Libby Davies

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, first of all, the issue involving Sun Belt is about dealing with this resource and managing it in terms of the public interest. It raises very serious questions about the kinds of trade deals we have signed, like the NAFTA, which place in jeopardy our ability to have a public policy around these issues. Therefore I would disagree with the member's assumption.

In terms of it already being policy, I think that begs the question: If it is already in place and operable, then why do we have these kinds of situations developing? The fact is, there is no national legislation, and legislation has been promised by the Liberal government.

If the member believes that it is already in place, then I would assume he would enthusiastically support the motion and carry it further to ensure the legislation comes forward.

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for her comments and her question.

I want to point out the intent of the motion presented by New Democratic Party. Very clearly the motion is calling on the government, in co-operation with the provinces, to place an immediate moratorium on the export of bulk freshwater shipments, et cetera. I think we are very mindful of the fact that in this day and age we need to develop an approach to federalism that is co-operative and responsive to provincial needs. That is why the motion was written in that way.

I do not think the motion has been brought forward because all of a sudden we have noticed there is a problem. This has been an issue of public debate for a very long time. There are environmental groups, organizations, individuals and even members of the Liberal cause, as well as other members of the House, who have campaigned to ensure there is a sense of national purpose around the preservation of this precious resource. This motion has not suddenly popped up on us today.

However, I would point out that there is a very critical situation in B.C. because of claims being made by Sun Belt, which is, in effect, taking on the B.C. government. It is very important that the response to that be based on what is our national policy. Unfortunately we do not have one. It is very important to have that so it is not one province at a time which is trying to take on this issue.

[Supply, February 9th, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I am very proud today to participate in the debate on the motion from the New Democratic Party. It is a very important motion, as a number of members have already noted.

The motion calls on the House to place an immediate moratorium on the export of bulk freshwater shipments and to assert Canada's sovereign right to protect, preserve and conserve our freshwater resources for future generations. This is something that obviously is very significant. It is important that it be debated in the House.

Listening to the comments of my colleague in the NDP from Churchill and understanding that in her constituency of northern Manitoba, water as a resource, as a way of life, as a part of the environment, as part of the history of that province, is very important.

I represent a very urban riding. Water does not pop up on the agenda every day. I deal with issues of drug abuse and homelessness and poverty. Yet when I talk to constituents in my riding of Vancouver East about the importance of having a sense of national purpose around the very precious resource of water, there would be very strong agreement.

I am certainly not an expert in this area and many of us in the House are not experts. However, we fundamentally understand as Canadians that one of the things that makes this country very great and one of the things we are very proud of is our natural environment.

As Canadians we have a very strong sense that one of the purposes and roles of our federal government is to preserve and protect the natural resources we have been endowed with. We are the custodians of those resources for future generations.

That is why the motion before us today is very important. It is here to be debated because regrettably we do not have a national policy about the protection of this resource. That is why we are here debating this motion today.

We have certainly heard from members opposite, from the Liberal government. We have heard many debates, many promises, many campaign slogans that water as a natural resource is something that will be protected by legislation and by national policy.

We have yet to see that happen. I think it is a real tragedy. I hope today in debating this motion there will be an acknowledgement and a recognition that this issue is now very critical.

In my province of British Columbia I am very proud that we have had a provincial government with the courage to enact legislation to protect water as a very precious resource. That legislation is being challenged by a foreign corporation under NAFTA which is now claiming damages in the order of $300 million from the B.C. government.

On the one hand, it is very important for us as parliamentarians and as policy makers to make it very clear that we do agree there should be national legislation, that there should be a moratorium as an immediate measure to prevent the bulk export of freshwater from Canada to other places.

But we also need to take action to show that we support that legislation in British Columbia. It is something we need to have right across the country. We have already heard in debate today that different promises have different kinds of policies around this question.

In the New Democratic Party we are saying this issue goes to the very heart of what it means to be a sovereign nation. It goes to the very heart of what it means for democratically elected governments to be able to enact public policies around issues like health care or the management and protection of water. That is what this debate is about today.

I think Canadians would agree that we cannot afford to continue along a direction where basically water is up for grabs in this country where under different situations provincially we may have various licences that are handed out, we may have bulk export and it becomes something that a province may or may not pass legislation about.

