Chris Charlton

[Petitions, March 21st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition today on behalf of hard-working families on Hamilton Mountain who are increasingly recognizing the existence of the prosperity gap in Canada. They do not feel they are benefiting from the economic growth they keep hearing about. This is especially true for the many Hamiltonians who are working full time but are still living below the poverty line.

To that end, they have asked me to table a petition calling on the House to restore the federal minimum wage which the Liberals eliminated in 1996 and to pass NDP Bill C-375 to set the minimum wage at $10 an hour as a first step in moving toward a living wage. I am delighted to present this petition on their behalf.

[The Budget, March 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, first, let me point out yet again that the vast majority of seniors who the member just described as poor are not investing in income trusts. Nonetheless, I think the question he asked is an important one.

We have been advocating, long before I got to the House, that when the income trusts were created, we needed accountability and transparency. I agree with the member that the Prime Minister perhaps misled Canadians inadvertently by suggesting that income trusts would be safe under his administration.

The reality is seniors made investments based on that campaign promise and then he broke that promise. That is why seniors have lost money in income trusts. Those investments probably should not have been made. They should not have taken him at his word during the election campaign.

Our position has been absolutely consistent. We need accountability and transparency. We are dealing with the retirement incomes of seniors. They deserve to be protected and they deserve the protection of the House.

[The Budget, March 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I make absolutely no apologies for standing up for the interests of my constituents in the riding of Hamilton Mountain. I am relaying to the House what I have heard on every doorstep.

I appreciate the member may think that allowing for the creation of RRSPs and greater contributions or enhanced contributions under RESPs may be his vision of how people can get their way out of poverty. The reality is those who are most in need do not have money left over at the end of the month to invest in RRSPs. Those are the people for whom we are fighting. That is why we cannot support the budget.

Disproportionately corporate tax benefits total up to $9 billion. Those who are most vulnerable in my community will receive nothing. I did not say the budget had no baby steps forward. I said, on balance, the budget does very little to close the prosperity gap. That is what we are fighting for in the House. That is why we cannot support the budget.

[The Budget, March 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time today with the member for Acadie—Bathurst.

I am delighted to participate in this debate today, both as the NDP critic for seniors and pensions, but more importantly, as the member of Parliament for Hamilton Mountain.

During the last two weeks that the House was not sitting, I spent every day talking to people at their doors and in my community office, meeting with groups and attending community functions. Everywhere the message was the same. People are increasingly recognizing the existence of a prosperity gap in Canada. They do not feel that they are benefiting from the economic growth they keep hearing about, and they are right. The numbers back them up.

Not only is there a growing gap between the rich and the poor, there is also an alarming erosion of economic security for middle class Canadians. I stood in the House yesterday, before the budget was tabled, and relayed what ordinary Hamiltonians told me that their priorities were for achieving some fairness. Now that we have the budget in hand, I would like to evaluate it in that context.

Did the budget close the prosperity gap for people on Hamilton Mountain who are working hard and playing by the rules but who are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet? Let us look at each of the items I raised yesterday in turn.

I spoke about the desire among my constituents to see some significant property tax relief through federal investments in urban infrastructure. In a community where our aging infrastructure is leading to regular flooding, poorly maintained roads and constant struggles to expand public transit while keeping fares down, Hamiltonians had hoped for a serious investment in our city. Ratepayers cannot afford to shoulder the additional burden of these essential investments solely on their property taxes.

These are precisely the hard-working families that the government says that it wants to support, but instead of making the infrastructure investments that would relieve our local tax burden, the infrastructure spending that the budget actually entails is money that will flow to the provinces, not directly to the municipalities, and it must be spent on public-private partnerships.

For anyone not familiar with the significance of the P3 stipulation, let me just remind them of Highway 407 where a public asset was turned into a toll road to satisfy the voracious revenue appetite of the private sector. That arrangement is costing Hamiltonians dearly and the last thing we need are more such infrastructure investments that end up costing us over and over again.

On public transit, the budget is virtually silent. There is absolutely no new dedicated money for transit. In short, the most basic needs of our municipality have gone unmet.

Second, I called yesterday for a manufacturing sector strategy. Hamilton has lost thousands of decent paying jobs as a result of restructuring and plant closures. Not only is the budget silent on strategic investments to Canada's industrial heartland, but it ignores the plight of displaced workers as well.

