Debates of Nov. 24th, 2009

Government Response to Petitions

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to seven petitions.

Child Protection Act (Online Sexual Exploitation)

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-58, An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

Interparliamentary Delegations

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 34(1), I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the report of the Canadian delegation of the Canada-Japan interparliamentary group, representing its participation in the annual visit by the co-chairs held in Tokyo, Japan, April 4-10.

Transport, Infrastructure and Communities

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present, in both official languages, the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities, in relation to the study of Bill C-310, the air passengers' bill of rights.

The committee recommends that the House do not further proceed with the bill.

Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, there has been consultation among the parties and I believe if you seek it, you will find unanimous agreement for the following motion. I move:

That, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practice of the House, under the Rubric “Motions” during Routine Proceedings today, the hon. Member for Sault Ste Marie may move a motion to concur in the Sixth Report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, presented on Friday, November 17, 2009, provided that no Member may speak in debate for more than 5 minutes and that, following a speech from a Member of each recognized party, the report shall be deemed concurred in.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

Does the hon. member for Vancouver East have the unanimous consent of the House to propose this motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

I declare the motion carried.

(Motion agreed to)

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I move that the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities be concurred in.

Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the unanimous resolution by Parliament in 1989 to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000. In the motion passed last week by the parliamentary committee I serve on, we honour that anniversary. We note the urgency of action to eliminate poverty.

I believe we honour the mover of that motion, Mr. Broadbent, as well as poverty activists who make a difference in our communities and the MPs who, back then, had the will to want to tackle that daunting challenge. In 1989 we had the collective will, the values and the conviction to do so. What we lacked, and it was our critical omission, was a concrete plan to make it happen.

Why is this so? Canada is ranked close to last in UNICEF and OECD reports on the welfare of children. We spend the least on early childhood education and care. We spend little for families and not much to make sure our children grow up healthy and smart.

We are the only industrialized nation without a national affordable housing strategy. Only one in five children have access to early childhood education and care. Our minimum wage has not gone up much and neither have child tax benefits or funding to support aboriginal children.

We need to collectively recommit to build a Canada that leaves no one behind. Regardless of our politics, I believe there is consensus to do just that. Indeed, for a wide range of social, economic and spiritual principles across the spectrum, there is motivation and reason to do so.

While the barriers are many, I meet members of Parliament in all parties who understand the common sense of giving everyone in their communities equal opportunities to be productive members. People want that. In these tough times in our ridings when a new employment opportunity arises, we also see the enormous lineups of people wanting to work.

Food Banks Canada's HungerCount 2009 notes that even when people find jobs, if those jobs do not pay enough, there is no escape from poverty. One in five food bank users had employment. The Campaign 2000 report notes that four of every ten poor children belong to families in which a parent works.

Let us remember the statistics being released today are drawn from 2007 numbers, that is, numbers from before our recession. With so few covered by EI, with welfare rolls increasing and with the recession recovery slow, it is reasonable to conclude that low-income poverty numbers are higher now and will grow even higher in the next year. We need national leadership.

There are seven provinces starting poverty plans, but they do not have the capacity to move recession victims out of poverty. We cannot fail this time. We know we can make an extraordinary difference in this country for all who are excluded from our communities because they live in poverty.

For two years now, the parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities has undertaken a major study of the federal role in poverty reduction. In the committee's imminent travel west, we will hear from witnesses on the incumbent need for national leadership.

This is about justice, not charity. This is about human rights. We know internationally and in other countries freedom from poverty is a human right. It is not so in Canada.

We are coming to recognize as well the economic arguments, the true cost of poverty and of excluding so many from being productive members of society as well as the savings in the fields of health, education and criminal justice from eliminating poverty.

A report just released in Sault Ste. Marie by the Community Quality Institute assessed the external cost of poverty. It states:

If poverty is reduced, education levels will rise, improving the community's workforce and supporting economic development. With lower poverty and higher education levels will come overall improved health of citizens.

The report notes that the impact of poverty is felt by the entire community.

For our children, for our families, for all, for a lasting legacy to our country, it is time to keep the promise to make Canada poverty-free.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development and to the Minister of Labour]

Mr. Speaker, I know the member for Sault Ste. Marie has a keen interest in this area.

