Pat Martin

[Employment Insurance, December 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP EI critic, the member for Acadie—Bathurst, is currently touring the country consulting Canadians about our flawed EI system. So far not one person has said they wish their premiums were 15 cents lower. What we are hearing instead is people saying they wish they could feed their families on these lousy benefits, or they wish they qualified at all. This reduction in premiums does nothing for unemployed Canadians.

What does the minister plan to do to expand the benefits so that more Canadians qualify and fewer Canadians are shut out of this flawed EI system?

[Petitions, November 27th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I also have a petition that I would like to table.

These petitioners are largely residents of my riding of Winnipeg Centre. They feel very strongly that there is a need to modernize our parliamentary institutions and they would like to see the Senate abolished.

[Points Of Order, November 27th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Public Works and Government Services made reference to a document during question period and read from the document. I would ask him if he would be willing to table the document that he quoted from today.

[Poverty, November 27th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, for all the rhetoric it would seem that the government's social and economic policy is not only hurting Canadians. It is becoming an international embarrassment, and the world is telling us so.

Some of the UN's observations were very specific. The Minister of Human Resources would be interested in this one at least. It asked the government to use the EI surplus to expand coverage and criticized the end of the Canada assistance plan and the gutting of transfers through the CHST.

If the government will not listen to us in these matters, will it listen to the world? Will it expand coverage to EI so more people are covered? Will it broaden the social transfer through the CHST?

[Poverty, November 27th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, chronic poverty is Canada's worst human rights problem and this week we got an earful about it from the United Nations. The UN asked Canada some very tough questions.

It asked why in such a rich country we tolerate escalating rates of child poverty and poverty among women. It asked why we were fighting the deficit on the backs of the poor and the unemployed. These are questions we in the NDP have been asking for years.

Will the government heed the warnings from our colleagues at the UN and use the next federal budget to fight the real deficit in the country, the social deficit?

[Senator Selection Act, November 26th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to enter into the debate. I have enjoyed the two previous speeches. I learned a little bit and much of what I heard was easy to agree with.

Reform of the Senate has been a goal and objective of most political parties that come to this place. I was doing some reading prior to coming here tonight. As early as 1919 the Liberal Party had Senate reform as part of its platform. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in power. With our own party and its founding convention in 1933 the CCF was adamant that Senate reform would be a real priority. Again when the NDP was formed in 1960 that found its way into the priorities of our political platform.

The flaw I find in the bill we are debating is that we would not see any serious reform. Even if it may be achievable to put in place an elected Senate through this piece of legislation, it would not be the triple E Senate the member's party is usually promoting.

The equal side of the triple E is where the real barrier is. Even though we may institutionalize or help to formalize the institution through the democratic process of voting senators in, if we do not have the other aspects of Senate reform, we have not made things any better at all. To this day, after all the constitutional wrangling and all the best laid plans of political parties coming and going, no one has managed to implement true Senate reform, especially in terms of equalization of representation.

The member for Winnipeg South is quite right that we came very close in the Charlottetown accord. That is one of the reasons I was happy to work for the Charlottetown accord. I went to the five meetings across the country as an ordinary Canadian. I learned a great deal and I was very enthusiastic about the opportunities Canadians had within their reach with the Charlottetown accord, a real reformed triple E Senate. That I could have supported.

We have chucked that away. We chose not to avail ourselves of that opportunity. It is no longer there for us. I do not have any optimism that we will see it back in the national forum in my lifetime. Most Canadians would rather poke themselves in the eye with a stick than go through another process like the Charlottetown accord and all the constitutional wrangling and frankly, I am one of them.

The Reform Party member from Nanaimo cited a number of polls and surveys that they have done which indicate broad support for an elected Senate. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of those polls. What we did not hear was that some of those polls gave a number of options: Do you want an elected Senate? Would you rather see an abolished Senate? Would you rather leave the Senate exactly the way it is?

There was an interesting trend in the most recent and the largest nationwide poll which was the Angus Reid poll in April. The real trend to watch on the graph in that survey is the growing support for abolition. From the polls in 1987, 1989 and now in 1998 the number of people who want an elected Senate is almost equal to those who want the Senate abolished. Forty-five per cent say they would like an elected Senate. I believe most of those voters are really thinking of a triple E Senate, not just elected. In a scientific poll across the country, 41% now say abolish, abolish, abolish. That is the camp I am in and I am happy to promote that position on behalf of our party.