This budget offers no support to older and laid off workers. It is silent on employment insurance. It fails to protect the wages and pensions of workers in cases of commercial bankruptcies. To add insult to injury, it keeps in place almost $9 billion in corporate tax cuts over the next four years. Clearly, this budget was written more for those at the boardroom table than for hard-working families around the kitchen table.

Equally galling is the fact that this budget fails to address the needs of transient workers. We have significant labour shortages in parts of our country with decent paying jobs beckoning workers from other regions but this budget does nothing to remove the barriers to accessing those jobs.

This is particularly true for workers in the building trades who often go to job sites for a limited amount of time until a project is complete. The building trades have been lobbying for over 30 years to be able to deduct their accommodation and meal expenses from their income taxes when they work at a job site that is more than 80 kilometres away from their homes. They and I had hoped that this issue would be addressed in this budget.

I have a private member's bill, Bill C-390, on the floor of this House that would do precisely that. I had indicated to the Minister of Finance that I would be happy to see progress on this issue regardless of whether it was through the passage of my bill or through a government initiative. In the end, the government sat on its hands. Again, it could not help but add insult to injury by increasing the meal allowance for long haul truckers from 50% to 80%.

All the building trades have asked for is a little bit of fairness. The government's inaction comes as a slap in the face.

The third issue my constituents raised with me was the gouging that has been happening at the pumps. For people who require a vehicle to get to and from work each and every day, nothing has had a more direct inflationary impact on their household budgets than the price of gasoline.

Where is the federal watchdog to ensure that hard-working families are not being hosed? Where is the relief? Instead, ordinary Canadians learned yesterday that they do not rate. Instead of helping them make ends meet, the government continued its billion dollar subsidies to the oil and gas industries for the next three years, with a complete phase-out not even in the picture until five years after that.

Again, the rich are getting richer while hard-working Canadians are struggling to make ends meet. The budget did nothing to close the prosperity gap.

What about those who are living at or near the poverty line? Yesterday's budget created the working income tax benefit, purportedly to help the lowest income earner. In fact, it does nothing to help those who are making the minimum wage. While serious initiatives to help the most vulnerable in our communities are always welcome, the government should have sent a resounding message that in a country as wealthy as Canada it is completely unacceptable that someone who is working 40 hours a week at minimum wage is still living below the poverty line.

In the absence of showing a willingness to move toward a living wage by setting the federal minimum wage at $10 immediately, the budget has done little to close the prosperity gap.

I also called yesterday for investments in post-secondary education. Again, the government would want hard-working Canadians to believe that it has moved aggressively on this file but let us take a closer look. These investments create scholarships for graduate students, but do nothing for those who are working on their first degree. These are precisely the students who are weighing whether they can afford to get the education they need to participate in the knowledge based economy against a potential average student debt of more than $24,000.

A budget that does not address student debt and student loans does nothing to enhance access to post-secondary education for children in modest and middle income families.

With respect to yet another key priority for residents on Hamilton Mountain, it is good to see that the government is at least taking baby steps forward with respect to the environment. However, it is obvious that the government has not spent a great deal of time thinking about this issue and is offering little more than the symbolic gesture that the Liberal leader gave Canadians when he named his dog Kyoto. There is no serious commitment in the budget to the Kyoto accord, to mandatory fuel efficiency standards or short, medium and long term targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The following is perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the budget. The Conservatives are offering a $2,000 tax credit on the purchase of green cars, but sadly the vast majority of these vehicles are being built in Japan and in the United States. Indirectly they are subsidizing foreign car manufacturers. Instead what they should have been doing is investing in the environment and in Canadian jobs by supporting the production of green cars right here in Canada, but nowhere in the budget do we find an auto sector strategy.

Moreover, the carbon tax that is going to be imposed on vehicles that are not fuel efficient is going to impact the very middle class families that the government says it wants to help. Parents who are driving their kids to hockey, soccer and baseball games are buying the minivans. Neither the $310 child tax credit nor the $500 children's fitness tax credit will compensate for the up to $4,000 surtax on their minivans.

