Michelle Dockrill

[Petitions, November 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud today to table a petition requesting this Parliament to support the opening of Donkin Mine as part of the crown-owned, free mine operation under the jurisdiction of the Cape Breton Development Corporation.

This petition consists of over 550 names from various communities on Cape Breton Island, such as Glace Bay, Gabarouse, Sydney River, New Waterford and the community of Donkin.

[Devco, November 21st, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, my question is addressed to the Minister of Natural Resources. Devco's chairman, Mr. Joe Shannon, pretends to be working hard to modernize Devco.

One of his projects has been to rip up the rail track used to haul coal away from the mines. In the name of efficiency trucks are now used instead. I am sure it is the desire to modernize that has led Mr. Shannon to pursue this project.

I am sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Mr. Shannon is the owner of one of the largest trucking companies on Cape Breton Island.

While the House has heard many stories about Liberal patronage, it is rare to find an example this blatant—

[Devco, November 5th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Natural Resources.

During a recent meeting with the auditor general, we were informed that a special examination of the crown corporation Devco will be concluding soon but only Devco's board of directors have the right to see the results of this audit.

Taking into account the latest questionable activity of Devco's management, and on behalf of the members from the United Mine Workers of America who are in Ottawa today, will the minister live up to the standards of openness and accountability that his party campaigned on and table—

[Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, October 28th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I stand today in support of Bill C-6. While understanding that there are different views of the legislation within the Northwest Territories from aboriginal organizations, industry and other public interests, we fully support the timely implementation of land claims legislation, the substance of this bill.

Parliament has been delivered a package resulting from extensive negotiations among the Gwich'in, Sahtu, federal and territorial governments but there are concerns about the adequacy of the involvement from other aboriginal organizations and the public.

This is a very important piece of legislation as it will change environmental management of the western Northwest Territories. The bodies that will be established under this legislation are institutions of public government and they represent a significant shift of power and management to a more local level, something we clearly support.

At the same time it is important to ensure that some of the significant gains made through legislation, like participant funding for review panels in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, are reflected in the bill.

Consistent with the principles of participatory democracy, we will strongly urge the standing committee to hold public hearings in the north to hear the diversity of views on the bill. Getting such comprehensive negotiated packages in the House seriously limits the critical role of the member of Parliament to just acceptance of the package.

We believe that the committee should devote part of its attention to analyse the process which was implemented to develop this legislation. We are dealing with issues that, in virtue of a process, are in a fast track. To some extent the process of negotiations and consultations among the interested parties shut out Parliament from the decision making process.

We have an opportunity to assess one of the processes used to limit the role of Parliament. In this case we suggest that the committee travel to the north and act as an open forum for a detailed analysis of the bill but also of the process followed for the development of the legislation; the role of the bureaucracy, the acceptance of public input and the balance obtained among divergent sides, etc. This is an opportunity to decide if committees should be given more resources, more freedom to travel, to get in touch with the people of Canada and enhance the credibility of this House with the people of Canada.

There is also a fundamental value behind the implementation of this legislation. One of the major issues during the free trade agreement was the future of the water resources of this country. Canadians were extremely concerned that the policy implemented by the federal government was detrimental to the capacity of Canadians to manage one of the most abundant resources in this country, water. For Canadians engaged in the free trade agreement debate, Canadian water was not a commodity to be traded in a commercial market or just a resource to be exploited. In this bill we are doing justice not only to the aboriginal people but to those Canadians who fought for the prohibition of bulk export of Canadian water.

This legislation clearly recognized that for aboriginal people as well as for many other non-aboriginal Canadians land and water are not just economic commodities. This kind of co-management system makes it more likely that water will not be traded as a good. This bill also is a formal recognition by the Government of Canada that land and water are an inextricable part of aboriginal identity, deeply rooted in moral and spiritual values. In doing justice to aboriginal people, Parliament is indirectly recognizing those who took a similar approach to the water issue during the critical debate on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement.

Different societies do have different views on property or resource rights. The views of the federal government and some provincial governments are of open access or indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources that can be bought and sold in a commercial market. Aboriginal people view land and other resources as their common property.

Different values and visions create different management styles that could led to conflict and confrontation. Bill C-6 creates conditions to eliminate or minimize cultural clashes and promote or return to aboriginal people their rights to take part in the governance and management of land and resources. It is clear that we are addressing a fundamental concern of aboriginal people, their role in the management over land and water as well as other resources critical to their goal of self-sufficiency and self-reliance.

The co-management approach will allow an optimal balance between the values and beliefs of aboriginal people with the values and beliefs of other segments of the Canadian population.

We are very pleased with the message being sent to the aboriginal communities of Canada through the implementation of this bill. The co-management created for the land and water resources in the Mackenzie Valley is a positive model for all of us. It indicates that co-operation and honest, transparent dialogue create condition for substantive changes in the relationships between first nations and the people of Canada.