We find that the current situation cannot be fixed. Some things are irretrievably broken. Tampering and fooling around with it in a minor way is not going to give us the satisfaction we need. We believe the abolition of the Senate could actually become the next unity issue, just as the Charlottetown accord was supposed to pull the country together finally and let us get passed the differences we have. I think the abolition of the Senate will become the single one issue we can all agree on and move forward together on in a very united front.

The Angus Reid survey shows much higher levels of support for abolition in the province of Quebec than in the rest of Canada. The figure is 57% or 59% for abolition. The member from the Bloc who just spoke points to a petition that was recently circulated in that province. He was talking about the last parliament.

Last summer a petition was circulated broadly across Canada. I know one member of the Bloc took a copy of this petition and got 11,000 signatures. I believe that is the figure. We have not seen the tally yet. Again, that was done in the course of a couple of weeks. I will read some of the preamble from the petition.

This is what Canadians are signing in droves across the country and presumably this is what they believe: “We the undersigned”—etcetera—“that the Senate of Canada is an undemocratic institution composed of non-elected members who are unaccountable to the people; and that the Senate costs taxpayers some $50 million per year;”—another sore point certainly—“and that the Senate is redundant, given the roles played by the supreme court and the provinces in protecting minority rights and providing regional representation; and that the Senate undermines the role of MPs in the House of Commons; and that there is a need to modernize our parliamentary institutions; therefore, your petitioners call upon parliament to undertake measures aimed at the abolition of the Senate”.

The petition is getting a lot of support right across the country. There is multiparty support. An NDP MP and a Liberal MP put this petition together. We have quotes from a Reform MP saying he would like to abolish the Senate. We have members from the PCs saying that Reform would have to modify some of its policies on the united alternative, one being its position on the Senate. We have the Reform Party quoted in articles saying that would be something it would be willing to do. It would be willing to back off its position on the Senate in order to allow the united alternative to go forward. I would be happy to share the quotes with the member from the Reform Party.

We find that no single issue has galvanized Canadians quite as much as this one lately. It is a very tangible, visceral issue. Although I am not going to dwell on this, isolated cases of abuse have brought the issue to the forefront.

I am the first one to recognize that there are many fine people in the Senate of Canada doing valuable work right across the country. I have had the pleasure to meet a few since I have been here. I do not think those fine people would stop doing the fine work they do if they were no longer senators. I know they got to be senators because they were fully engaged and seized of these issues. They are not going to drop them because they are no longer housed in that building.

Frankly, with the $50 million we would save, who is to say that the Prime Minister or the government of the day would not make people special emissaries on certain issues.

There is one senator I had the pleasure of working with on the child labour issue. She is a champion of social justice in that regard. Who is to say that if she no longer sat as a senator that the Prime Minister would not put her in charge of a task force on child labour and be our representative overseas at the international forums.

That is all within the realm of possibility. Canadians would see that as money well spent because we would not have the same issue of the undemocratic and in fact a barrier to democracy that exists on the other side.

I would like to spend just one minute on the numbers. The province of Manitoba was cited in the Reform Party's speech. The actual figures in the province of Manitoba according to the Angus Reid poll as of April 1998 were that 45% said to reform the Senate and 41% said to get rid of it. We were exactly on the national average for getting rid of it and we were one or two points higher in terms of reforming it. Those are the real numbers. It was not 87% want an elected Senate and it is intellectually dishonest to craft the figures in that way.

[Labour Market Training, November 26th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, a recent report from the Canadian Labour Force Development Board states that Canada's labour market training system is in chaos and confusion.

After dumping training on to the provinces and slashing the spending by $700 million, now there is no planning, no co-ordination, no national standards and access is getting to be a joke.

Will the minister of human resources accept that labour market training is in crisis and will he use the EI windfall surplus to restore the $700 million gutted from our training programs?

[Unemployment Insurance, November 17th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the EI system is showing an incredible surplus of $600 million per month, yet less than 40% of unemployed Canadians qualify for benefits.

Now the government suggests that it will use some of its fiscal surplus to provide tax cuts to the wealthy. It is like some perverted version of Sherwood Forest where it intends to rob from the poor to give to the rich.

Will the finance minister reject calls from the Business Council on National Issues and others to take billions from the pockets of the unemployed to line the pockets of the rich? Will he commit today to use the EI surplus only to restore benefits and eligibility and for no other purpose?