I have one last point on the environment. I was pleased to see the cleanup of Hamilton Harbour get at least a cursory mention in the budget, but an $11 million allocation for cleaning up contaminated sediment in Hamilton Harbour as well as the Niagara River, the Detroit River, St. Marys River, Thunder Bay, Peninsula Harbour, St. Clair River and Bay of Quinte is clearly wholly inadequate. The city of Hamilton alone had asked the federal government to contribute $30 million toward the cleanup of Randle Reef.

Equally inadequate is the government's investment in health care. While some new initiatives are being funded, the top of mind concerns of families in Hamilton are not being addressed. There is no mention in the budget of training and hiring new health care professionals to deal with the doctor shortage. There is no investment in pharmacare to help people with their drug costs. There is no investments in home care to allow seniors to live independently in their own homes longer and to take some of the burden off their children who all too often are becoming primary caregivers by default. There is no investment in long term care despite the fact that many acute care beds in our hospitals are tied up needlessly because chronic care beds are not available.

The seniors whose tax dollars built our health care system deserve to have it be there for them at a time in their lives when they need it most. The same is true with respect to their retirement income. The budget is a disgrace when it comes to its treatment of seniors. It brags about the fact that it allows seniors to work longer when in reality most seniors only continue to work because they cannot afford to retire. In Hamilton 25% of seniors live in poverty and 36% of single women over the age of 75 live in poverty, none of whom I might point out can benefit from pension splitting because they either never had or no longer have a partner or a spouse.

Announcing through the budget that seniors should now count themselves lucky because the government will allow them to be Wal-Mart greeters is hardly a strategy for allowing seniors to retire with the dignity and respect they deserve.

Seniors had hoped for increases to the OAS and GIS. They had hoped that the tax rate for the lowest income bracket would be dropped from 15.5% to 15%, where it was before the budget of the Conservatives of last year. They had hoped for new affordable housing and expanded public transit. They had hoped to reimbursed for all the full amount that the government shortchanged them as a result of Statistic Canada's mistake in calculating the consumer price index. None of these things were delivered in the budget.

By definition, seniors cannot wait forever. For a government that supported my seniors charter in June last year, it has shown itself contemptuous of both the will of the House and the very real needs of seniors.

[Petitions, March 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition I am pleased to table today builds on the questions that I have been raising in the House about fairness for ordinary Canadians who were shortchanged by their government as a result of an error in calculating the rate of inflation.

The petitioners call on Parliament to take full responsibility for this error and take the required steps to repay every Canadian who has been shortchanged by a government program because of the miscalculation of the CPI.

The petition is signed by almost 100 seniors who live in the Swansea apartments in my riding of Hamilton Mountain. They are people who have worked hard all their lives, played by the rules, and are now finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. All they are asking for is a little bit of fairness. I am pleased to table this petition on their behalf.

[Petitions, March 20th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table two petitions today. Let me begin with one from the building trades. This petition was circulated by two community leaders in my riding of Hamilton Mountain: Joe Beattie, who is the business manager for the Hamilton-Brantford Ontario Building and Construction Trades Council, and Geoff Roman, the chair of the Political Action Committee of UA Local 67.

They have lobbied successive governments for over 30 years to achieve some basic fairness for their members. They want trades persons and indentured apprentices to be able to deduct travel and accommodation expenses from their taxable incomes so they can secure and maintain employment at construction sites that are more than 80 kilometres from their homes.

It makes no sense for trades persons to be out of work in one area of the country while another region suffers from temporary skilled labour shortages simply because the cost of travelling is too high. To that end they have gathered hundreds of signatures in support of my bill, Bill C-390, which allows for precisely the kind of deductions that their members have been asking for.

I am pleased to table the petition on their behalf and share their disappointment that this item was not addressed in yesterday's budget.

[Economic Prosperity, March 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I spent the last two weeks talking to hard-working families in Hamilton Mountain. They are increasingly recognizing the existence of a prosperity gap in Canada. They do not feel that they are benefiting from the economic growth they keep hearing about.

They are right. The numbers back them up. Not only is there a growing gap between the rich and the poor, there is also an alarming erosion of economic security for middle class Canadians.

Here is what my constituents want to see in the budget: property tax relief through federal investments in urban infrastructure; a manufacturing sector strategy and help for building trades to secure decent paying jobs; fairness at the gas pumps instead of billion dollar subsidies to the oil and gas industries; a $10 minimum wage so that no Hamiltonian working full time is still living below the poverty line; investments in green technology and post-secondary education to help climate change and our kids; assistance for cleaning up Randle Reef; timely access to public health care; pension protection and income security in retirement.

