For the March issue of Outlooks, I interviewed Liberal MP Mario Silva as part of my unofficial programme of profiling all gay and lesbian parliamentarians for the magazine. I do a few every year, but I also try to make the interviews timely in some sense, though it doesn't always work out that way. When I interviewed Silva, the hook was about campaigning as an out MP and how that has its own particular challenges, and at the time, it looked like we were about to have an election. After all, it didn't look like the government was going to last until the last four by-elections, but lo and behold, it's still going and now it looks like it will last until autumn. Nevertheless, given space considerations and keeping my focus on campaigning, there was plenty from the interview that ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor. These are some of the highlights.
On his being an advocate for human rights:
“I care greatly about human rights issues, I’m the vice chair of the Human Rights committee and we’ve been dealing with a lot of issues around the world on human rights and I have spoken frequently about it. I think where there is a great opportunity for the gay community, and I’d like to work in partnership with and I have already started working with is queer associations, is to deal with issues of gays and lesbians who have been persecuted in many countries around the world and have them come as refugees to Canada – it’s an issue I’m very passionate about and would like to be more active in. I’d also like to see more people in the community be more active in that, and I’ve spoken a few times in Parliament about that, and in the spoken in the Human Rights committee on that, and I think that there’s more that we can do. I think that all of the gains we’ve made in Canada, we should now fight for them globally. Canada could be a very good refuge for these individuals who are suffering a great deal of intolerance and discrimination, hatred and attacks in these other countries, in the Middle East, where you can get killed – it’s very scary. I spoke very strongly about those two Iranian teens that were executed – it was so emotional for me because I thought that I could have been one of those if I was living there. I think the community needs to be more active about those issues. The problem is that people have to qualify to come and it can be very difficult.”
On his role as Treasury Board critic:
“It’s a challenging role, it’s a very tedious role and certainly around the time of the estimates and the budgets when it gets really busy, we go line by line and we pay a lot of attention to the money that was going, in terms of advocacy roles and positions, and even on issues of justice, on crime how much they are spending on prevention as opposed to locking people up, all those things, so I took a very critical look at some of those things. I look at them from my own perspective and viewpoint and I make the recommendations to our party and our leader based on that.”
On the demise of the Court Challenges Programme:
“It’s a real shame because one of the reasons that Canada was perceived internationally as this great defender of Human Rights – our Charter of course, but the fact that people could challenge also laws that are discriminatory against them, and we would pay for that, and few other countries do that, but that was a real landmark decision that we had put forward, and we are very sad that the Conservatives had cut it. They didn’t see the value in it. It’s very interesting because the cuts were directed at certain groups. The money we were talking about was very manageable, a very small amount, but it was women’s groups, it was the special court challenges, it was literacy programmes for adults – little moneys as they see as being run by activists who work against them, and therefore we should cut the funding to cut the activists out of the picture. Whether it was doing any good or not they didn’t care. I think that the Conservatives are still quite upset about how the country has moved so far based on the court challenges and based on the courts – the whole attack on the courts and activists courts by the Prime Minister was incredible and I think that they’ve come to the conclusion that there’s nothing else they can do other than attack the courts to still maintain some of their bases, but the reality is that they’ve lost that battle.”
On his private member's bill banning replacement workers:
“It’s still a very controversial bill, and I haven’t been moving as fast as I could but that’s because I want to make sure that I have the maximum support from all of my colleagues in the caucus before pushing it forward. But we are supposed to be holding second reading soon.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment