It is a dubious pleasure to speak to Bill C-11, the Cape Breton Development Corporation divestiture act. I say dubious because of the great hardship which the government and this bill have put upon the people of Cape Breton.
My colleagues from Cape Breton have dealt with the details of the entire bill very well in many speeches, as well as the groups of amendments. Group No. 2, which we are now on, relates to ensuring that people from the community and pensioners are on the board. This speaks very directly to a responsibility to the community and to a transparency and accountability which has been sadly lacking in the way in which the government has dealt with this legislation, and specifically the Minister of Natural Resources. I heard someone say earlier that every time we ask a question about this subject, it almost seems as if he has gravel on his seat. He does not seem to want to talk to it and he is very uncomfortable with it.
The way the Liberals have dealt with this whole issue speaks reams to their callousness and their ability to manipulate events and people in the regions.
There was an astounding lack of consultation in this whole matter. The benefits, when they were announced, were completely insufficient. I am speaking of health, pension and economic development benefits. The Devco arbitration decision, which was released on June 2, made it entirely clear that the package was inadequate, which our members, in particular our members from Cape Breton, have been saying all along.
The way in which the government dealt with the legislation, quashing the debate at second reading, was undemocratic in the extreme. It is completely uninterested in holding public hearings. That should not surprise us a bit, because that is the way it has dealt with a whole lot of other information in the recent past.
I want to concentrate on something a little different tonight, which also speaks to the heart of the matter in the second group of amendments.
If I may give a bit of context and background, this past weekend the Prime Minister of our country was in Berlin speaking to a group of what I consider to be largely social democratic governments about progressive governance. We might question initially what he was doing there. We found that it was due to his good friend, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, that he was even invited.
One may also ask what Bill Clinton was doing in a meeting talking about social democratic governance, the third way, or as the Prime Minister calls it, the Canadian way. I was reading in The New York Review of Books this past winter an article by an esteemed American economist, Robert M. Solow, called “Welfare: The Cheapest Country”. The cheapest country was the United States.
He ends his article by saying that what really distinguishes the United States is the equanimity with which the majority contemplates the poverty of a minority. So one might ask what the president of the United States was doing in a meeting talking about the third way, and secondly, what he was doing inviting our Prime Minister to talk about the third way when clearly he does not know the first thing about it. The way in which the Cape Breton Devco situation has been handled speaks entirely to that.
This weekend the Prime Minister was boasting about Canada's “mixed economy”, the third way; not private enterprise solely, not development by the states solely, but a compassionate and intelligent mix of the two. That is what our Prime Minister was talking about, but as I said, I do not really know what gives him the credentials to talk about it.
I briefly want to give a couple of examples which really do relate to Cape Breton and to the Devco situation. He says that the challenge is to seize opportunities, believing that private economic growth has to be complemented by public investment, yet we have a situation here where a mine which has been publicly owned is going to be sold off. We do not know to whom. We have no idea whether they will keep mining coal. We have no idea who will be employed. We do not even know if someone might buy this mine and shut it down, simply because they do not want to have competition from it. This does not speak to me of a government which comes at a mixed economy with any integrity or knowledge whatsoever.
The context here is that he is lecturing governments from other countries of the world, like the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Our Prime Minister is lecturing them about the mixed economy and the third way. This might be a good standup routine for Yuk Yuks comedy, but it is not exactly what we would expect at a meeting of august members of governments from other countries.
In this context, the Prime Minister says that Canada's governments make a clear commitment to preserving the Canada pension plan. It was not that long ago, a couple of years back, when we were fighting tooth and nail to keep the government from downsizing the Canada pension plan. When it got pushed to the wall and could do nothing else, the government did not cut it as badly as it was planning to. Suddenly now it is taking credit for enhancing it. That is the way it always goes with the Liberals.
He talks about a progressive income tax system. We know from the last budget all about the progressive income tax system. Yes, it is very progressive for people who have capital gains to pay, for the more affluent in our society and for people who are dealing with stock options. It is very progressive for them, but there is not very much for the rest of us. As our party has pointed out again and again, there is very little for health care.
He brags about the employment insurance program. That will make my colleague from New Brunswick double over with humour. We have had to fight the government on the employment insurance system tooth and nail again. Even having done so, the benefits are much more difficult for people to get. It has caused a great deal of hardship for people, in particular working women.
I could go on. He talks about the government's support for students. We know all about that support. The government does admit that student debt has increased. That is about the only ray of truth I see in the document.
He finally says that governments have to find new ways to engage citizens. The government certainly has done that in Cape Breton with Devco. People are engaged in anticipating their own demise.
It is a bit rich when the Prime Minister of Canada goes to another country to, I suspect, set himself up as some wise person who will return home and call an election on the things he is talking about. When and if he does that we will be here to remind him that, despite the highfalutin words, these are mainly false and hollow promises.
In the couple of minutes left to me I want to refer to another thing which is a cruel deception being practised on the people of Cape Breton. We have been told that these mines are being shut down. We are not sure whether the coal which still exists in reserves will be mined in Cape Breton to supply coal for power generation in Cape Breton. What we do know, and it is already happening, is that coal is being hauled from Colombia to be sold to Nova Scotia Power, being hauled on ships owned by the Minister of Finance I might add. However, that is not my main point. What I want to talk about is the race to the bottom being perpetrated by this government on the people of Cape Breton and how it will impact other countries.
A mine leader from Colombia where this coal is being purchased, Francisco Ramirez Cuellar, was in Canada recently. He told us that he feared for his health and safety when he went home because he was coming to Canada to speak out about what was happening. We now have information from the inter-church committee on human rights in Latin America, dated May 29, 2000, concerning an urgent action about renewed threats against this Colombian trade unionist. As he had suspected and feared when he went home, he was followed. It says that there were at least two attempts when people in utility vehicles tried to pick him up. If they had he probably would have lost his life.
I ask myself and I ask members across the way what kind of development it is when we have these kinds of situations occurring, when people in Cape Breton are being played off against people in the third world. What are they being played off against? They are being played off against regimes which will torture and murder people who dare to unionize to improve the situation for their workers.
This is a shameful situation. When we look at the motions being put forward to improve the sad situation which this government has perpetrated upon the people of Cape Breton, the amendments that my party is putting forward are the least we could ask. I humbly ask members across the way to give these motions consideration and to at least pass them so that we can hold our heads high eventually when we talk to the people of Cape Breton, rather than having to hang our heads in shame because of what we have done to them.