Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to what I think is one of the most important pieces of legislation that this term of Parliament is managing. I pay my respect in particular to David Lepofsky, a lifelong friend who I first worked with when I was the chair of the accessibility and advisory committee at the City of Toronto. We tried to push forth as many progressive and enlightened ideas about how to make sure that people with disabilities, in the full range of what that means, had access to not just the city and city government, but participation in our communities in ways that we can only learn about if we sit in concert with people with disabilities to understand the various challenges that are required.

I would like to say this. If this was the only piece of legislation that our government had dealt with regarding disabilities, it would be a good piece of legislation. However, I also want to bring to the attention of the House all of the other measures we have taken across other forms of legislation and other forms of programs that I think are contributing to a change in this country and give people with disabilities the absolute place of citizenship they deserve simply by being Canadian.

For example, one of the requirements of the national housing strategy is to overshoot and make accessible housing a stronger requirement than it is in any provincial or municipal building code across this country. Of all units built as affordable housing in this country, 20% must be built to a universal design standard. A universal design standard is something that often brings to mind people who use mobility devices. However, the reality is, and we have heard it from the members opposite, that disabilities are much more complex, diverse and subtle than simply the ones that spring to mind in a stereotypical way. Therefore, a universal design is being brought to bear through the national housing strategy, which is also enshrined in a human rights approach to housing so that we make sure that we build housing for everybody when we use public dollars to create affordability. In the housing sector itself, some of the most progressive organizations in this country have pushed back against it for being too expensive. The cost of not doing it is what is too expensive. The cost of not making sure that when we use public dollars to build housing we build it for everybody is critically important to understand.

Additionally, when we look at other issues, such as the passengers' bill of rights, there is a nod to it. When we talk about the income supports that are designed to lift individuals out of poverty, we know that poverty impacts people with disabilities in ways that are far more complex and far more serious than simply addressing poverty for poverty's sake. Therefore, some of our programs have been intentionally designed to make sure that those programs are also stepped up.

I will provide an important example around public transit. Our investments in public transit are designed on a per-ridership basis and are invested into communities that provide transit right now. As well, they are designed to make sure that accessible transit is spoken to, not only in terms of providing new service, which is critical, and making sure things like elevator programs and subway stations in the city of Toronto are eligible to receive federal funding, but also that repairs to accessible buses are eligible.

We know that many communities have made the initial investment to get accessible community buses or DARTS into various parts of this country. Some of those communities were investing the first time with new dollars, but without the operating dollars for investment, they were losing that service to disrepair. One of the reasons we changed the infrastructure program to include state of good repair for public transit was specifically to address the issue of the fragility of some of those accessible buses. We need to make sure that accessible transit is available in many more communities right across the country.

We have also included active transportation in the infrastructure fund. This is important because we have built cities and communities across this country that do not accommodate mobility. Not every city in this country has a dipped curb at every intersection, which should be a standard design right across the country. There is also the retrofitting of traffic lights and intersections for people who require audible assistance to get across intersections. All of these things are part of what active transportation now funds. It is not just the big-ticket items of big subways, big pipes or big sewer plants, it is also the fine-grain infrastructure of cities that have to be built to accommodate everybody in this country. Our national infrastructure program accommodates that.

To speak specifically to the legislation here today, I want to explain, from the perspective of someone who is a parliamentary secretary and has to manage the flow from parliamentarians to minister's offices and manage the way in which amendments come forward, why it appears sometimes that an opposition amendment that is accepted eventually by the government is not accepted in its written form and has to be woven into the legislation because legislation often covers more than one bill and more than one form of federal regulation.

If the legislation is not written in a particular way, gaps are created within the system and those are the loopholes that quite often create the cracks that people fall through. For example, when we talk about the words “shall” or “must”, in drafting when I was a councillor at city hall we always looked for the words that were operative or provided permissions as opposed to instructions and tried to tighten legislation as much as possible.

With the federal drafting guidelines, because of the shared jurisdiction in many components of this bill with provincial, federal and municipal jurisdiction, and sometimes indigenous governments, we cannot force federal laws into those areas. We have to literally fit federal laws into those areas. That is why some of the language had to be fine-tuned to make sure it was consistent. We could not get to that in time for the committee. As the opposition has said, there have been 70 amendments. It is good in spirit, except in principle. We had to workshop and wordsmith them into the legislation to make sure they were operable across all the clauses, all areas of federal jurisdiction and all the intergovernmental realities this legislation governs.

On that point, when the legislation went forward to the Senate, we were still working with the spirit of those amendments knowing that senators were going to be working on them as well. We were having dialogue with senators about what amendments might be coming forward and how to fine-tune them to better fit them into the legislation, as well as looking at what legislation might come back to this House and whether it would have to be fine-tuned after having gone through the screen of the Senate.

It is a complex process of forming the language around the legislation. If it is not done properly, unintended consequences can have real impacts. On this issue, impacting people with disabilities unintentionally is doing harm to a community that has already suffered enough. Getting the law right was just as important as the timing of that legislation.

I do not really care who puts the legislation around the deadline to make sure that some of the elements of this bill must be enacted by a certain point in time. It does not really matter to me whether it is an opposition member, a Senate member, a government member or a bureaucrat who comes up with the notion. The idea is that we have to work together to evolve it into the right language and the right legislation.

We have taken the good advice of the opposition, the stakeholders and the senators and come up with an excellent bill that moves this agenda forward in a progressive and smart way, in the right way for people with disabilities.

As part of this process, the opposition has asked why it has taken so long. When one is in government, one is criticized for doing one of two things by one of two ways. One is either told that this was rushed to the House and time was not taken to consult, and one should have slowed down and consulted with stakeholders before bringing the legislation forward, or else one is criticized for consulting too much and not getting it to the House fast enough.

