Debates of Nov. 2nd, 1994

Unemployment Insurance Act

[The Deputy Speaker]

Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the said motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Some hon. members]

No.

[The Deputy Speaker]

All those in favour will please say yea.

[Some hon. members]

Yea.

[The Deputy Speaker]

All those opposed will please say nay.

[Some hon. members]

Nay.

[The Deputy Speaker]

In my opinion the nays have it.

And more than five members having risen:

[The Deputy Speaker]

Call in the members.

And the division bells having rung:

[The Deputy Speaker]

The division will be taken row by row starting with the mover and then proceeding with those in favour of the motion seated on the same side as the mover. The votes of those who are in favour of the motion on the other side of the House will be recorded.

Those opposed to the motion will be called in the same order.

(The House divided on the motion, which was negatived on the following division:)

[The Deputy Speaker]

I declare the motion lost.

A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

[Chris Axworthy, NDP, Saskatoon—Clark's Crossing, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the week before last I raised a question in the House with the Deputy Prime Minister about the proposals in the green paper for post-secondary education funding.

We all know that there is much in the green paper which talks about the importance of education, skills upgrading and training to Canadians and to Canada in terms of our ability to compete in the new world economy.

I am glad to see those comments in the green paper but the proposals which the Minister of Human Resources Development goes on to suggest for post-secondary education belie this rhetoric.

The minister is proposing that the $2.6 billion which each year goes to the provinces for post-secondary education instead go to students in the form of loans. We remember that federal government transfers to the provinces were first cut by the Liberal government prior to 1984. Those cuts were continued by the Mulroney government through the 1980s and into the 1990s and of course, as we all remember, were vigorously criticized by the Liberal Party while in opposition. Now the Liberals are back in government and those cuts continue.

The government rationale here appears to be that the cash portion of post-secondary education funding coming from the federal government to the provinces is going to disappear anyway because of this trend begun first by the Liberals and continued by the Conservatives. As it is going to disappear why worry about tuition fees going up, they are going up already. Let us just let them go up even further.

What the government is planning to do in spite of arguing, quite rightly, for the importance of post-secondary education, is planning to slash $2.6 billion from post-secondary education and make that available as loans to students and have an income contingency loan repayment system.

The contradiction is quite clear. It is time the government recognized that it cannot say good things about post-secondary education and then cut funding to post-secondary education and expect Canada to compete in the world economy.

The imposing of a heavy burden of loans on students will of course lead to less accessibility of education as more and more potential students decide that they simply cannot afford to incur such heavy loans.

A study in Australia which has a similar program to that being proposed by the government has found that the average man repays 50 per cent of his loan by the age of 28 years but it takes an average woman until she is 38 years old in order to pay 50 per cent of that loan because of the difference in earning capacity for women. We know that Canadian women earn significantly less than Canadian men and thus they will be the most heavily burdened by this process.

Perhaps the most cynical and disturbing part of this proposal is what this government is doing is saying to Canadians and to Canada that the agreement that we have always regarded as important, that post-secondary education is an important contribution both to the student and to Canada as a society, is no longer the case.

What this government is saying is that the burden of paying for post-secondary education and thereby the benefits will all fall to the student and Canada will not benefit in the slightest.

This completely contradicts every study done in Canada since the Massey commission in 1951. It is stupid and the government should change its strategy and position on this.

It has done a good job of politicizing students in 1994. I am glad to see the students have seen through this government's action on this. I urge the government to change its policy and make post-secondary education an investment in Canada and Canadians and stop imposing the burden on Canadian students.

[Jean Augustine, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond.

Under the present system Canada spends a lot, about $16 billion, on post-secondary education. The federal government alone spends $8 billion annually. The cash portion of the EPF transfers to the provinces is slowly ratcheting down. As the cash portion decreases the invisible portion which is given to the provinces through tax points is increasing. This is an invisible endowment to the provinces which will grow from about $4 billion in 1996-97 to $6 billion within 10 years.

The provinces will make the decision whether or not to pass on some or all of this cash reduction to students. Nobody yet knows how much will actually be passed on. That remains to be seen. Many factors will influence their decisions.

