“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

– Hannah Arendt

Under the category “youth,” the issues pop to mind immediately. This special issue on youth concerns is bound to focus on access to affordable post-secondary education, student debt and the burden of interest bearing student loans, and persistently high unemployment among youth.

The statistics speak for themselves:

• Number of Canadians ages 20-34: 7,291,100;
• Total student debt in Canada, including private loans: $28.3-billion;
• Average debt load for Canadian students upon graduation: $28,000;
• Canada’s 2012 unemployment rate of persons age 15 to 24: 14.3 per cent;
• Canada’s overall unemployment rate: seven per cent.

There is no question that Canada’s youth is concerned about where they will find a job in the field for which they have trained.

But we do our young people a disservice in assuming these are their only concerns. They care about the climate crisis. They care about social justice.

I travel Canada holding town hall meetings, open question and answer sessions on university campuses and speaking to high schools. And, even accounting for the self-selection that goes into the youth likely to attend Green Party events, I do not believe my impression of the concerns of young people is skewed. There are enough “captive audience” events that my anecdotal view of youth concerns is more than a reflection of a minority.

To get a sense of how young people, or at least one young person, would approach this topic, I emailed my daughter. Cate is now 22, a 2013 graduate of King’s University in Halifax, about to start her masters’s program, juggling several part-time jobs in the service industry while working as a teacher’s assistant at Dalhousie. I asked her how she sees the topic of “youth issues.”

“I think that youth are mobilizing effectively around two huge threats: climate change and damning levels of debt. There is a real connection between the two insofar as having a corporatized education model not only devalues the learning we receive, but also subsumes a possible source of resistance (critical thinking about politics) and incapacitates students unless they adhere to the structure, thereby depending on the societal parasite: corporate control.

“On a more essential note, youth fight for their two futures: the ecological one and the economic one. This is a struggle to protect what gives youth their very homes.

“For those youth who are outside post-secondary institutions, the market for their skills skews toward expensive accreditation. The cost of this accreditation can be prohibitive. Even though students fight tooth and nail just to keep tuition from rising, many also understand that the game is rigged, the system broken.

“This brings us to the unproductive idea that youth are cynical and apathetic. It is good to be skeptical when the received ideas you’ve lived with are motivated by the same projects that give rise to outright global climatic instability–seriously. Youth issues, then, are issues for all of society, if other people will hear the urgent claim. We seek to make the world radically different than how it now is because the world is still new to us.”

The notion that youth have a particular right to demand that their elders not wreak their future chances has never had to be enunciated by previous generations. No cohort of elders has ever been so cavalier about whether their children have anything like the opportunities, the life chances, of the previous generation.

Our life chances, the success of our economies, has been built on the largely predictable, stable climate coupled with a post-war boom.

The boomers have had the best of many worlds-economically and ecologically. Just as now former finance minister Jim Flaherty says, essentially, the rules of the game have changed: ‘Next generation, take your lumps on pensions,” so too are we saying, “tough luck kids. Sorry about screwing up the world.’ Increasing extreme weather events, crop losses, not-so-natural disasters, are the new normal.

We still have time in our generation (I say speaking to those of us over 50) to prevent much of what could be the worst outcomes for the next generation. We have time to provide affordable education on a healthy planet. A well-educated citizenry is key to our economic success, just as a healthy biosphere is a precondition to civilization. But as my daughter says, none of that will happen without some radical reorienting of our priorities. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether our kids are apathetic and disengaged; it’s how did the boomers get so apathetic that we do not fight for our children.

Originally posted in the Hill Times.

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I am so proud of a small high school—it is not that small, really—in my riding, Claremont high school in Cordova Bay, that answered this question with something they called “Rails to Relevance”. The global studies program there decided to offer for students in grade 11 the chance to take the train from Vancouver all the way to Ottawa and learn about the country on the way. I was on board doing onboard seminars with my friend from the NDP, our local MLA, Lana Popham. They saw their country all the way from Vancouver to Quebec City and were able to be here in Parliament. In Parliament, I am grateful to my colleagues, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, the leader of the official opposition, and the leader of the Liberal Party for meeting with these wonderful students.