Of course he is speaking today about an unfortunate anniversary, one that should make us all pause and reflect that 20 years ago members of the House promised Canadians that they would end child poverty in 11 years, by the year 2000. Twenty years later we are still working toward that laudable goal.

Important steps have been taken and progress has been made. However, I am not suggesting we naively believe that we have solved the problem of child poverty. We know there is much more to be done.

Clearly, none of us should be content until the goal all parliamentarians pledged in 1989 to achieve has been achieved, the elimination of child poverty, but we should not ignore the undeniable progress being made in advancing this objective.

I encourage all parties to step up and do their respective parts to ensure that the vision of Parliament becomes a reality. Certainly it should be obvious to everyone that in order to eliminate child poverty, we must attack poverty in general and poverty within families in particular.

Lifting whole families out of poverty is what is necessary to ensure Canadian children are no longer living in poverty. While governments, federal, provincial, territorial and municipal alike, all have important roles to play, we can accomplish our goal only by working together in all aspects of our society. We cannot simply think that all solutions will come from government and that all good ideas will come from politicians. Not even the most important actions must come necessarily from governments but that is not to say that governments cannot do good work, as we are doing.

We have made progress toward the elimination of child poverty. A good deal of this progress can be traced to good economic performance and to rising incomes in good economic times, as well as to good jobs for more Canadians and hard work by Canadian parents and families.

We can also give credit to the many initiatives we have introduced over the past few years, many of them delivered collaboratively with provincial and territorial governments as well as business and community organizations. It is no coincidence that we have seen gradual but steady progress in reducing the overall low-income rate for children in Canada.

According to Statistics Canada and its low income cut-off measure, which is a relative measure, the incidence of low income among Canadian children has come down from 18.4% in 1996 to 9.5% in 2007. This is a fifty percent reduction in child low income in about a decade. Although there is still more work to do, and we are not where we want to be, we are a far cry from the days when almost one in five children lived in poverty.

We still have more hurdles to clear, to be sure, but our government is continuing to work at moving toward that goal. Our government has taken substantive action in a range of areas to support low-income Canadians and to provide vulnerable Canadian families with a hand up. These actions have produced concrete results by reducing the number of low-income Canadians. Fewer low income families means fewer low-income children.

In Canada's economic action plan we continue to make significant investments through a range of income support, tax relief and targeted support for Canadians. The working income tax benefit was introduced in 2007, commonly referred to as WITB, to make work more rewarding for low and modest income Canadians. The WITB helped over 900,000 low-income Canadians in the first year alone. In budget 2009 our government doubled its investment in the WITB resulting in increased benefits for low-income working Canadians. These improvements are in addition to the Canada employment credit to help working Canadians.

Just yesterday in the National Post Peter Shawn Taylor said:

The Working Income Tax Benefit is arguably the country's most significant housing program because it boosts income for the working poor.

With housing a significant issue, and we are talking about low income, this is another significant way we are working toward our goal.

Our government has also lowered taxes so that low-income Canadians can keep more of their money. The Canadian economic action plan included an increase in the basic personal amount, as well an increase in the upper limits of the two lowest personal income tax brackets. This means that low-income Canadians can earn more money that is not subject to federal tax.

As a result of these measures combined with previous tax cuts, close to one million low-income Canadians will not have to pay federal income taxes anymore.

In addition, we have the universal child care benefit of $100 per month for every child under six years of age. That helps lift some 22,000 families with 57,000 children out of low incomes. We have also enhanced the national child benefit that has been very popular and well received. Together we spend over $13 billion in benefits to help families with children, and that is an impressive record.

[Raymonde Folco, Liberal, Laval—Les Îles, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to second the motion made by my colleague, calling for concurrence in the sixth report on poverty reduction in Canada.

Twenty years ago today, Parliament, led by a Conservative government, promised to eliminate child poverty in Canada by the year 2000.

Was it an empty pledge? Today one in 10 Canadian children live in poverty, often with many of them going to bed with hungry bellies. Their parents live in poverty and many of those parents are single working women.

The figures are even worse for first nations and Inuit families living on reserves or in the territories, where one child in four and his or her parents live in poverty.

According to our committee's research and hearings, every month, 770,000 people in Canada use food banks. That is nearly two-thirds of a million Canadians, and 40% of them are children. That is nearly half a million children in Canada.

