

What has happened is the government has politicized the process of appointing people to the IRB which has made the backlog even worse.

It is very important that the government own up to this. First, it must admit that refugees are not queue jumpers. Second, it must admit that it has made the problem of the refugee backlog slightly worse because it failed previously to act quickly in terms of appointing members to the board.

There are problems with this bill. It creates two classes of refugees. One class would be the regular refugee stream. The second class would be denoted by the minister as designated arrivals, which, upon being designated accordingly, would be treated differently. They could be held in detention for up to 12 months.

What is really happening is the government is categorizing refugees. It is creating classes of refugees for different treatment based on, if we really look at it and read between the lines, the mode of transport the refugee claimants have used to get here. Refugees who come by plane typically would not come in big groups and would not receive the ministerial designation of designated foreign nationals and would not receive the different treatment that is being reserved for designated foreign nationals in this bill. Refugees who come in groups who will be designated as designated foreign nationals under the act typically will come by ship in squalid conditions. If they come by plane, they are not considered to be designated foreign nationals under the law.

The government is creating different classes of refugees based on how the refugees come to Canada. Following that logic, there should be a class of refugees for those arriving by minivan. It is very unhealthy when we start to distinguish and create categories of people from what is essentially a group of people with the same characteristics, people who are fleeing persecution or misery for a better life.

This brings me to another point. Back in June when I first spoke to this bill, I said that the government seems to make legislation based on the latest headlines. Instead of analyzing a situation over the long term and coming up with a solution that has some merit, it will react very quickly to news, especially before an election. It will bring in rushed legislation which obviously will have flaws because any legislation that is rushed will have flaws. It will bring in legislation to try to show the public that it is acting quickly to solve a problem, which sometimes is very complex and requires more reflection than it is receiving.

When the government introduced Bill C-49, which is now Bill C-4, it had already brought in Bill C-11 about a year before. Bill C-11 was meant to attack the problem of the growing refugee backlog the government itself had contributed to making worse. Under Bill C-11, the government implemented something that had been created by a Liberal government. It brought in a refugee appeal division to speed up the process whereby when a claimant is refused by the IRB, he or she may appeal to the Federal Court. The government said it would implement something that a Liberal government came up with, which was the refugee appeals division.

I should mention that has not yet been implemented, as far as I know. Bill C-11 tried to remedy this situation but there have been more delays in terms of creating the refugee appeal division. In any event, Bill C-11 was attempting to deal with the problem. We still do not know if Bill C-11 would deal effectively with the problem because the appeals division has not been created. Why did the government not let things be and allow Bill C-11 to work its way through to implementation to see if it was able to resolve the matter before introducing Bill C-4? That is quite indicative of the fact that the government prefers to rush into things, sometimes with measures that are half-baked or not called for.

A major problem with Bill C-4 is that it probably violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is what happens when legislation is rushed: we get legislation that is not thought through and is not properly put together. It means the legislation could be challenged and if it is challenged, it may be struck down. That would create more problems down the line. A government should really do things properly or it may find itself with problems down the line.

Bill C-4 possibly could violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms because of the fact that a person may be kept in detention for up to 12 months. We have seen jurisprudence by the Supreme Court find that time far too long and in violation of at least two sections of the charter.

I will stop on that point and take the opportunity to move an amendment.

I move:

That the motion be amended by deleting all of the words after the word “That” and substituting the following:

‘this House declines to give 2nd reading to Bill C-4, An Act to amend the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the Balanced Refugee Reform Act and the Marine Transportation Security Act, since the bill fails to achieve its stated principle of cracking down on human smugglers and instead targets legitimate refugee claimants and refugees, and because it expands the Minister’s discretion in a manner that is overly broad and not limited to the mass arrival situation that supposedly inspired the introduction of this legislation, and because it presents an imprisonment scheme that violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protections against arbitrary detention and prompt review of detention, and because its provisions also violate international obligations relating to refugees and respecting the treatment of persons seeking protection.’