We need leadership from the House. We need leadership from the federal government to make it very clear that there is a commitment to put into place what has been stated so many times. There is a public consciousness about this issue.

The Council of Canadians, which has a very broad and diverse network and membership across Canada, has made this one of its key issues. In its recent Canadian Perspectives there is a very good article entitled “Our Water's Not for Sale” by Maude Barlow:

Before this goes any further, we need a public debate in Canada. I believe that water is a public trust. It belongs to the people. No one has the right to appropriate it or profit from it at someone else's expense. An adequate supply of clean water for people's daily living needs is a basic human right and is best protected by maintaining control of water in the public sector.

I wholeheartedly agree with those comments and call on the government to basically bring in that legislation that has been promised.

I hope this will be a unanimous vote in the House of Commons today. I have heard debate from all sides of the House and I think we understand the importance of this issue. We need to unite on this issue, represent the interests of Canadians and protect the future of our environment and say that we are willing to stand up for this resource and not just see it treated as a good or commodity that can be traded away for vast profits.

We must take the honourable course and say there is a public interest here that overrides private interests. The public interest is that we have to protect that water resource.

I urge all members of the House to basically support this motion and for Liberal members to ask themselves why their government has not brought forward the legislation and see this motion as a first step to a real commitment to take the legislative steps necessary to make this motion a reality in terms of protecting this resource. I urge all members to support the motion.

[Homelessness And Poverty, February 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, a few hours ago busloads of poor and homeless people left Toronto to come to Ottawa to meet with the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister flatly refused to meet with this group.

What happened to Liberal compassion? Was it axed too, along with social housing? Canadians want to know why the PM is ignoring this crisis of homelessness and poverty and why his government is so callously abandoning those most in need.

This is an emergency. What action is the Prime Minister going to take?

[Homelessness, February 9th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday community members in Toronto held a vigil in memory of a homeless man known only as Al who died on a heating grate across from Queen's Park.

In January I travelled across Canada and saw for myself the devastating impact of this government's deliberate policy to kill social housing. How many more people will have to suffer? How many more people will have to die before the Prime Minister responds to this crisis?

Ten mayors and more than 400 organizations have endorsed the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee's urgent call to recognize this as a national disaster.

A few hours ago, busloads of homeless and poor people left Toronto for Parliament Hill to demand a meeting with the Prime Minister. His response? He turned them down flat. This is an outrage.

I want to know, will the Prime Minister have the guts to meet with the poor and homeless people who are coming here tomorrow? Will he visit the sites of this national disaster and see the devastation firsthand? Does this government have any compassion?

[Finance, February 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his very serious question. To have a fair definition is something advocates and anti-poverty activists would agree with. The UN report, in addressing its comment to Canada on its performance under the UN covenant on social, economic and cultural rights, actually raised this question and challenged the government to work with anti-poverty organizations to ensure there is an accepted and fair definition around poverty measures in Canada.

It is true that the LICO has been used by Stats Canada as an unofficial poverty measure in Canada for decades. The danger here is that there is a very high level of cynicism in the population that the purpose of this exercise is not to help people who are living in poverty. It is to simply politically recast the question, redefine what we mean by poverty so we can attempt to somehow eliminate what is a growing political problem.

I work with anti-poverty activists in my own community and across Canada. There is great fear and skepticism that is what this exercise is about. The exercise is being led by the Fraser Institute, which wants to move us to a kind of criterion and measure that would see a huge drop in how we would define the number of people living below the poverty line. It is called the absolute poverty measure.

The reality is there are people paying 40% to 60% of their incomes in rent. No matter how we define it, they are living in poverty. They are living in a homeless kind of environment. Single parents making minimum wage, parents trying to survive on EI payments or parents whose EI payments have run out are living in poverty.

At some point it gets to be a very academic exercise. To be optimistic, if there were a genuine effort by the government to work with people who know what poverty is about and to have an inclusionary process then there would be some discussion. There is so much skepticism and fear about what the government is attempting to do through this exercise that we will see a lot of people resisting any attempts to change the LICO.

[Finance, February 2nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House tonight to speak to the prebudget debate.