On this particular issue with landmark legislation, our government deliberately chose to consult widely across all of government. We chose to consult with provincial, municipal and indigenous governments. Fundamentally and most importantly, at the centre of every one of those consultations were the people with lived experience. We decided deliberately that because of the complexity of the community, the difference in geography of this country and the different reaches and federal regulations that had to be addressed through this legislation, that consultation ahead of introduction was critically important.

In fact, my conversation with David Lepofsky first started when we began to look at this legislation three years ago. It was not even a responsibility of the file I was carrying at the time. However, having come from the city, I had some experience with how legislation moves forward with government and I knew some of the experts in the field, people like Sandra Carpenter and others we had worked with previously with the city. I knew that if I could establish those relationships, bring them into the consultation, make that conversation robust, check with ministerial staff and my colleagues, monitor the work on committee and do the consultation properly, that we would get as big and strong a bill, as well as the most robust set of changes possible. That is why I thought consultation was important.

The opposition asks why we are waiting until the third year of our term to get through the House, and it is for that reason and that reason alone. It is not a sense of not having an urgency to address these issues. It is important to address them and the urgency is important, but getting it right is just as important. It is about having time to make sure that the Senate can give it a second look, that the committee has a proper process and that people with disabilities are involved. It is also about taking a look at what the committee did and the lessons that were learned. For example, making sure we had an inclusionary process, sign language, Braille and all the different forms of accommodation, including time for people with intellectual disabilities to speak without having the clock run out on them. It also includes making sure we had different ways of reaching out to these communities. This was the work of a Parliament seized with this issue and a government that seized this issue. As a result, it has the legislation here today.

The last point I want to address is this notion of why the Liberals are not all standing up and speaking one at a time. Every one of us has a story we could tell about the experience we have had in our families, our communities and our political life as we have come to a stronger understanding of some of the challenges we face or others face in our communities or in our families. There are disabilities in so many of the stories of people who sit in this legislature and it is one of the reasons why so many people are engaged in this file the way they are engaged. It comes from a very good space.

The reality is that as a government we are trying to get this to a vote. The longer I speak, the further away the vote is. We know that we are coming to the end of a term of Parliament and we know that things can happen that interrupt any single process, so we are nervous that we would not get this to a vote. We want this to come to a vote as soon as possible. We know that there are people in the galleries who have come here to watch the vote so that they can be present at the time when this historic legislation is passed.

The reason we are not standing up to repeat the points and to go on with the points endlessly and make the same point over and over again is not because we are afraid of the opposition. None of us on this side of the House is afraid of the opposition. We have dealt with the opposition members for four years and we know exactly where we stand with them. There are good voices, good questions and good points to be made and listened to and the legislation can always be made better; no one is saying that is not true. At the end of the day, we want this vote to happen and to happen in a way that shows that the whole country is behind the transformation of the approach to the rights of people who have disabilities. The whole country is behind the response that we all share to make sure that accommodation is not just reasonable but is progressively realized in a way that respects the dignity and the human rights of all the individuals involved.

I know that we will be revisiting this issue because disability and approaches to disability change over time. We need a fluid and flexible law that allows us to do that. Many of the elements that the community wanted in the legislation are going to be captured in regulation so we do not have to go through a three-year process to make changes to do the right thing, in the right way, in the right time frame. Ministers will be able to do that after the community and people have come forward and asked for those changes. The regulations can be changed without going through a robust, time-consuming and expensive parliamentary process. I am very proud of the fact that the legislation is good, but I am equally proud of the fact that the regulations are just as strong and provide that flexibility and ingenuity to make sure we can respond to the needs of these communities and the individuals as quickly and as effectively as possible, but from a perspective of the Human Rights Commission.

I said that the last point would be my last one, but I failed to address this in my general comments and I want to address it.

There are two approaches that are contemplated when looking at how one adjudicates or forces the government through complaint to respond to shortcomings in our system. One is to have the one-door approach; the other one is for everybody to have shared responsibility.

If, for example, the CRTC does not properly regulate new technologies to make sure they are accessible to and usable by all Canadians, we could have a single office that people go to in order to complain and then the office would have to manage the conversation and the process with the CRTC, or people could set it directly at the door of the CRTC and the CRTC could respond.

What we have in the design of this legislation is the best of both worlds. We have clearly an advocate that is housed at the Human Rights Commission that is part of the process of evaluating the implementation of this bill and the corrections to this bill and creates a living office to make sure this legislation is living and responds in real time to people's needs. However, they also have charged every single federal authority that touches the lives of Canadians with the responsibility that all of us have, which is to make sure the accommodations are progressive, beyond reasonable but effective to make sure people's human rights and dignity are fully respected. I do not think we are going to get a slower, more bureaucratic response. What we will get is a faster, more effective response by having the process established at every single federal institution, because every single federal institution has a responsibility to make sure all Canadians' rights and dignities are respected.

I am proud to be supporting this legislation. I am proud that our government has taken the time to get it right and to work with the communities, the individuals and the advocates involved. I am glad that we have had good input from the opposition and robust debate. Better is always possible. On this file, better must be achieved as a possibility because that is the goal here: how to make sure the rights of every Canadian, regardless of the physical circumstance he or she is born with or acquired, be respected with dignity and how to make sure the federal government responds to complaints and concerns effectively, quickly and in a progressive way.

I am proud our government is the government that has brought this forward. I am proud that we will be passing this legislation, and I am proud to be sitting in the House to vote on it.

Adam Vaughan

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