At the same time we face different pressing realities. Government resources are shrinking but more people need more education to get and to keep a job. Full time college and university enrolments are up 36 per cent since 1981 and 3 million workers, 25 per cent of the workforce, want to upgrade their skills and cannot afford it.

The discussion paper asks whether the federal government's role should remain as is or whether we should develop a more strategic approach. One option proposed in the green paper is to use the cash to invest in a new permanent program to provide more loans and grants to individual students.

Each $1 we spend could mean $4 in loans, $500 million could mean $2 billion in loans. Instead of declining cash loans would remain constant. Along with tax transfers this would mean the total resources available to the post-secondary education system would continue to grow in order to meet increasing demands for more learning opportunities for more Canadians.

[Deborah Grey, Reform, Beaver River, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in this adjournment debate to ask more questions and try to get some clarification about this ongoing saga that has continued in the front benches.

I would like to make the Chair aware again of the remarks I made on Friday where I asked the Prime Minister about his particular quote in which he said and I quote from Hansard :

I consulted the government's ethics counsellor and the one I appointed for myself-

We asked questions about that and did not seem to get wonderful answers. The Prime Minister replied to me on Friday morning, October 28 and I quote from Hansard at page 7367:

The ethics counsellor was consulted yesterday and gave his advice. The advice he gave was given to me and it did not force me to change my mind about the decision I took a few days ago.

It is pretty straightforward. It would seem to me that would make perfect sense if we took the Prime Minister at his word.

However this morning the ethics counsellor appeared on national television, CBC Newsworld. I quote from the transcript that we were provided where the interviewer said: "You're saying then that the Prime Minister at no point asked you to rule on the ethics of this letter". Mr. Howard Wilson replied: "No. That is quite clear. The Prime Minister indicated that he had handled it and came to the conclusion and he stated it".

This seems perfectly clear to me that the ethics counsellor in fact was not consulted, was not asked for his advice. There is a huge discrepancy here and we want to get to the bottom of it.

There are any number of guidelines for cabinet ministers, the most recent of which I quote from, when we look at quasi-judicial bodies versus the judiciary. It would seem to me pretty straightforward again where these guidelines from the Privy Council Office in a confidential document say to ministers: "You are advised to take very special care to avoid intervening, or appearing to intervene in cases under consideration by quasi-judicial bodies". It is again fairly straightforward to me. It would seem like the minister certainly knew what his bounds were and he stepped outside of them.

I would just like to finish before asking the parliamentary secretary to respond to this by pointing out that the Prime Minister has made it clear over and over again that you should not phone a judge no matter what. I refer to a situation that went on in the House yesterday and of course in the newspapers recently where the Prime Minister said that I was being dreadful for bringing up an incident in which he phoned a judge in 1971. Of course he said that he was just asking when the particular court case on this bankruptcy would be. That is fine. The Globe and Mail accused him further of saying that he had tried to intervene in that case.

Regardless the instance, regardless the circumstance, this Prime Minister stood in his place a number of times in the last week and said that no cabinet minister should phone a judge ever, for any reason, period. That seems fairly straightforward to me.

We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I hope that we get further answers and further clarification from the parliamentary secretary right now.

[Jean Augustine, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the question of October 28.

In our parliamentary system it is the Prime Minister who is ultimately accountable for the actions of his government and who must answer to Parliament and to the public. There can be no substitute for responsibility at the top. It is the Prime Minister who sets the moral tone for the government and who makes the ultimate decisions when issues of trust and integrity are raised. That is what leadership is all about. As the Prime Minister said yesterday during question period, the buck stops here.

The ethics counsellor plays a very important role in advising the Prime Minister in conflict of interest issues, but at the end of the day it is the Prime Minister who must make the decisions. He must make the decision about membership in the cabinet. Creating an ethics counsellor with a reporting relationship to Parliament will not change this fact.

The ethics counsellor envisioned in the red book had a focus on lobbying. This government extended that to a much broader range of ethical issues, including administering and enforcing the revised conflict of interest code which replaced the old conflict of interest guidelines.

The ethics counsellor's responsibilities in the two domains of conflict of interest and lobbying put him in a unique position to make a significant contribution to restoring public confidence in government.