I would like to echo the comments made by my colleague from the Bloc who talked about the need to have an anti-poverty law in Canada. I think that is something that should be a real priority for this government.

The Liberal government loves to boast about its fiscal record on battling the deficit, but the government is much less comfortable talking about the social deficit it has created in the process.

Today Canada stands accused in the court of world opinion of fighting the deficit on the backs of the poor. In its report on Canada the United Nations committee on economic, social and cultural rights expressed its deep and grave concern on 25 issues relating to Canada's treatment of its most disadvantaged citizens.

In the words of the committee chair:

I would not be surprised to hear about these things from a developing country. But, in a very well developed country like Canada, with so many resources—the degree of homelessness and poverty is really quite shocking.

It needs to be pointed out that Canada was a signatory to the UN covenant on economic, social and cultural rights which lays out the basic foundation for equality and rights, and which should be the law that my colleague just spoke about, the basis on which we could eliminate poverty in this country.

If we were to read the finance committee's majority report on its prebudget consultations we would wonder if it was talking about the same country.

The Liberals claim in their majority report that “As its finances have improved over the past five years, the government has introduced several new programs designed to help build a strong and compassionate society”.

That sounds very wonderful. In fact the Liberal members on the finance committee think that Canada is in such good shape that the best thing the finance minister could do in his upcoming budget is to give huge tax breaks to Canada's upper income earners.

Is this the same country that the UN committee condemned for exacerbating poverty and homelessness during the time of strong economic growth and increasing influence? Yes, it is.

Last year, with a balanced budget in sight, we were supposedly on the cusp of a golden age. After years of budget cutting and zero inflation policies, the big question before the committee was how to spend the fiscal dividend. In fact the finance minister was delighted to announce a new fiscal milestone every time he stood up. As it turns out, the fundamentals are weaker than they have been since the 1930s, and the 1990s are shaping up to be a lost decade.

In fact per capita GDP has not risen through the decade. Real living standards have declined for a majority of Canadians and are at desperation levels for the growing numbers of poor.

While governments retreat behind slogans about market discipline and fiscal responsibility, the reality is that in our local communities health care bleeds to death from a thousand cuts.

More than half a million more children have fallen into poverty and students seeking education are pushed into a lifelong debt, if they can afford it.

The training system in the country is awash in chaos and confusion.

The majority of the unemployed are denied benefits, while a surplus of $20 billion accumulates in the government accounts.

Canadian farmers are killing their livestock rather than facing complete ruin trying to market them.

On the streets of our largest cities homelessness has been declared a national disaster. That is the reality that is facing a growing number of Canadians today.

Meanwhile, out in the market economy, the top 10% of income earners have increased their share of national income by a factor of 15. Today those folks earn 314 times the income of the bottom 10% of Canadians, up from 21 times in 1973.

It is in this climate that the Business Council on National Issues urged the finance minister to make the courageous choice and support major tax cuts for those earning up to $150,000 a year. It is in this climate that the Liberal majority on this committee is now pushing tax cuts for upper income Canadians as the number one priority for government spending.

Last year one of the finance minister's proudest boasts was that he had cut government spending back to 1949 levels. The impact of this year's recommendations will be to lock in downsized government, to promote private wealth while the public sector deteriorates, and to ignore the genuine needs of Canada's poor and unemployed whose lost benefits have paid for the finance minister's budget. It is my constituents in Vancouver East and in other low income communities who have paid the price for the government's attack on low income Canadians.

Last December the finance minister called child poverty a national disgrace. He said that the elimination of child poverty should be a great national objective. That is very worthy. He said it should be on the scale of the battle to reduce the deficit. But to date there is no indication that the federal government plans to do anything to ease the financial burden on poor people.

Later in 1998 two major reports condemned the federal government for its record on child poverty. The Canadian Council on Social Development noted that the number of food banks operating in Canada had doubled in the 1990s. The National Council on Welfare reported that only 17% of single parent families, the poorest of the poor, will get the so-called child tax benefit. Overall only 36% of poor families will get any benefit from this much wanted government solution to child poverty.

Despite the finance minister's supposed concern and the fact that our justice minister calls poverty our most glaring human rights problem, the new government approach to child poverty has done absolutely nothing. What the government really wants to do is define poverty out of existence.