More experiments in regional public government, shared jurisdiction and shared management of resources may be coming and we look forward to them.

We hope that certain segments of the department of Indian affairs will modify their attitude to aboriginal people and participate fully in the implementation of this new relationship with the aboriginal people of Canada.

In conclusion, we support the speedy passage of this legislation and we call on the Government of Canada to proceed as soon as possible with its response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and to include the Parliament of Canada in the overall process of policy decision making and evaluation in this new relationship with the aboriginal people of Canada.

[Infrastructure, October 23rd, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, last month $7.2 million in infrastructure projects were announced for Cape Breton county, creating 214 short term jobs. Good news? Maybe not. When my constituents tried to find out about those jobs no answers were forthcoming.

Even more interesting, there are four byelections going on in Nova Scotia as our seatless premier tries to win a place in the legislature.

Recently when I crossed the border into the premier's sought after riding, I was shocked by the beehive of infrastructure activity.

Why are the only jobs created in Cape Breton always designed to help Liberals win elections? Why do those jobs always disappear when the polls close?

Nova Scotians are fed up with being exploited, fed up with only getting the roads fixed at election time.

Cape Bretoners deserve to know how and when they can get information about these projects regardless of their political affiliation.

As for the byelections, Nova Scotians will not be hoodwinked again. I look forward to congratulating four new NDP MLAs on November 5.

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

You've done a wonderful job.

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

Madam Speaker, it is ironic that my colleague does not feel that a nurse, a doctor and a teacher are relevant jobs and are not needed.

As I reiterated in my address to the motion, I come from a part of the country that has the highest rate of unemployment in the country. Over the last two years 700 individuals in the health care system have lost their jobs due to the cuts by the government. My colleague is saying that they are not important jobs. I invite him to come to Cape Breton and talk to the gentlemen who wishes he had that nurse to look after his wife. That is the problem.

The Reform are not making the government accountable for what it is doing to the country.

[Supply, October 21st, 1997]

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

Today I rise in favour of the motion. I am proud of the initiative and leadership taken by my party with respect to this motion.

I am honoured today to stand in the House of Commons as the member of Parliament for Bras d'Or, a riding that takes in much of the island of Cape Breton. It sweeps from the coalfields of Glace Bay and Donkin where my father began as a coal miner and where I grew up, down past the historic site of Louisbourg, through the fishing communities to the south and then up again to Cheticamp and the beginning of the Cabot Trail.

My riding is diverse. French, English and aboriginal communities live side by side. There are families who came here from many of the world's nations to work underground or in our steel mills or on our oceans. These are the people of Bras d'Or.

One hundred years ago Glace Bay was the fastest growing town in the British empire. It was a magnet for people from around the world, for people who wanted to make a better life for themselves and their families.

We fought for decades to make conditions better for the workers in our communities. The miners went on strike to fight for a living wage, for safe working conditions. They had to fight tooth and nail for every scrap, for every little advantage that today we would take for granted.

So I come from a region where we are used to fighting, where we are used to having to work hard for everything we have. It has always been a tough place to live and our history is full of hardship and sacrifice.

Cape Breton helped build our country, feeding the people and industry as we expanded to the west. But somewhere over the decades as our success turned into Canada's success, we started to slip away from the centre of national life. The handful of rich men who owned our industries moved on to new ventures in new regions and we were left to cope as best we could.

And cope we did. Cape Bretoners are an industrious people who are used to hard work, who enjoy hard work, who are good at the task they set their minds to. One of the great tragedies of the last two decades has been to see these people deprived of the work they love.

While the rest of the country went through booms and busts, Cape Breton was on a slow decline. Even in the days of big government no thought was given to reviving our island. Instead we saw millions of dollars thrown away on megaprojects that made a few people, often strangely enough, friends of the government of the day, into millionaires and left the people where they had been, increasingly desperate, increasingly isolated. Many left.

Since I was elected in June, I have been amazed at the number of Cape Bretoners I have met across Canada. Nearly all of them left home to find work. Nearly all of them would love to go home again if work was there for them. Of course, there is no work in the late 1990s.

In his town hall meeting last December the Prime Minister told Canadians that people who lived in places like Cape Breton were basically out of luck. Just last week the finance minister spoke at great length about the Canadian economic miracle. But just a few months ago he said that any economic recovery in Canada would likely pass Cape Breton by.

We are not asking for special favours from the government. We do not want any more heavy water plants or other white elephants dreamed up by bureaucrats. All we want is help to get back on our feet, help so that we can do the things Cape Bretoners are best at: hard, honest work.

We have had many promises from the government. We were promised that the Donkin mine would open, a mine built at public expense. It still has not opened. We had a promise that education would be made a priority. Instead, we had the slash and burn budgets of the last three years, budgets that forced the provinces to accept fewer teachers, larger classes and lower standards.

We were promised a fair deal on taxes. Instead, the tax burden went up for working and middle class people, especially in Atlantic Canada where the federal government held hearings with its provincial counterparts and gave us the BST, a good name for a tax I must say.

We are paying more, getting less and the government has told us it is our fault. When offices are closed down, making it impossible for Cape Bretoners to access the services other Canadians take for granted, we are told that we are to blame.

We were promised accessible health care. Instead, we see transfer payments reduced and hospitals closed. We see patients dying because they cannot get access. That is not something I am saying to inflame the members of the government. That is a message straight from more than a dozen doctors in the town of Glace Bay who held a press conference this past May to say that approximately 40 deaths had been directly related to health care cuts. What a disgrace.

Every time I go home I hear about more cases, of patients turned away, of waiting lists, of doctors and nurses so overwhelmed with work and so fatigued that they cannot properly do their jobs, of Canadians dying because they live in Cape Breton. As the Prime Minister put it, I guess they are just not lucky.

This is the human side of the government's action. While the American bankers pat the Minister of Finance on the head and give him extra brownie points from the world finance candy store, my neighbours are sick and sometimes dying.

While the Prime Minister travels to Russia and speaks about the need for the country to reform so it can rise to our level, there is a community in my riding where raw sewage flows through the streets.

The Prime Minister and the Prime Minister in waiting can talk all they want about growth, and the government backbenchers can happily bleat the party line about unemployment. But tell those lines to the people of Birch Grove where the children cannot play outside because of the danger of contamination. Tell that to the man who lost his wife because the doctor did not have time to properly diagnose her.

Some towns and village in Bras d'Or have a real unemployment rate of over 50%. Half the people in the communities are out of work. Many people have given up, finally crushed by decades of struggle that seem to get them nowhere, by odd jobs and government work schemes that promise to lead them back to security but led them instead to their Prime Minister telling them that they had better move if they wanted to get ahead.

We in the New Democratic Party believe we need to improve health care and other social programs, not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it will also create good jobs and enable many more skilled and talented Canadians to participate in the workforce in every part of Canada. Money invested in health care produces three times as many jobs as the money being used for an income tax cut.

I call on the government to expand medicare, to cover home care and prescription drugs so community based and non-hospital care is available to all without an American style, two tier system. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Enforce the principles of the Canada Health Act: universality, accessibility, portability, comprehensiveness and public administration. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Promote a community based health system which is driven by the health care needs of the people rather than fee for service medicine. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Establish a special funding for research and development and pilot projects in the health care field. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Support the development of community based facilities for primary care, for health care and for health support services such as shelters for battered women and women's health centres. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Establish an aboriginal health institute to support aboriginal communities in taking action to improve their health, broaden research, identify culturally relevant approaches to aboriginal health issues and increase advanced education for aboriginal students in the health profession. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Support a national strategy for research treatment and prevention of AIDS. It would create meaningful jobs in Canada.

Canadians deserve a more balanced approach to getting people working. Reducing the deficit does not have to mean the old style slashing pushed by the Liberals, Tories and Reform. It could have been done without threatening health care for Canadians and education for our children.

What is it going to be? Is the government going to own up to its responsibilities in times when questions are tough or is it simply going to duck and weave, dodging blame and grabbing credit wherever it can and thinks it can get away with it?

[Health Care, October 9th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I have good news and bad news for Canadians today.

The good news is, two-tier health care is not a threat any more. The bad news is, it is a reality.

Alberta's first private hospital is now up and running; a private for profit hospital where those who can afford to pay get service and those who cannot are left behind.

Allowing a private hospital to operate paves the way for two-tier health care. The government, egged on by the Reform Party, is standing aside to let it happen. This new private hospital is chomping at the bit to set up shop in Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver.

Canadians want the Minister of Health to take action, not to sit idly by as foreign companies line up to rake in big profits while they dismantle medicare.

Surely patient care must always come before profit.

[Health Care, September 26th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I am both honoured and proud at having been chosen by the people of Bras d'Or to be their voice in Ottawa.

The people of Cape Breton sent a strong message to this government on June 2. It is their right and the right of all Canadians to be guaranteed by this government that they will receive access to quality health care under the Canada Health Act.

It is unacceptable for the people of Bras d'Or to be forced to stand in line and take a number to access even minimal health care. These people are trying to get medical attention, not pick up a parcel at their local department store.

It is with this in mind that I intend to make the government accountable for the devastating effect that has resulted from the cuts to health care through the CHST.

The people in Bras d'Or would like to send a clear message to the government that this type of treatment will not be tolerated.

I call on the government to reverse the cuts and reinvest in health care until such time as the system addresses all the health care needs of my constituents and all Canadians.