Madam Speaker, I congratulate you on your elevation to an esteemed position in the House of Commons. I wish you all the best in your deliberations. I will be splitting my time with the member for Dartmouth.
I thank the voters of Regina—Qu'Appelle for having confidence in me and re-electing me as their member of parliament. This is my ninth parliament. I was first elected in 1968. Over those years I have seen many changes in the House of Commons. There are a couple of general themes that I am really concerned about, the themes of democracy and equality.
I remember the sixties and seventies when there was a tremendous move in the country for better social programs and greater equality among people. There was a real fight in the student movement and others to have a more democratic society. I remember Pierre Trudeau and the talk about a just society and participatory democracy.
The word inequality or equality was not even mentioned in the throne speech last week. Some 30 years later we find that the gap between the rich and the poor, after narrowing in the fifties, sixties and throughout the seventies is now starting to widen again.
Recently there was a study of the family by the Vanier Institute which showed that the gap between the rich and the poor is now widening throughout the decade of the 1990s. That should really concern us as a country and as policy makers in Canada.
I should like to place a couple of very worrying trends on the record of the House of Commons in terms of the growing gap between the rich and the poor. If we look at the wealthiest 20% of Canadians, in the beginning of the 1990s compared to the latter part of the 1990s their share of the national income went up from 37% to 39%, an increase of 6.6% of their share of the national wealth.
If we look at the poorest 20% of the Canadian people, their share of the national income went down in the nineties. At the beginning of the nineties they had 7.6% of the national income and national wealth. At the end of the nineties they had 7.1% of the national income and national wealth. As we can see, the incomes of the wealthy went up while the incomes of the poorest went down. This is a sad commentary on the progress we have made as a society as a whole, not just at the federal level but at the provincial and municipal levels.
I want to mention a couple of other statistics that are interesting. In 1989, 29,200 households in Canada went bankrupt compared to 85,000 in 1997. This again is growing evidence of the widening gap between the rich and poor in Canada.
In terms of savings, the household average in 1989 were $6,250. In 1998, household savings on average were $1,664. This represents a tremendous drop throughout the decade.
According to the Vanier Institute, by the end of the 1990s 40% of the poorest Canadians spent more than they earned. The middle 20% spent all that they earned by the end of the 1990s. If a dollar was earned, a dollar was spent. However, the wealthiest 40% of the Canadian population had increased savings in the 1990s while the average went down radically throughout that decade.
Once again, we see the redistribution of wealth and income widening. It seems to me that the challenge of a parliament in any country is to govern on behalf of the common good, to create greater conditions for equality and opportunity, and to redistribute wealth so that people have a better opportunity to pursue what they want in their individual lives.
An example more specific to my riding concerns the farm crisis. The grain and oilseed farmers today are facing the biggest crisis since the 1930s. Farm income is dropping. Between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2000, 22,000 prairie farmers left the land. However, we have a federal government that provides very little assistance to farmers in comparison to what is happening in Europe and the United States. That is another example of the widening gap between the rich and poor.
People are homeless and living on the streets. We have young people who are poor. The Vanier Institute stated that among single parent families and the young, the poverty rate was increasing while take home pay was decreasing compared to wealthy people in Canada. It is our obligation as members of parliament to address those issues.
The other issue I want to address is the issue of democracy. Democracy in Canada is in a crisis today. We have to look at electoral democracy, parliamentary democracy and economic democracy.
In terms of electoral democracy, the Prime Minister will soon be naming 12 more people to the Senate, a legislative body that is not elected, not democratic, not accountable and supported by only 5% of Canadians. Yet, as parliamentarians, we do nothing about it. The time has come to abolish that unelected body and bring the purpose of the Senate for checks and balances into a reformed House of Commons. That should be done as soon as possible.
We should also look at bringing our democracy into the modern world. We should bring in an element of proportional representation, as have other countries in the world with populations of more than eight million people, such as the United States and India. Most countries in the world have some element of proportional representation that treats all voters as equal. This means that a vote is a vote and no vote is wasted. Those are some of the things that have to be done. If we do not do it soon we will have a tremendous crisis.
The turnout in the last election campaign was barely 60% of the population. In 1997 it was 66% of the population. If we go back to the fifties, sixties and earlier seventies, it was closer to 80% of the population. There is no doubt that we are sleepwalking toward a crisis in democracy on the electoral side, on the parliamentary side and on the economic side.
In terms of parliament, the power of the Prime Minister is much too great in our constitution today. We need stronger committees that are more independent. We need to have fewer confidence votes in the House of Commons.
The power of the PMO to make appointments, whether it be the Senate, the Supreme Court, the RCMP or every important legislative body or important institution, should be thwarted and democratized. Perhaps we should have appointments nominated by the Prime Minister but approved or rejected by the relevant parliamentary committee.
The Prime Minister should not have the power to set election dates. There should be a fixed and set election date. Perhaps we should even have a term limitation for the Prime Minister of Canada. These are ideas that many countries around the world adopt.
When it comes to economic democracy, the trade deals today and the large transnational corporations are really an assault on democracy. They take away a lot of the political power which nation states used to have to make important decisions over the lives of individual citizens. That is an area we have to address as we begin a brand new parliament.
To that end, I want on behalf of our caucus to move a subamendment. I move:
That the amendment be amended by adding, after the word “provinces” the following:
“and further that this House strongly condemns the government for its support of the proposed U.S. National Missile Defence System as well as undemocratic trade deals such as the WTO, NAFTA, and the proposed FTAA that do not ensure respect for human rights, labour, and the environment”.
In other words, it is an assault in democracy by these trade deals. We have lost democratic control.
It is not a question of being for or against trade. We are all for trade. We are a great trading nation. In the process of doing that let us make sure we reassert some national sovereignty and democratic control so that in these trade deals we can have minimum standards or a waiver for social programs, for the environment and for health. That is what we should be building. Also within those trade deals in the context of transnational corporations we should not give away our sovereignty and democracy.
There is nothing democratic about some of these large transnational corporations that have an economy bigger than these nation states. Wal-Mart has about the 10th or 12th largest economy in the world. That is bigger than nation states. These big transnationals are not run by entrepreneurs or free enterprise. They are run by technocrats and bureaucrats. They are like big icebergs that bump around the world destroying the economies of nation states.
The time has come for people to reassert democratic control when it comes to the economy of the world and the economy of our own country as well.