According to StatsCan we have 1.5 million children and some 3.8 million adults living in poverty under what we call the low income cut off, which is the commonly understood poverty line in Canada. By changing the definition, essentially dropping the income floor by about 20%, governments could remove 1.8 million people with the stroke of a pen, including 500,000 children, from the nation's poverty rolls.

The government likes to say that the child tax benefit—and we have heard this so many times—is designed to improve benefits for low income families with children, to reduce the depths of child poverty and to promote attachment to the workforce. What the government does not say is that the poorest of the poor are denied the benefits, those on welfare. The government does not say that because of clawbacks the child tax benefit effectively denies benefits to roughly half a million poor families on welfare.

It does not say that parents unfortunate enough to lose their jobs will be made poorer by cuts to employment insurance benefits and will likely be denied benefits in training. It does not say that its newest approach to reducing the depth of poverty for families might be to drop the floor by over $6,000, handily reducing the depth of poverty by two-thirds.

What is needed is not a new definition, but a real commitment by this government in this budget to set targets to reduce unemployment and to set targets to reduce poverty for all Canadians living below the StatsCan unofficial poverty line.

If the Liberal government had a shred of sincerity about addressing poverty it should expand the program, end all the clawbacks and index the benefits to the cost of living.

A week or so ago I concluded a national tour across Canada on homelessness in this country. One of the things I learned from housing activists and anti-poverty activist in places like Toronto, Moncton, Winnipeg, northern Manitoba, New Brunswick and in my riding of Vancouver is that more and more people are feeling the impact of the abandonment of the national housing program by the federal Liberals since 1993.

This is one of the true tragedies in this country. One of the real causes of growing inequality and poverty is the lack of housing and increasing homelessness. The government must take real measures on this in the budget. We have seen this situation in Toronto. Although there are many Liberals from Ontario who are hearing a lot about what is going on in Toronto, we have a national disaster on our hands when it comes to homeless and lack of adequate housing.

In this budget we expect and demand to see an investment by the federal government to get back into the provision on the supply side of housing and work with the provinces to ensure that there is indeed a national housing plan. Canada is the only industrialized country that does not have a national housing plan.

I would just like to say a few words about health care because that too, like homelessness, is a growing crisis. The crisis in health care is evident in the growing numbers of Canadians who are losing confidence in the system. In May 1991 over 60% of Canadians rated the system as excellent or very good. By 1998 less than 30% of the population could support that claim.

Canadians are growing skeptical because they look around and experience a system in crisis. They know there are longer waiting lists and delays in treatment, crowded emergency rooms, lack of beds, nursing shortages, diminishing access to care, higher drug costs and the list goes on and on.

On a cumulative basis $15.5 billion in federal cash transfers have been withdrawn from the system since 1995-96. Privatization is increasing as well. For example, essential tests such as the MRIs in Ontario are increasingly being made available to the well who can pay for them rather than the sick who need them.

The New Democratic Party believes that health care has to be a number one priority. Our prescription for health care is to reinvest $2.5 billion into health care in the upcoming budget, to restore funding to the health protection branch, to conduct an independent audit, to stop the slide toward private for profit health care by reinforcing and enforcing the principles of the Canada Health Act and to convene a national summit on health.

I would like to move now to another key issue before us in terms of this budget debate, the EI fund. This year the government expects to bring in $7 billion more in EI premiums than it pays out in benefits. On a cumulative basis we know this now has resulted in a $20 billion surplus while over 900,000 unemployed Canadians have no income support, no access to training and very little prospect of finding new jobs as the economy contracts.

It is clear that government raided the funds to pay down the deficit and that it apparently intends to continue to do so. Meanwhile, less than 40% of the unemployed are receiving benefits today, only 31% of unemployed women and only 15% of unemployed youth.

As part of my tour across Canada on homelessness I talked to unemployed workers who were living in shelters. I remember one young man who gave me his last EI slip for $121. When I told him about the $20 billion surplus and how that really belonged to the workers of Canada, he asked me why he could not get access to that fund for training, to find work and to get help because he did not want to be in an emergency shelter.

What right does the government have to take that money from unemployed workers in Canada? Those funds should be used for retraining, to expand the benefits and to help the unemployed.