In 2007, in a speech he gave in Toronto, the Conservative Prime Minister stated, no doubt with some measure of pride, that the poverty rate had decreased from 16% in 1996 to 11% in 2005.

Four years later the HungerCount survey released on November 17 showed that in March of this year almost 800,000 individuals used food banks across this country.

This is a 17.6% increase. The percentages speak volumes, but the real numbers are even more telling. We are talking about an additional 120,000 people using food banks.

Of the 794,738 people helped in March of this year, 72,321 or 9.1% of the total, stepped through the front door of a food bank for the first time according to the survey. In other words, more families need the food banks today than ever before. This is not good enough in a society of plenty such as Canada.

Witnesses who appeared before the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities explained that Canada had succeeded in drastically reducing poverty among seniors.

The time has come for this government to use this model for reducing poverty among seniors and put in place an action-oriented strategic framework to reduce poverty, including monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.

Since 1989, Liberals have acted on several fronts to eradicate poverty while supporting Canada's commitment to the millennium development goals. The 2002 throne speech allocated long-term funding for increases to the national child benefit as well as investments in affordable housing. Continued actions of the Liberal government removed over one million low-income people from the tax rolls.

The Canada child tax benefit proposed significant investments to the tune of $13 billion per year. It provided $9 billion in income support to help more than three million low- and middle-income families. We also committed $5 billion to work with the provinces and territories to improve and expand early learning and child care across this country, including the 2003 multilateral framework on early learning and child care.

A number of these agreements have been cancelled by the current government.

Witnesses who testified before the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities said that the $100 a month that the Conservative government allocates to families is not enough to achieve real poverty reduction goals.

Liberals have been clear in their commitment to reducing poverty. In 2007, the member for Saint-Laurent—Cartierville spoke for all members on this side of the House when he said that, “Housing and universal child care are critical foundations of opportunity for low-income Canadians”.

Part of that commitment included honouring the promises of the Kelowna accord, a $5 billion program dismantled by the Conservative government.

The committee's sixth report, which marks the anniversary of the 1989 unanimous resolution to eradicate poverty by the year 2000—a goal that has not been achieved—calls on the government to develop an immediate plan to eliminate poverty in Canada.

Canadians need answers from the current government now. As legislators, we must put food back in Canadians' budgets. Civil society demands it.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate the hon. member from Sault Ste. Marie for his motion to concur in the committee's sixth report, which I had the honour to table last Friday, November 20.

I will not quote many statistics. My colleagues who spoke before me did a good job of showing how we have failed to achieve the objectives of the unanimous motion to combat poverty that this House passed on November 24, 1989, 20 years ago today.

As the hon. member mentioned earlier, we can be happy that we have made some advances in the fight against poverty, especially when it comes to seniors, but I think that in terms of families, and particularly children, we have failed. That is distressing. The motion specifically said that we should try to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. We are in pretty much the same position as we were in 1989. In order to ensure that things improve, we cannot lie to ourselves. There are aggravating factors that lead to poverty. We must work under the assumption that where there are poor children, there are poor parents.

What is more, it should come as no surprise to us today that the government has not met its goals, because, in the two decades since the motion, it has made deep cuts to the measures that make up the social safety net.

One contributing factor is the shortage of adequate, decent housing. Between 1993 and 2001, the Canadian government withdrew its financial support for the provinces' efforts to build affordable housing. Funding was not restored until 2001, and then only at a fraction of what it had been. Then along came the deficit we have now. We inherited this policy, which is one of the worst there is.

Over the past few years, especially in the latest budget, the government has cut funding for programs that support gender equality in the workplace. Women are being denied legal recourse to fight for pay equity. The tragedy here is that anyone should be surprised that there has not been greater progress in the fight against poverty.

The same goes for literacy. Over the past five years, the literacy budget has been cut in half. Depriving people of knowledge, information and the ability to find out what they need to know and use their own knowledge to survive also contributes to poverty.

My colleague from Laval—Les Îles talked about how the government scrapped the Kelowna accord for aboriginal peoples. It is disconcerting. The federal government has a fiduciary responsibility toward aboriginal communities. There was supposed to be $5 billion made available to aboriginal communities.