[Manitoba Claim Settlements Implementation Act, November 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, seeing as I was made reference to a number of times in that address, I want to clarify a few things.

What I said in my remarks is that it is intellectually dishonest to try to take a bunch of isolated incidents of problems with funds and try to thread that together into an overall picture that aboriginal people in Canada are not ready for or capable of self-government or the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission which our party stands for. I am not saying they are allegations. I am saying they probably are well founded incidents.

I made a number of connections with anti-Indian organizations like FIRE. The hon. member can deny any connection to them if he likes. As the ONFIRE begins now, the Ontario version of the anti-Indian organization, the director is a Reform Party member and activist Judy Kilgore. Brian Richardson, the founder of the Ontario FIRE organization, left his job with FIRE so he could run for the Reform Party in the last federal election. He did not want that crossover too public I guess.

Mel Smith, who was the salaried, paid consultant for the Reform Party's Indian task force, is the author of the book Our Home or Native Land . It is a play on words instead of our home and native land. The three major points are that aboriginal self-government must be stopped; that some government treaties with first nations should be either ignored or modestly interpreted; and that all government programs related to native people should be phased out, i.e. first nations people should be made real Canadians. In other words, no special affirmative action measures to try to recognize the historic imbalance.

Does the Reform Party stand behind the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission on aboriginal people or does it subscribe to Mel Smith's points?

[Manitoba Claim Settlements Implementation Act, November 16th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, for months we have been listening to the Reform Party thread together isolated incidents of problems on reserves. Reformers have been trying to thread those incidents into an overall package that aboriginal leadership is corrupt, inept or incapable of handling its own self-government. It is no coincidence that this kind of talk is escalating now as we get closer to the historic Nisga'a deal.

Throughout B.C. there has been a very organized campaign to try to stop the Nisga'a self-government deal. We have seen newspaper editors manipulating their stories in the press, those who are convinced they are against us. We have seen a former Reform Party researcher leave his job with the Reform Party, move to British Columbia and set up the B.C. chapter of FIRE, the anti-Indian organization from the United States. This is now the B.C. chapter of FIRE dedicated to holding aboriginal people back.

I have sat here and listened day after day to speaker after speaker trying to convince everyone that aboriginal people are corrupt, mismanage all their funds and some even wear expensive jewellery. I even heard allegations that aboriginal leaders are dressing too well, that they are rich and people on their reserves are poor.

To try to imply that it is some kind of national trend, that all aboriginal communities are corrupt, is absolutely intellectually dishonest. I have listened to it for about as long as I care to. I am sure we will hear more of it as the whole Nisga'a debate continues.

Some comments have been very revealing of the true attitudes. I heard the Reform member for Athabasca say “Just because we didn't kill the Indians and have Indian wars, that doesn't mean we didn't conquer these people. Isn't that why they allowed themselves to be herded into little reserves in the most isolated, desolate, worthless parts of the country?” Other Reform members likened Indians living on reserves to people living on a south sea island, courtesy of a rich uncle. Another member of the Reform Party accused native Indians of practising South African style apartheid because they want to set up their own aboriginal self-government and have control of their own communities, as if that is apartheid.

The first time that I heard of that position was on the front page of the Up Front magazine. Up Front is the publication of Heritage Front. That was the postulation of the president of Heritage Front, Wolfgang Droege, another former Reform Party member, two years ago. I have a copy of it if anyone would like to see it.

There is a disturbing connection between the extreme right winger in the country vehemently opposed to aboriginal self-government and the comments made by the Reform Party. It is being picked up in the mainstream media by other anti-Nisga'a campaigners like Gordon Gibson, the former leader of the Liberal Party in British Columbia, who is also involved with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Equality.

These people believe that all people must be treated equally, whereas Judge Murray Sinclair, an aboriginal leader in Manitoba, pointed out clearly that to treat all people equally when they are in fact unequal is in itself a problem that compounds the problem.

I hear people laughing. To try to imply that we can allocate the same type of principles to all people equally is not recognizing the unequal situation that aboriginal people find themselves in now. Special circumstances are in order. That is why we as Canadians are willing to give special consideration to aboriginal self-government.

I guess I like the comments of the member of the Reform Party who spoke previously. Do you or do you not agree with the positions of the anti-Indian movement, FIRE, as chaired by a former federal Reform Party researcher, Greg Hollingsworth?