But apparently the Liberals see nothing illegitimate about taking that money and using it to subsidize debt repayment, nothing corrupt about seizing it to fund a tax break geared to upper income Canadians. It is precisely because the government cannot be trusted to manage the fund that New Democrats, along with other opposition parties, called for the UI premium account to be separated from overall government revenues as of April 1, 1999 with an independent commission made up of worker and employer representatives.

Theft and misuse of EI funds must be stopped. There is no question about that.

Pumping millions of dollars of spending power back into the hands of Canadians through the EI fund by expanding the benefits and the coverage in some of our poorest communities and regions would strengthen local demand, assist provincial governments coping with increasing welfare caseloads and, more important, would put food back on the tables of the jobless, restore their dignity and bring new integrity to the government's fiscal accounting.

That is what the Liberals and the finance committee should be fighting for. Instead, the central message of the Liberal majority report spending proposals is “the time has come for personal tax reductions directed at middle and higher income Canadians”. Their report calls for a flattening of the progressive income tax by presenting a three year tax reduction plan at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. They call for the elimination of the 3% surtax on incomes over $65,000. The cost, $1.05 billion.

They call for a timetable for eliminating the 5% surtax that applies only to the very high earners. The cost, $650 million. The list goes on and on.

The above plan amounts to tens of billions of dollars of tax cuts depending on how phase-ins are structured and a strong reduction of the tax burden on those who clearly can afford to pay.

Clearly the committee is not interested in the glaring fact that after tax inequalities are increasing in this country or that the poor are falling further and further behind.

New Democrats are concerned about the vast number of Canadians who are being excluded from the Liberal's frame of reference. Do these people even exist anymore to the Liberal government?

Our approach would be to rebuild our deteriorating social infrastructure with health care at the top of the list; restore the unemployment insurance program to the working people of this country; address the glaring issues of inequity around us by addressing the shocking levels of poverty and the widening gap between rich and poor and growing discrimination against the unemployed; to provide proper and timely relief to Canadian farmers devastated by the drop in commodity prices; and to introduce tax relief for all Canadians, as finances permit, with an increase in the GST credit and a 1% tax reduction rate to generate new jobs.

As the Canadian government brings down its last budget before the millennium and as the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the international declaration of human rights, December 10, 1998, a fitting tribute to the occasion would be a recommitment from this government and from all parties to the standards and rights that we pledged for all our citizens and a budget that starts to address the serious lapses that are a major blot on this country's reputation in the world community.

[Income Tax Act, December 8th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity today to speak in support of Bill C-316, which has been introduced by the member for London North Centre.

I would like to congratulate the member for bringing forward this proposal which will help provide some relief to students who are in very dire straits in Canada.

As we have heard, the purpose of this bill is to allow a person who pays interest on a student loan to deduct from income, for the purposes of determining tax payable, the full amount of the interest for 10 years after the first payment of interest was due. If the student does not use the full deduction in any year it may be transferred to the person, if any, who guaranteed or co-signed the loan initially.

I believe that the member's rush now for bringing forward this bill is because business owners are permitted to deduct interest paid on business investment loans. Using that provision as a precedent, Bill C-316 acknowledges the role of student loans as investments which deserve the same consideration.

Certainly from that point of view, in terms of the motivation of the member, we would support this bill coming forward. However, I think it also needs to be pointed out that this particular bill is a bit like treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. The fact is that tax relief, while always welcome, does nothing to ease the fact that students must cough up increasingly high tuition fees in order to make it through post-secondary education.

This bill, although providing some relief, does nothing to address the fact that post-secondary education is becoming increasingly inaccessible to more and more students, particularly those with low and moderate incomes.

Unfortunately it does nothing to address the fact that over the last decade tuition fees have climbed a whopping 240%. Even in the last year alone tuition fees rose 12% nationally, which is seven times the rate of inflation.

That should give us some idea of the severe difficulties that students are facing today in trying to pay their tuition and in making it through school. It is simply an astounding fact that tuition fees are now seven times higher than the rate of inflation.

Nor does this bill, unfortunately, expunge the massive debts that students are graduating with, which now average $25,000. That figure is up from the average of $13,000 when the Liberals took power in 1993.