Thanks to Mark Neufeld. Thanks to Sally Hansen, the local school district, VIA Rail, and everyone who made this fantastic trip possible.

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As the House will know, this legislation was brought forward in place of or at least after Bill C-30 was withdrawn. It was the so-called protecting children from Internet predators act. I do understand the reasons for urgency.

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This legislation, Bill C-55, is in direct response to a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R v. Tse, in which the court found that the current emergency wiretap provisions failed the charter test. The court suspended its ruling for 12 months to allow the House to remedy those sections of the Criminal Code such that they would conform with the charter. The clock started ticking when the Supreme Court rendered its decision, which was April 13 last year. We have a small amount of time to correct those mistakes.

I want to start my discussion of the amendments I am putting forward by stressing that I also support Bill C-55. It is, overall, well crafted and meets the challenge of ensuring that this extraordinary power of the state to obtain emergency wiretaps without a warrant—and this is what we are talking about—which is quite an egregious invasion of the privacy of the individual citizen, is balanced and only justified in exigent circumstances when certain standards have been met. It is only charter compliant, according to the Supreme Court decision in R v. Tse, if there are adequate oversight mechanisms put in place.

My amendments go directly to the point that we do not want Bill C-55 to be struck down by a future court because we failed to put in place the adequate oversight provisions and because we failed to get the balance just right, based on the advice of the Supreme Court.

I am just going to take a moment to go back to the ways in which the Supreme Court of Canada’s decisions around these matters have evolved in very recent years. It was not long ago that our major authority, the precedent from the Supreme Court of Canada that governed in this area, was a 1990 case, R v. Duarte, in which Mr. Justice La Forest found that:

as a general proposition, surreptitious electronic surveillance of the individual by an agency of the state constitutes an unreasonable search or seizure under section 8 of the Charter.

It takes quite a bit of evolution within court decisions to ask how we justify sections 183 and 184 of the Criminal Code in allowing the state, without access to a warrant or even judicial review of any kind, to go forward and wiretap private communications.

That process is now settled in a new precedent of the Supreme Court of Canada in R v. Tse, in which the court ruled in the majority that yes, in these exigent circumstances, where, for instance, there is a kidnapping or another criminal event where a life is at stake and there legitimately is not time to get to a judge for a warrant, it is now going to be acceptable under the charter.

What is not acceptable under the charter is when these powers are not adequately supervised. I think that needs to be a foundational point that is stressed here. These are intrusions into the private lives of Canadians that in any other circumstance would be viewed as charter violations. This House must craft, very carefully, that rare exception when we are going to let the state intrude on our personal communications.

I am troubled, sometimes, when I hear the comment: “Why would we worry if people want to wiretap criminals? The only people who would be worried about that would be people who have something to hide”.

We need in this country to constantly remind ourselves why we prize the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms why western democracies, the British Empire, our common law, and centuries of practice and respect for the rule of law recognized that the state has no business knocking down a person’s door. It is literally pushing through doors and breaking into houses and invading our privacy, which in an electronic era includes wiretapping.

We have to remind ourselves why civil liberties matter. We have to remind ourselves of this fairly constantly, because in not just this instance but in other laws passed through this place, we are seeing an erosion of our respect for the idea of civil liberties through resort to such rhetoric as “Well, only criminals need to worry” and “We shouldn’t be so worried about criminals as we should be about victims.” A victim of an injustice of the state invading our civil liberties is no less a victim than the person mugged on the street. We need to pay attention to civil liberties. That is why I am putting forward my amendments.

