Mr. Speaker, it is with a surplus of energy that I wanted to wind up the day by adding my comments to those of my Bloc Quebecois colleague, and especially to speak about the main challenge for members of this Parliament, which is the fight against poverty.
Members would have to agree that this government has little to say, little to offer and little to suggest when it comes to the fight against poverty. And yet what a paradox that is. Back around 1968, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Liberal, urged Quebeckers to continue the Quiet Revolution in Ottawa; his goal was to build a just society.
Forty years later, we can only observe that there have never been so many poor Canadians as there are today. Of course, it could be said that poverty is a question of adjusting the available manpower to the manpower required. This would be to ignore the fact that we are faced with a government that is deliberately setting out, through its policies, to create poverty. There is not a single parliamentarian of any experience who will not admit that the government has created poverty with its EI reform.
It takes some nerve. Despite all the imperfections of the labour market when left to its own devices, and not content with destroying the social safety net, the government decided to deliberately create poverty and exclude people from the social safety net by means of EI reform.
This calls for two comments. How is it that Canada is allowed to be one of the only OECD countries that does not contribute to its public EI scheme? By what principle should the Canadian government, in contrast to workers and representatives of employers' associations, be exempted from contributing to the EI regime?
What is most tragic about all this is that we have never seen a weaker ministerial deputation. We have never seen a ministerial deputation as lacking in ambition and as spineless as this bunch, for whom anything is fine as long as the party line prevails.
I think it must be made very clear: there is a deliberate desire on the part of this government to create poverty. If ten unemployed people were collected at random from here and there in Canada, it would be found that barely four of that ten could qualify for what is supposed to be a protection for workers.
Were there any voices raised by the government majority calling upon the Minister of Human Resources Development to improve his reform? This is a man of letters, a man who writes, who publishes, a wise and knowing man. The problem is, he is not a man who listens. He is a man lacking in sensitivity, one who is unable to stand up to his public servants in order to finally propose some corrective measures to improve a reform which has, and I say it again, deliberately created poverty.
I would like to share with you my feelings of outrage when I saw and heard the minister responsible for Human Resources Development, I shall not say his name, on RDI last Monday.
He was plugging his book, which had just been released. It is called “Pour une politique de confiance”. Confidence—I would like to see the minister come down to the lower St. Lawrence region, to Hochelaga—Maisonneuve, to Gaspé, to central Quebec, and tell the unemployed, whom he has deliberately excluded from his policy of social protection, that they must have faith in the future.
The biggest paradox is that there was the minister on television with his stylish suit, telling RDI viewers that there was something worse in society that exploitation: exclusion. As a Liberal minister, he is suddenly aware that this is a society which excludes some of its members.
He should have realized that before and not contributed himself, through the policies he proposed as a member of this government, to the exclusion of people. This is my first example of someone speaking from both sides of his mouth.
The second subject I wanted to raise is the problem of unsuitable housing, which is of concern to those facing financial difficulties. To all intents and purposes, the various governments that have succeeded each other since 1992, both the Conservative and the Liberal one in place, got totally out of public housing.
According to the evaluation by FRAPRU—a very credible activist group in Quebec that has developed expertise in government policy and especially in analyzing social housing issues—and according to the latest census, more than 1,670,700 households in Canada spend over 30% of their income on rental accommodation.
There is a problem because the definition that should be applied to poverty ought to take into account the portion of a person's budget that goes to housing. It is generally agreed that an individual spending over 30% of income on rent is likely to be in the disadvantaged class, spending a disproportionate amount of his income on public housing.
Has this government been sensitive to this since 1993? Has it proposed measures to help these people with housing problems? Absolutely not. Not only did it follow the example of the Conservative government, but it is now negotiating—and I say negotiating, although it is not really negotiating—so it can transfer $1.9 million to the provinces to manage the rental housing stock.
Negotiations are under way, but the approach is ill-conceived, to say the least, because not only does the government want to transfer a responsibility that it should never have had, but the rental housing it wants to transfer will need major repairs in the years to come. So the government does not want to transfer to the provinces the equivalent funds that would enable the provinces to look after social housing, which is their constitutional responsibility, as they see fit.
Historically, because it has always resisted, as it should, the federal government's invasive policies, Quebec has received on average 19% of the available funds since it has taken part in the social housing shared cost program. Quebec, however, has 29% of the people who need such housing. Quebec is responsible for 25%—its demographic weight—of the federal government's revenues.
This represents a distortion that provincial negotiators tried to get the federal government to understand, but in vain, because the federal government was not interested.
This brings me to the conclusion—because I think that is where I should be headed—that we need anti-poverty legislation. I repeat that there are two broad categories of people still being discriminated against in our society: homosexuals and those with low incomes.
You can count on the Bloc Quebecois, on the Bloc Quebecois whip and on the member for Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, to make a suggestion in the House in the near future for anti-poverty legislation that we hope will meet with the favour of the members across the way.