The ethics counsellor is available to the Prime Minister to investigate allegations of impropriety by public officeholders and to advise the Prime Minister accordingly, but he is only an adviser. At the end of the day the Prime Minister is ultimately responsible for ministers and senior officials.

Under Bill C-43, the lobbyists registration bill, the ethics counsellor has independent powers with respect to the lobbying industry. If there are grounds to believe there has been a breach-

[The Deputy Speaker]

Order, please. The hon. member for Mackenzie.

[Vic Althouse, NDP, Mackenzie, SK]

Mr. Speaker, on Friday I raised a question with the Minister of Human Resources Development to whom I had given notice. Eleven ministers of agriculture for Canada had agreed to an initiative to help with community development, particularly concerning child care. The Department of Human Resources Development had allocated some $720 million for 150,000 child care spaces in this budget year. I was asking how much of that would be dedicated to rural child care.

I raised this question because we have just come through a harvest season which is a very busy time on farms. As always there have been reports of some injuries to children because of the exigencies of harvest.

The modern farm is not the idyllic place that we read or think of in mythology. There are huge machines around. There is noise. There are chemicals. There are factory type buildings. There are sinkholes that children can get caught in. There are grain augers. There are all sorts of hazards for children. It is not a place particularly for very small children to be involved. However, both parents of necessity are required to contribute to the work, especially in busy times and it is unsafe and quite impractical for those children to be among the machinery and animals on the farms.

There has always been difficulty in setting up child care facilities for rural areas because of the low population and great distances and the need for very flexible hours. Families will sometimes need child care for short periods of time during harvest and seeding that would run from eight o'clock in the morning until 10 or 11 at night. The rules that have been set out for urban child care just are not adequate and do not fit.

For the decade and a half that I have been in this Chamber, I know of groups that have been trying to find a model for rural child care that is flexible, that will work, and that provides all of the requirements for children and still provides the basic necessities available for urban child care but can be adapted to rural communities.

We have watched a model of child care develop at Langruth, Manitoba. That very small community of some 500 souls has developed a child care facility that meets all of those requirements. It has been in operation for about two and a half years and provides child care for some 40 children. It is considered to have overcome most of the organizational problems, the service delivery models and particularly provides the required flexibility.

There is an old saying that it takes an entire village to raise a child. All communities whether they are strung out rural communities or local neighbourhoods in cities understand that. Particularly in an era of the global village we understand that the whole of society must contribute to the raising of a child. Therefore it is only fair that the money which has been allocated for child care should also be equally available to rural families.

I would hope that the government would state how much, what proportion and what its plans-

[The Deputy Speaker]

Order please. The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister.

[Jean Augustine, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to Prime Minister]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to respond to the member for Mackenzie.

This government is committed to improving child care in Canada. In its red book the government committed itself to investing $720 million toward that end. The intent is to expand existing child care in Canada by 150,000 new quality child care spaces, 50,000 to be phased in over the next three year period.

The implementation of the federal initiative will be done in co-operation with the provinces since child care is a provincial responsibility. Initial discussions with provincial authorities have shown that rural child care is a priority for any new spending. However no decisions have been taken yet on the allocation of spaces. The provinces will decide on the distribution of funds and services to their rural communities. During these discussions most provinces indicated a preference for rural population in new cost sharing arrangements with the federal government.

In his question, the member referred to Langruth, Manitoba as a model for delivering rural child care. This centre is an excellent example of federal-provincial co-operation. The centre became operational through provincial support and federal funding under the child care initiatives fund program. The centre's program is designed to meet the specific child care needs identified by families living in that rural community.

I would remind the member for Mackenzie that the federal government currently contributes significantly to the cost of child care services in Canada. The federal government is contributing in excess of $400 million annually to support child care services mainly through the Canada assistance plan. Clearly that is not enough and more needs to be done. The human resources minister tabled a discussion paper on social security reform which addressed the whole issue of child care. Page 53 is the reference.

In closing, I would like to invite the member for Mackenzie to submit any proposals on how we could develop child care in rural parts of Canada to the Minister of Human Resources Development. I am sure he would be very interested.

[Bill Blaikie, NDP, Winnipeg—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am here today to pursue a question that I asked of the Deputy Prime Minister. The Minister of Transport was not in the House at the time but I asked the Deputy Prime Minister whether or not letters that were being sent to the Prime Minister with respect to something the Minister of Transport had said would be answered.