The court ruled very clearly in R. v. Tse that the failure of the current Criminal Code provisions was a failure to have adequate accountability measures. The court did not set out what the accountability measures should look like with any degree of specificity, so Bill C-55 attempts to, and does, put forward accountability measures; however, will they pass the charter test in a future Supreme Court case? My submission to the House—and I urge other members to vote with me—is that we make the bill much safer and more secure against being struck down later by improving the accountability measures.

The amendments I put forward would ensure, for instance, that the intercepted communications would require an Attorney General report, which would include records of all those wiretaps for which no charges were ever laid and would require the police officer in question to memorialize the reasonable grounds he or she had at the time for seeking warrantless wiretap evidence. We would record and report as much information as possible to ensure that the oversight statutory process in Bill C-55 would meet any future charter challenge.

My amendments are based on recommendations primarily from three groups that testified before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights: the Canadian Bar Association, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the Criminal Lawyers’ Association. Those three bodies recommended, in the language I have used, the amendments I am putting forward today.

They strive to ensure that there be a requirement to publicly report the numbers of persons whose communications were intercepted but who were not subsequently charged. They include a requirement for the police officer’s justification for the interception to be recorded and memorialized and would also ensure that if subsequent judicial authorizations were obtained on the same grounds as for the interception under section 184.4 of the Criminal Code, evidence obtained by a further section 184.4 interception may be ruled inadmissible.

The other piece I want to mention briefly is something that was not part of the res judicata of R. v. Tse but that was certainly significant obiter dicta, and that was the court’s concern that the definition of “peace officer” was overly broad. I cite the decision of the court on this matter, and there was not a dissent. At paragraph 57 of R. v. Tse, the court noted it would agree that:

We, too, have reservations about the wide range of people who, by virtue of the broad definition of “peace officer”, can invoke extraordinary measures permitted under s. 184.4. That provision may be constitutionally vulnerable for that reason.

I am not saying that the Minister of Justice has not taken account of this obiter dicta. The revised Bill C-55 no longer uses the term “peace officer”. The revised Bill C-55, in clause 2, changes the term “peace officer”, which was overly broad and could include anything from mayors and reeves and so on, to “police officer”, but then in the definition adds an element of overly broad definition by saying:

“police officer” means any officer, constable or other person employed for the preservation and maintenance of the public peace

I remain concerned despite the quite interesting testimony, and I thank the justice critic for the official opposition, who pursued this point with the Minister of Justice. I am less sanguine about leaving in the term “or other person”, so one of my amendments would remove the term “or other person” to further clarify the act and ensure that it is not constitutionally vulnerable.

I will conclude by saying that my amendments are put forward in the interests of ensuring that Bill C-55 will survive any future charter challenge and I recommend them to my colleagues.

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While in general we are living longer, there are worrying developments. Particularly disturbing is the numbers of illnesses and syndromes that afflict our children. If we were an animal species, looking at issues of population health, we would notice and worry that our young do not haveon a population basisthe state of health of earlier generations. Some have noted that the trend toward every generation being healthier than their parents is about to abruptly end. Industrialized countries have seen a rise in children’s cancer. One in five Canadian children has asthma. There is an epidemic of obesity in children. Rates of diabetes in our children have also gone up. And the rate of attention deficit disorder, autism, and mental retardation are on the rise.

Meanwhile, we are told the cost of health care will be driven up by the aging population. It turns out, that claim lacks empirical support. According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information:

“Analyses of the drivers of increases in public sector health expenditures over the last decade showed that the contribution of aging has been relatively modest. To date, system-level cost drivers such as inflation and increased utilization have played bigger roles in health spending increases.,” (Health Care Cost Drivers: the facts, CIHI, November 2011)

So what is driving up the costs of our health-care system?

Skyrocketing costs for pharmaceutical drugs have now eclipsed all other health care expenditures. Drugs are the fastest rising component in health-care costs. Pharmaceutical companies claim that the high pricesmany times more than the actual cost of manufacturing the drugare necessary to recover their investment in research and development. Recent studies from around the world have debunked this claim. (Light, et al, “Will lower drug prices jeopardize drug research: a policy fact sheet,” American Journal of Bioethics, 2004.)