In conclusion, I would like to touch on one last element. The government eliminated the program, and nobody should be surprised at the state of aboriginal communities. Yet the Canadian government has a fiduciary responsibility toward these communities. I also want to briefly mention the fact that the government made deep cuts to employment insurance benefits even though the money was there, and then used that money for other purposes.

All of these actions have prevented us from gaining ground in the fight against poverty.

I really hope that the House will unanimously pass the motion before us this morning.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Pursuant to order made earlier today, the motion to concur in the sixth report of the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities is deemed adopted.

(Motion agreed to)

Library Book Rate

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians love to read and they love to share. Today I am proud to present petitions from Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick.

Canadians want equal access to information, regardless of their location, age or ability. Bill C-322, An Act to amend the Canada Post Corporation Act (library materials) would protect and support the library book rate and extend it to include audiovisual materials.

Rouge Watershed

[Michael Chong, Conservative, Wellington—Halton Hills, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition asking the Government of Canada to create a new national park in the Toronto area.

Mr. Speaker, I am tabling a petition signed by Canadians calling on the Government of Canada to work with the Province of Ontario to establish a national park in the Rouge Watershed in the Toronto area to protect this nationally significant portion of Canada's eastern deciduous forest, also known as the Carolinian forest zone, an area that contains numerous flora and fauna on the endangered species list.

I note that the House adopted a motion in January 1990, moved by the hon. Pauline Browes, calling for the same thing, namely, the establishment of a new park by the Canadian government in the Rouge Watershed.

Canada Post

[Jean-Yves Roy, Bloc, Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to present to the House two petitions on behalf of the citizens of Saint-Vianney in the Haute-Gaspésie—La Mitis—Matane—Matapédia riding and the citizens of Sainte-Flavie, who want the government to maintain the moratorium on rural post office closures.

I would remind the House that, despite the moratorium, some post offices in our ridings are closing down. Unfortunately, this is happening quite regularly. The citizens want rural post offices to remain open, because they are an important part of their communities.

Canada–Colombia Free Trade Agreement

[Jim Maloway, NDP, Elmwood—Transcona, MB]

Mr. Speaker, this petition calls for a stop to the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement.

Violence against workers by paramilitaries in Colombia has been ongoing, with more than 2,200 trade unionists murdered since 1991. Much violence has been committed against indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, human rights activists, workers, farmers and journalists.

The agreement is similar to NAFTA, which has mainly benefited large multinational corporations rather than providing real benefits to working families. Since NAFTA's implementation, Mexico has lost over a million agricultural jobs.

The murder of labour and human rights activists in Colombia increased in 2008 and continues unabated to this day.

All trade agreements must be built upon the principles of fair trade, which fundamentally respects social justice, human rights, labour rights and environmental stewardship as prerequisites for trade.

The petitioners call on Parliament to reject the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement until an independent human rights assessment is carried out and the resulting concerns are addressed. They also call for the agreement to be renegotiated in line with the principles of fair trade, taking fully into account environmental and social impacts while genuinely respecting and enhancing the labour rights of all affected parties.

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

[Blake Richards, Conservative, Wild Rose, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to present a petition today from a number of constituents throughout my riding, from places such as Cochrane, Bearspaw, Water Valley, Olds and Airdrie to a number of other Alberta communities, such as Calgary, Beaverlodge and Grand Prairie.

These petitioners share my concern about the bill currently before Parliament that seeks to legalize assisted suicide. They also have concerns about euthanasia. The petitioners are calling upon Parliament to retain section 241 of the Criminal Code without changes to ensure that Parliament does not sanction or allow the counselling, aiding or abetting of suicide.

National Housing Strategy

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour of presenting a petition signed by petitioners in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The petitioners are calling for a national housing strategy that will ensure secure, adequate, accessible and affordable housing for all Canadians. In particular, they are looking for an increased federal role through investments in not-for-profit housing, housing for the homeless, access to housing for those with different needs, and sustainable and environmentally sound design standards for new housing that go beyond the one-time stimulus investment contained in Budget 2009.

They are asking for Parliament to ensure swift passage of private member's Bill C-304.

Questions on the Order Paper

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I ask that all questions be allowed to stand.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Barry Devolin]

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

The House resumed from November 23 consideration of the motion that Bill C-36, An Act to amend the Criminal Code, be read the third time and passed.