In short, Hamiltonians can do without flashy pre-election announcements. All that working families want is fairness from their government. Surely that is not too much to ask.

[Canada Pension Plan, March 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would think that after the lengthy debate in the House about that charter in June of last year which actually led to the adoption of this charter by the House the member would be aware of the rights that were enumerated in the charter. Those rights are the right to income security, the right to health care, the right to wellness, the right to lifelong learning and above all, a mechanism to give real access to seniors for all of the government programs and services that the charter outlines.

[Canada Pension Plan, March 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. This bill is a little bit of flag waving to try to placate seniors and for the government to say that it did something in the House of Commons to address their concerns.

Substantively the bill does very little. The seniors in the member's riding of Timmins—James Bay are like the seniors of Hamilton Mountain and the seniors in Victoria that my other colleague spoke about. They do not need more rhetoric. What they need from the government is action.

We have the capacity to deal with those things in the House. I tabled a motion asking that the House of Commons review the income needs of seniors on a regular basis, that we establish adequate benefit levels and that we say to seniors that it is unacceptable that they are living in poverty after all the contributions they have made to build this amazing country. If we are not going to do that, at a minimum we should take seriously Bill C-336 which I introduced so that seniors can access their CPP entitlements retroactively.

It is completely insane that we rely on funeral homes to let people know about their survivor benefits when a loved one passes away. Why can the government not engage in active outreach? It used to do that. There used to be people in Services Canada who counselled people with respect to their pension entitlements. Those people are now dealing with everything from boat licences to employment insurance. That is not good enough.

Our seniors deserve the kind of hands on specialized attention that gives them access to their benefits in a timely fashion. If that is not provided, then at a minimum seniors should be given full retroactivity for their benefits so that no matter when they find out about their entitlements they can get the money that is legally and legitimately theirs. That is the minimum of what we need to do to lift seniors out of poverty.

When the government supported the seniors' charter we all saw that as beacon of hope. We thought that perhaps just for once this House would move forward and take the right steps on behalf of seniors. Clearly that has not happened yet. On the eve of an election I am not optimistic that it is going to happen, but boy, I know that the government is going to be out there waving the flag and saying, “Trust us. We will do it next time”.

I do not think seniors are so trusting any more. They cannot be fooled. They deserve action now.

[Canada Pension Plan, March 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to participate on behalf of the NDP caucus in the third reading debate on Bill C-36, An Act to amend the Canada Pension Plan and the Old Age Security Act.

I know that the government wants the bill to pass through the House expeditiously. With an election perhaps just days away, the government desperately needs something to hold up to seniors to say, “See? We acted on your concerns”. However, every time I have pushed the government for action on issues like fully pension retroactivity or reimbursement of the money owed to seniors as a result of the CPI miscalculation, it has responded by dodging the issues at hand and instead has pointed to this bill simply as a placebo.

That is all this bill is, a placebo. It is a placebo that has all the right things in its title. It references the three cornerstones of most seniors' retirement income, namely the GIS, the OAS and the CPP. In doing so it raises hopes among seniors that this legislation will finally take the necessary steps to lift them out of poverty, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the bill's promising title, it does little to improve the lives of the vast majority of seniors in Canada. Instead, it engages in administrative tinkering that serves the government more than it serves its purported target audience. There is only one section in the entire bill that is truly laudable, and that is that the government is finally going to waive the requirement for a renewal application for the GIS and allowance benefits after an initial application has been made. That change, quite frankly, is long overdue.

Once seniors have applied for and received the GIS, there is absolutely no need for them to fill out subsequent applications. Their income tax forms give the government all the information that is needed to determine continued eligibility. Removing this burden from seniors is indeed a welcome relief.

Sadly, the bill is more remarkable for what it failed to achieve than for what it accomplished.

During the past few weeks I held consultations with seniors throughout my riding of Hamilton Mountain. It did not matter whether I was talking to seniors on their doorsteps, at a meeting of the residents' council of Swansea Apartments, at a gathering of active seniors at the Sackville Hill Seniors Recreation Centre, or at a meeting of over 150 seniors at St. Elizabeth Village, the message was always the same. Seniors are concerned primarily about the adequacy of their incomes and about the need for improved health care.

I recognize that health care issues are beyond the scope of this bill, but suffice it to say that huge numbers of elderly people in my community are suffering. They are suffering because they cannot afford the diapers for their incontinence. They cannot afford the new lenses for their glasses that would allow them to carry on their normal independent lives. They cannot afford the dentures that are so crucial to their nutrition and to their overall health.

The seniors who told me those stories were shy about admitting those problems publicly. Most of them came up to me privately at the end of meetings and tearfully told me of their personal care needs. In many instances they had to swallow their pride to reach out for help.

That is not the retirement with dignity and respect that the government promised to seniors when it voted for my seniors charter. This House has adopted the charter as a statement of fundamental rights that each and every senior in Canada deserves to enjoy as a contributing member of our society. The time to enact those rights is now.

The other concern that is top of mind for seniors not just in Hamilton but right across the country is income security. Seniors everywhere told me that they are worried about the solvency of their private pensions, the adequacy of survivor pensions should they predecease their spouse, the sufficiency of CPP and public income supports, and their ability to cope with what Statistics Canada confirms is a higher rate of inflation for seniors than for average Canadians.

Since the mid-1990s seniors' incomes have reached a ceiling. The gap between seniors' revenues and those of other Canadians is increasing. According to the National Advisory Council on Aging, between 1997 and 2003 the mean income of senior households increased by $4,100 while the average income of other Canadian households increased by $9,000.

The situation is even more pronounced for seniors living alone. In total, over one-quarter of a million seniors live under the low income cutoff, or as we more commonly say, below the poverty line. In 2004 about one-third of seniors, most of whom were single women, had little other income and were dependent on OAS and GIS for an average annual income of only $12,400.

Living in poverty is hardly a retirement with dignity and respect. So when seniors learned that the government was finally going to open up the Canada Pension Plan and the Old Age Security Act and bring in amendments, they greeted the news with cautious optimism. They eagerly awaited a sign that the government understood the financial plight of seniors and that it would do the right thing for those who built our country.

However, when seniors had a chance to review the bill, they felt cheated. The programs that seniors rely on most for their financial security are finally being amended and yet nowhere does the bill address the most urgent needs articulated by seniors. The bill does not increase benefit levels to lift seniors out of poverty. The bill does not allow seniors to claim retroactive benefits, even if they are just trying to access their own money, as is the case with the Canada pension plan. The bill does nothing to foster a higher take-up for those unaware that they are eligible for government benefits.

Yes, we will be supporting Bill C-36 because we must at least ensure that the poorest of seniors will have easier access to the GIS, but for everything else, we must now pin our hopes on this afternoon's budget. Perhaps it will live up to the spirit of the seniors' charter and see the government walk the walk.

Seniors are still waiting to be reimbursed for the StatsCan error in calculating the consumer price index that has shortchanged seniors for years on the increases to their CPP, OAS and GIS entitlements. Will the government's budget this afternoon fix this egregious wrong? Will the government allocate resources to re-establish the government specialists within Services Canada who can help people access their pension entitlements fully and in a timely fashion? If not, will the budget at least contain provisions that mirror my private member's Bill C-336 and allow for full retroactive benefits plus interest when someone applies for the CPP?

CPP is a pay as you go, contribution based program that is funded solely by employers and employees. It is absurd that a person who is late in applying for his or her pension is only entitled to 11 months of retroactive benefits. It is that person's money. It is not the government's money.

Will the budget live up to the other commitments the government made to seniors by voting for my seniors' charter in the House of Commons? Will it invest in accessible, universal, public health care by increasing funding to primary care, home care, palliative care, pharmacare, preventive care and health promotion? Will it support secure, accessible and affordable housing? Will it create lifelong learning opportunities? Will it finally create the office of the seniors advocate to ensure that seniors are involved in policy making and have access to all government programs and services? This afternoon the proof will be in the pudding.

If the government wants to be taken seriously with respect to its treatment of seniors, it needs to do more than talk the talk. It needs to walk the walk. Bill C-36 left seniors feeling betrayed. It is not too late to do the right thing. Let us listen to the voices of seniors in Hamilton and right across the country. Let us give them the support they need to retire with the dignity and respect they deserve. We owe them at least that much.