The high mark-up on prescription drugs simply cannot be justified based on the investment in research. We are being ripped off by Big Pharma. But we may also be suffering more harm than benefit. The world-renowned Therapeutics Initiative at University of British Columbia operates as the Gold Standard of pharmaceutical reviews. It spotted problems with Vioxx, even as Health Canada approved the drug.

Its review of the data package from the manufacturers has saved B.C. lives and tens of thousands of dollars. One aspect of Therapeutics Initiative that makes it nearly unique is that it refuses any perks from the pharmaceutical industry. As I learned when visiting their centre at UBC, for every doctor in Canada, there are three drug salesmen, and there are many offers of conferences in exotic locations to better acquaint doctors with the prescription drugs on offer.

Meanwhile, the traditional way that governments deal with health-care, throwing more money to the provinces, is not achieving concrete results. The 2004 First Ministers Health Accord committed $41-billion to health care system improvements, including $5.5-billion over 10 years to reduce wait times. Benchmarks were established in December 2005 in five key health-care areas that have been prone to longer waiting times. So far, progress is mixed, even though reducing wait times was one of only five promises made by Stephen Harper in the 2006 campaign. That Health Accord is due to expire in 2014.

To get a handle on rising health-care costs, we should focus on drug costs, but we shouldn’t stop there. Here is a short list of where we should look:

1. Improving the bed to bureaucrat ratio (more beds; fewer bureaucrats). Special effort should be made to expand availability of lower cost long-term care and recuperation beds, leaving high-cost post-op beds available for people who really need them.
2. Creating a national pharmacare program with bulk buying of drugs at the federal level to provide at lower cost to provinces. Support the University of British Columbia Therapeutics Initiative and expand its approach to ensuring drugs are only registered if they do more good than harm, across Canada.
3. Focus on efficient use of resources. Not every patient needs every diagnostic test. This bioethics discussion has been growing in the medical literature. Avoiding waste is a sensible approach, but can be difficult to implement, (“From an Ethics of Rationing to an Ethics of Waste Avoidance,” New England Journal of Medicine, May 24, 2012).
4. Provide student loan forgiveness incentives for graduating doctors, nurses, paramedics and other health-care professionals who agree to staff rural facilities and family practice clinics where recruitment is currently a problem.
5. Enshrine a policy that seniors’ care must be provided in the communities where they or their families live.
6. Expand home support and home care programs and assisted-living services to support people with chronic care needs, including many seniors who wish to stay in their own homes and communities.
7. Ensure that the Canada Health Act is enforced. (i.e., the federal government cannot wash its hands of health care.)
8. Follow through on our commitment to a national Mental Health Strategy.
9. Expand our awareness and investment in prevention. Focus on nutrition. Restrict more carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and immune-suppressive substances. Ensure physical activity from pre-school through high school.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.
Originally printed in the Hill Times.

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“October 17th is an opportunity to hear the concerns of people living in poverty. They are on the frontline of the fight against poverty. Eradicate poverty is a goal we should collectively pursue. Political leadership is key in that regard; a Green Party government would place poverty eradication at the heart of its action,” added Rebecca Harrison, Green Shadow Cabinet member for Poverty Elimination.

Through resolution 47/196 adopted on 22 December 1992, United Nations’ General Assembly declared October 17th as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and invited all States to devote the Day to presenting and promoting, as appropriate in the national context, concrete activities with regard to the eradication of poverty and destitution.

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The Green Party advocates changes that would enhance both teaching and learning.  We have called for a universal, child-care program for pre-schoolers.  We also have policies relating to the growing number of youths dropping out of school with no job prospects.  And, while education is a provincial matter, we believe the federal government should provide funding to increase the number of spaces at post-secondary institutions along with needs-based scholarships and bursaries to reduce financial barriers for potential students.  (Too many of our young graduates are facing terrible debt.)  We also support lifelong-learning programs.