We are talking about a bill that would amend the Income Tax Act. The bottom line is that the reason we have a crisis in post-secondary education is because we have seen a retreat in public funding. We have seen the federal government slash funds from post-secondary education by $3 billion since 1995. As well, $4 billion has been cut from training.

If we really want to examine what is facing students in Canada today, why they are having such a hard time and why more and more students are graduating into poverty, we have to look to federal public policy from this Liberal government which basically has withdrawn its support to the provinces in transfer payments. Students are paying the price for that. That needs to be said.

While I support the member in his efforts to provide some relief, I also hope that the member would, within his own caucus and within his own government, rethink and examine the policies that have been put into place.

One of the changes in the last budget that was particularly cynical which affected students was the change in the bankruptcy laws. That has really had a very dramatic impact on students. It used to be that a student could declare bankruptcy two years after completing studies. It should be pointed out that most students do not declare bankruptcy. Most students will do everything they can to pay off their Canada student loan. In actual fact, the new law passed by the Liberal government now says that a student cannot declare bankruptcy until 10 years after completing studies or finishing school. That virtually rules out that option.

I do not know about other members of the House, but I have heard horror stories from students about how they are harassed by collection agencies at 7 a.m or 8 a.m. because they defaulted on a payment.

I am glad the member brought this forward. However, we have to get the real picture of the things that have been done by the government, such as changing the bankruptcy law and slashing public funding to post-secondary education, which have made the lot of students much worse.

Liberal members often point to the millennium fund as the panacea and the cure-all for the difficulties that face students. We should recognize that the millennium fund, which does not even begin until 2000, is just a drop in the bucket when one compares it to what actually has been taken out of public funding.

New Democrats are not about to let the federal government forget about the student debt crisis. Instead of creating a scholarship program which duplicates existing programs and does nothing to help students in need, we have called on the federal government to take steps that would reduce student debt.

We have demanded of the government that we end the privatization of Canada student loans, that we end the harassment that students have to go through.

We have also called on the government, along with the provinces, to begin to restore the billions of dollars that have been cut from post-secondary education. If we really are genuine about wanting to assist students we have to begin at that point. There has to be a recognition of what the erosion of public funding has done to post-secondary education.

I would also suggest that we should follow the leadership of my province of British Columbia which has had a tuition freeze for three years in a row. That is something that needs to be done on a national basis.

If the federal government really wants to show leadership for students and show that it cares about what happens to students, then the minister should be convening a meeting of provincial education ministers, putting some bucks back on the table and saying “We are going to help students by enacting a national tuition freeze”.

That would be the first step in restoring confidence in what really has been a first class system in Canada of public education, which now is going down the slippery slope to privatization.

The NDP would change the millennium fund to make it the first step of a national grant program to assist first and second year students.

Probably most important, we would begin by saying that accessibility has to be a national standard that is brought forward by the federal government with the co-operation of the provinces so that we can say to young Canadians “You do have a future. You do have accessibility and you are not going to come out of post-secondary education with a massive debt around your neck”. That is what the reality is now.

I have talked to students who have a $60,000 debt. They are single parents who are trying to pay off that debt and they have not started working yet. It is an appalling situation.

In closing, this is a good measure that has been brought forward, but I urge the member to go back to his caucus and say that the government must rethink its priorities and that if they support public education it needs public funding and confidence to make sure students are not facing the severe situation they face.

[Poverty, December 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, poor people cannot survive on Liberal lip service any longer. The truth is that instead of reversing its dreadful attack on the poor, this government is set on providing tax breaks to the wealthy.

On Friday, the Liberal majority report of the finance committee called for billions in tax cuts for upper income earners. Will the minister promise today to stop catering to the wealthy? Will he do the right thing and commit to a real strategy to fight poverty in Canada, yes or no?

[Poverty, December 7th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.

With the sting still burning from the UN attack on his government's abysmal poverty record, today the minister must be reeling from two more devastating reports.

The CCSD report blames the feds for the declining well-being of Canadian children, and the National Council of Welfare takes the hot air out of the much touted child tax benefit and condemns it for ignoring the poorest of the poor.

If the minister can pull himself out of his chair to face the music, will he commit today to invest the funds necessary to ensure that no children go hungry in Canada?