These letters are from the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the United Transportation Union and others. They were calling on the Prime Minister to ask the Minister of Transport to apologize for remarks that he had made and to which railroaders had taken offence.

Subsequent to my question and to putting in for this adjournment debate the Minister of Transport had an opportunity to explain what he had to say in the House during question period earlier today.

I listened carefully to what he said. I think he could probably bring the matter to a close if he had added, and perhaps that is what he wants to do now, that if people took offence at what he said that he would apologize. He explained himself earlier today but did not actually apologize. Clearly some very sincere offence was taken at what the minister said. I look forward to what he has to say.

While I have him here and because I have so much difficulty in communicating with the minister on the floor of the House, perhaps he might also want to comment on a couple of other matters.

Recently a colleague of his, the member for Thunder Bay-Nipigon said that we would be better off without Churchill in the Canadian port system. This runs directly contrary to promises made by the Liberals in Manitoba during the last election.

Another matter has to do with Manitoba and Liberal promises during the last election has to do with the Liberals making a lot of promises in Winnipeg with respect to stopping the flow of jobs from Winnipeg to Edmonton on the part of CN. Subsequent to the election of the new government, CN has announced that it will be moving its rail traffic control centre and its crew calling offices from Winnipeg to Edmonton in 1995.

Here we have two Liberal promises to Manitoba, that Churchill would be revived and that the bleeding of jobs from Winnipeg to Edmonton on the part of CN would be stopped. What do we have? We have the rail traffic control and the crew calling jobs being transferred from Winnipeg to Edmonton, and we have a Liberal chair of a committee looking into ports and the seaway, et cetera, saying that we would be better off without Churchill.

I hope the minister can deal with these matters, repudiate the member for Thunder Bay-Nipigon and say that Churchill is still part of the plan for the Liberal government. Could he also say that pursuant to the promises made by his colleague, the member for Winnipeg South and the minister of human resources, that the Ministry of Transport and the government will be instructing CN to stop this constant diminution of Winnipeg as a rail centre by transferring jobs to Edmonton.

[Douglas Young, Liberal, Minister of Transport]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for recognizing that I had tried to explain the context in which the remarks were made in Winnipeg.

I do not know the rules on this, but let me explain with respect to Churchill. There is a marine review going on and Churchill will be addressed as well as the comments made by my hon. friend whom he mentioned in his speech.

With respect to jobs in Winnipeg, CN has just announced hundreds of jobs in Winnipeg. I was there a couple of weeks ago and that was confirmed, so there has been an effort to retain some jobs there.

I want to address specifically the question that was raised a couple of weeks ago. In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of CN employees worked in my province and many times I heard about the challenges that employees faced when representing their union brothers in trying to improve salaries, working conditions and safety conditions.

Many of these men to whom I spoke and listened to were veterans of World War I and II, like Luc Roussel and Bill Dunn who I mentioned this afternoon. They were very proud of what they had achieved in their military service but they understood they had very limited educations which was through no fault of their own. They had fought for their country and then they fought for their rights as workers, faced by highly skilled lawyers, negotiators for powerful railroad interests.

I said in Winnipeg that all parties today have to recognize their responsibilities with respect to where railroads are and what is happening, whether it is government or management. I also said that under no circumstances would I point a finger at those achievements arrived at by men who in many instances had only grades 7, 8 or 9 education who worked very hard at protecting their rights and the interests of those who have succeeded them.

Everybody in that room in Winnipeg, with the exception of the three people who walked out, knew exactly what I meant. It was a compliment to people who had made an enormous effort in the face of very difficult odds to achieve rights that were theirs.

I want to take up my friend's suggestion and apologize to anyone who has been mislead by the way those remarks were interpreted. I apologize if anyone felt slighted by them because those achievements were remarkable in those days. Now I think it is time for us to move on and make sure that the railroaders of today have a future by making sure the conditions they work in and the railroads they work for can be viable.

[The Deputy Speaker]

Colleagues, pursuant to Standing Order 38(5), the motion to adjourn the House is now deemed to have been adopted.

Accordingly the House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 7.11 p.m.)