Canada is transitioning into an information-based society – and, if the majority of Canadians have their way, a green economy.  These require research, creativity, and innovation.  They also depend on well-trained and respected teachers.  The Green Party thanks and salutes our teachers!

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There are aspects of the bill that I think we need to pay some attention to, in committee, amending it to make sure it applies appropriately to children who are critically ill and children who are missing and to further refine those circumstances.

However, I take the points of the hon. member for Newton—North Delta on the chiseling away of EI benefit rights. I am particularly concerned about what we did in Bill C-38, with taking seasonal workers and placing them in a circumstance where they are almost treated as if they were recidivists in a criminal justice system instead of workers in Canada who happen to be in industries that require of them that they are not working year round.

I wonder if my hon. friend has any comments on that.

Jinny Jogindera Sims: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for her very thoughtful comment and question.

All of us, right across Canada, know the impact of the EI changes. As I said, we are hearing about them here. Particularly hard-struck are seasonal workers.

Whether it is on the west coast, whether we are talking about agricultural workers in the Niagara Peninsula, whether we are talking about seasonal workers in the north or on the west coast, I will say that those groups of workers are beginning to feel as if they have done something terribly wrong, simply because their particular area of work is seasonal due to climate. It is not something they control. We live in a country that has a huge geography, and the workers are being punished because their employment is seasonal.

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I asked one of his colleagues about the lack of ministerial discretion to make an exception on compassionate grounds. It is limited only to where a child is directly affected. However, there is sweeping discretion that is quite mind-boggling in clause 8, which states:

The minister may, on the Minister’s own initiative, declare that a foreign national…may not become a temporary resident if the Minister is of the opinion that it is justified by public policy considerations.

Public policy considerations are not defined.

The member’s speech, of course, spoke to deporting people. What about refusing to allow someone to become a permanent resident with no real criteria being applied?

Mike Sullivan: Mr. Speaker, I have to agree with the member that the discretion in that circumstance is very strangely put.

Without any guidelines, without any indication of exactly what a public policy consideration is, one could imagine, certainly in a third world country, a gazillion different things that would be public policy considerations that would keep people from becoming Canadian citizens.

We are not a third world country, but the same problem exists in that there is no definition, no direction and no example given of what a public policy consideration is. It is a very scary prospect.

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I find that this bill really limits the minister’s power when it comes to humanitarian circumstances in cases where the best interests of the child are directly involved. The bill provides for a very minor exception in terms of humanitarian circumstances.

Would my colleague agree that there should be more exceptions available to the minister when it comes to exercising his or her powers for humanitarian reasons?

Pierre Dionne Labelle: Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her question.

Indeed, the bill takes away the minister’s responsibility to examine humanitarian circumstances. I have the impression that this bill takes powers away from the minister that we would like him to have, and gives him powers that we do not want him to have

That is why it needs some work. The opposition will participate in good faith in order to achieve the desired goals and to ensure that this bill does not simply serve as a public relations device so the Conservatives can look good.

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Almost thirteen years later, youth in Canada face increasing problems – high levels of unemployment, diminished social programmes, weakened environmental protection, and the threat of climate change. It’s time for young people to speak out more than ever! Canada needs your energy, your fresh vision, your courage in order to regain the kind of fair and just country established after WWII – and presently being dismantled.

During the federal election in May, 2011, we saw young voters across the country – including Greens – turn out to vote with an increased sense of purpose and urgency. Unfortunately, with our first-past-the-post electoral system, the Harper Conservatives won a majority – although some riding results are being contested in the courts.

This year, International Youth Day comes almost one month before the next session of Parliament, which promises to be a great challenge to those who care about Canada. We call on our Young Greens, whose hard work and dedication we appreciate very much, and all youth to help stop the Harper Conservatives. In fact, with the support of aware, open-minded young people, we can make this country even better than before!

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