Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity to rise in the House to speak on the motion brought forward by the member for Shefford.
Any time we have an opportunity to speak on issues about poverty and what is happening in the country it is important that we do that. I thank the member for the work she has done and for bringing forward this motion.
I begin by talking about this kind of motion and the kinds of debates we have in the House because it speaks to the issue of needing to look at the record of what has happened. Unfortunately the reality is that for the last two decades poor Canadians have heard again and again many promises about reducing unemployment and eliminating poverty in Canada. But the reality is that none of those promises has been fulfilled, not by the Tory government when it was in power and certainly not by the Liberal government since 1993.
The reality for poor Canadians is that they are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and more and more people are facing unemployment, facing part time work, low wages, underemployment, shrinking welfare rates and poor bashing. That is the reality of what is going on in Canada.
I will take the issue of the record and the credibility of what it is we do as political parties and talk about what happened yesterday on Parliament Hill because certainly the media today are full of news stories of how Mr. Clark was jostled in the crowd and that he went there with good intentions to speak to people but poor Mr. Clark, look what happened to him.
I was there yesterday at that rally.
I saw what happened and I saw the reaction of people. First, it was not a little nest of two or three people who decided to take on Mr. Clark and give him a hard time. It was 200 or 300 people who were outraged that he came unannounced, uninvited to that rally basically with a media entourage to take away from the rally.
If Mr. Clark had genuinely wanted to find out how people were feeling, if he wanted to understand what people were experiencing he could have gone to the Bronson Centre the night before, Tuesday night, where people had arrived on buses and where people were sitting down in the cafeteria eating their supper.
He could have gone in quietly, talked to people and said “I am the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party. I want to find out what your concerns are”. But he chose not to do that.
It was a media show that arrived with Mr. Clark. I talked to many people in that rally. The reaction they had to Mr. Clark was absolutely genuine because they were angry. They understood what the record was.
People do not forget. The rally was not a rent a crowd. It was not people who professionally demonstrated. These were people who are hurting, who are homeless, who are poor. They came to Parliament Hill to meet with the Prime Minister and were turned away.
The reaction that Mr. Clark got was no surprise to me and no surprise to anyone who was there. If he did not understand that, if he did not understand the reaction he got, then he does not understand much about this issue. That is very important for the record. Poor Mr. Clark, he got a rough time.
As far as the motion goes, it is basically supportable even though we will not be voting on it.
The issues we have to address are not just tax credits. What we have to address is a systematic problem of chronic poverty and unemployment in this country.
What we have called for in the New Democratic Party is for the government to set real targets, achievable targets for eliminating poverty and reducing unemployment.
This is something the Liberals are very proud they have done in terms of the deficit. What we have been saying is we have to do this regarding poverty and unemployment.
Again, if members look at the record it becomes very clear. I heard one Liberal member speak about how the Liberals have produced a balanced and moderate approach.
We have to understand that the so-called balanced and moderate approach has been at the expense of more and more people living below the poverty line. It has been at the expense of more and more unemployment in this country.
If the Tories are serious, if the Liberals are serious about dealing with this issue of poverty, if we truly did have a belief in 1989 through the unanimous resolution of the House that we would eliminate child poverty, then we need a systematic approach. Unfortunately that is lacking in this motion.
On the issue of tax credits I believe we should have fair taxation. The reality is the richest one-fifth of Canadians receive close to half of all the income in Canada while the poorest one-fifth of Canadians receive just 3.1%.
When we look at the child tax benefit, there is an injustice because it is not indexed. I would certainly agree with the motion on that basis.
This simply does not go far enough. We need to talk about fair taxation. We need to look at what the Vanier Institute is saying in its recent report, that tax cuts benefit mostly wealthy and upper income Canadians.
If we are talking about tax credits, we have to look at the taxation system and say why is it that wealthy Canadians are paying less in taxes proportionately and poor Canadians are paying more.
I would like to address what I heard when listening to the debate today as the member from the Reform Party was speaking to the question of what a poverty line is. I was really outraged by the comments the Reform member came out with.
He talked about what true poverty is. He said true poverty is basically kids who are starving to death. He said that actually there are not that many children who die of starvation in Canada.
One had to infer from this that we probably do not have much of a problem relative to, say, the third world.
The hon. member should take the time to go to almost any community in Canada to see the poverty that exists. There are kids who go to school hungry. They do not do very well at school because they do not have enough to eat. There are hundreds of thousands of people who live in substandard housing. There are about 100,000 Canadians who are homeless. That is poverty. It is poverty in our country. It has been recognized by the United Nations committee that has done research on our compliance with the UN covenant on social, economic and cultural rights.
I would ask the member from the Reform Party what he is really saying when he says that we do not have poverty in this country. Is the member saying that he wants to see people dying of starvation on the street before the Reform Party will acknowledge that we have huge income inequities in this country and serious problems with the inequitable distribution of wealth and resources?
The Reform Party's answer is simply to cut taxes. I would ask Reform members to look at our neighbours to the south, whom they always like to use as an example. If tax rates are lower in the United States, and I believe the Reform Party thinks they are, why does it have an even higher poverty rate than Canada?
These issues require very serious examination and a serious program if we are to address poverty in Canada.
The member who introduced this motion has done good work in bringing this issue forward. It is important that we work together as much as possible, particularly on bills such as Bill S-11 which seeks to have social condition included in the Canadian Human Rights Act as a ground against which there cannot be discrimination. We also have to have credibility and acknowledge what has been done in the past.
I say to those members, in terms of the policies of their party, if they are truly committed to eliminating poverty, then they should stand in defence of social housing. It was actually under the Tory government that social housing was gutted in this country and the job was finished off by the Liberal government.
Let us get the record straight and let us make a real commitment to reduce poverty and unemployment in Canada.