Mr. Speaker, over the past few weeks, parliamentarians have been invited to look into the massive so-called “budget bill”, and, as we have been saying for weeks now, this bill is a real Trojan Horse.
It has all sorts of provisions that will have an impact on everything, from old age security, food inspection and healthcare transfers right through to immigration. Of course, one third of this Trojan Horse bill includes significant changes to environmental protection regulations.
In short, this bill repeals the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act and, as a result, cancels all international accountability measures on climate change. Briefly once again, this bill repeals the current Canadian Environmental Assessment Act and, as a result, allows the Conservatives to considerably weaken the assessment system. So, in a nutshell, this bill dismantles the measures that were implemented to protect our environment and turns its back on climate change.
Just imagine what the rest of this bill contains. It is over 400 pages long and amends 60 different pieces of legislation, rescinding half a dozen and adding three, including a complete overhaul of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act.
I want to stress that the short title of the bill, “jobs, growth and long-term prosperity”, does not reflect its content. First, much of the bill has nothing to do with the budget and, second, the bill is about austerity. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has confirmed that public sector job cuts will be in the order of 26,800 over the next three years. In addition, about 6,000 contract positions are being cut. The government has refused to detail where many of these cuts will be made, but many of the services and programs that Canadians rely upon will be diminished or eliminated.
It also seems clear that, since our economic recovery has stalled and in the face of global economic uncertainty, the last thing we need are further cutbacks, which will be a further drag on the overall economy.
Have we gained new jobs from the very depths of the economic downturn in 2008-09? Yes, of course. However, since the employment rate fell dramatically by 2.5% of the working age population at that time, it has only rebounded by 0.6%. Only about one-fifth of the labour market damage from the recession has been repaired. Between one in four or one in three net new jobs created in Canada from the end of 2007 to the end of 2011 went to temporary foreign workers. We have still not recovered from the lost jobs and we have not kept up with population growth.
However, the changes in the bill to employment insurance, rather than helping Canadian families adjust to a chronic shortage of jobs in most parts of the country, seem designed to compel them to abandon their skills in a rush to take any job at all. What a waste of skills at a time when Canada needs vision and leadership to help us transition to a more modern and environmentally sustainable economy.
We have somewhat succeeded in opening the debate. The minister finally clarified, in a way, what she has in store for employment insurance, but that cannot replace the normal democratic process.
Even though the Prime Minister has expressed opposition to omnibus bills in the past, the Conservatives do not seem too concerned about them today, but this bill is different. For many of the measures proposed, this is the first time we are hearing about them being in the bill. However, despite the bill's scope, the government is determined to pass it as quickly as possible, without consulting Canadians and their members of Parliament, and without having the bill carefully examined by experts and other stakeholders.
Conservative commentator, Andrew Coyne, wrote in the National Post:
Not only does this make a mockery of the confidence convention, shielding bills that would otherwise be defeatable within a money bill, which is not: It makes it impossible to know what Parliament really intended by any of it. We’ve no idea whether MPs supported or opposed any particular bill in the bunch, only that they voted for the legislation that contained them. There is no common thread that runs between them, no overarching principle; they represent not a single act of policy, but a sort of compulsory buffet.
But there is something quite alarming about Parliament being obliged to rubber-stamp the government’s whole legislative agenda at one go.
That was said by a Conservative commentator, and I could not agree more.
The Conservatives' approach is very worrisome. The official opposition has tried to work with the government to split the bill and allow the various measures to be debated more substantively and studied more carefully within the proper committees. The Conservatives refused.
We have asked for enough time to study the bill within the Standing Committee on Finance. The Conservatives gave us only four minutes per clause. And they refused to give us more time when witnesses representing both sides were unable to attend the meetings, whose schedule was strictly controlled by the Conservatives. This reduced the time for debate even more.
The finance subcommittee set up to study part 3 of the bill had just 12 hours to hear from witnesses on a wide variety of changes to environmental regulation and changes impacting our fisheries and species at risk, including an entirely rewritten environmental assessment act. Our colleagues on the subcommittee reported that hearings were often rushed, often interrupted, that consultation was extremely limited and that a lack of opportunity to draw on the expertise of the standing committees on environment, fisheries and natural resources prevented a proper and robust evaluation of the proposals in the bill.
I regret to say that our experience in the finance committee was much the same. The extremely tight timeline made it impossible for several witnesses to appear, which significantly cut down on our hearing time. Some witnesses, who did appear but did not support the government's position, often had their testimony dismissed. One economist had his work dismissed as garbage, and Paul Kennedy, who spent 20 years in the area of national security and who served as a senior assistant to the deputy minister of public safety, had his testimony dismissed as simply wrong. His error: he voiced concern over the impact of the elimination of the position of the Inspector General of CSIS.
Canadians have every right to expect that their government will listen to the public. The New Democrats were listening, both at committee and at public hearings across the county. We heard from Dr. Haggie, of the Canadian Medical Association, who warned that raising the age of eligibility for old age security was certain to have a negative impact. He emphasized that gnawing away at Canada's social safety net would no doubt force hard choices on some of tomorrow's seniors. The choice between whether to buy groceries or buy their medicine will, in the end, put a greater burden on our health care system.
We heard from a number of experts who warned that the proposed changes to employment insurance would contribute to a low-wage policy by forcing people to take significant pay cuts or be cut off from the benefits they paid into. One, Professor Marjorie Griffin Cohen, said:
Going from making $14 or $15 an hour to making $10.25, the minimum wage, makes a very huge difference for women. We see that this legislation will contribute to a low-wage policy, and already the vast majority of low-wage workers are women, so these policies will affect them. I would like the committee to understand that.
Last fall, I spoke with one of my constituents who came to Ottawa to protest peacefully on Parliament Hill against the government's inaction on climate change. She is in her sixties and had never participated in civil disobedience or been arrested, but she felt so strongly that Canada was going down the wrong path and that the government was not listening, she felt she had to do something, so she travelled to Ottawa to make her voice heard. This person is not a radical. Is it radical to believe that government policy should involve public debate. In a democracy, this should be commonplace but the Conservatives are determined to shut down debate.
We have fought tooth and nail every step of the way to have debate on the bill. We will continue to do so. That is why we brought witnesses forward to the finance committee and subcommittee. That is why we held hearings across the country. We are trying to make it clear that we do not want the government to balance its books on the backs of seniors and to make clear that massive changes to EI should only come after a substantive debate.
We want to provide an opportunity for all Canadians to have their voices heard on this important bill which would have very real impacts on them now and on generations forward.