Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on private members' Bill C-203 to amend the Auditor General Act to create a poverty commissioner.
I agree with other members who have said that it is very sad we even have to contemplate the creation of a poverty commissioner in a country as wealthy as ours.
I want to reflect on the first international trip I made as a member of parliament with the minister for CIDA. We went to Jordan and Israel and into refugee camps on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I had never seen or experienced poverty like that. It was so crushing. The smell and the sight were really appalling and shocking. All I wanted to do was turn around and go back to my beloved country but I still had five more days to go through those refugee camps to experience and see what those people had to live through. There is no escape at that level of poverty. They are walled in with security and armed guards all around them. There is very little hope for those people.
Last spring I made a trip up the James Bay coast to various first nations communities. I saw the poverty they were forced to live in. It was incredibly degrading for them. They had to send their children to a residential school. That was an incredible symbolism of oppression and degradation for them. The school had no fire exit and only one door. None of the fire escapes on the four storey building functioned.
It is unbelievable that in this country people are forced to send their children to those schools. People live three and four generations in one home because our country will not accommodate them in any way and help them live in dignity. The fact is that in the first place they had been forced to move to an area that could not sustain their traditional way of life. This meant they could not feed their children in the way their parents had managed to feed them. We forced them into poverty and then abandoned them to that poverty.
Think about what is happening around us right now with the rising cost of heating oil. For many people it could be completely unaffordable. I do not know if any other members of parliament have ever had to wake up in a house with no heat in the middle of winter and know that there would not be any heat for a long time. That is an experience of poverty which families suffer in this country. There will be even more because social assistance rates are very minimal. They are not adjusted when the cost of heating oil goes up. People who need to heat their house have to take that money out of the food money for their children.
Our first nations people suffer poverty in disproportion to everyone else in this country. The kinds of institutions that would help them or those living in our inner cities move out of poverty are not there. Shamefully, our inner cities are degenerating and there is no hope for the people to move out.