Debates of Feb. 4th, 2016

Business of the House

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, 2006 was a good budget. The Conservatives had just inherited a $13-billion surplus from the Liberals before them. We did not expect them to spend it all in one go, but that is exactly what happened.

We do acknowledge that 2009 and 2010 were stimulus budgets. We did agree that Canada should invest about $60 billion in stimulus. That was agreed upon, but the government went on to create another $90 billion in debt that we did not agree to. Sometimes agreement is not the worst thing in the world.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Madam Speaker, I would like to say in this odd way that it is very unfortunate that the hon. member had to use Windsor as her example talking about social consciousness and the fiscal responsibility that we need in moving forward and that it is a tricky mix.

In my area though, it really is not. We have to be very open-minded in our perspectives as we are all developing fiscal policy. Unfortunately, some of us who end up here have been in their bubble for an awfully long time. I sat here previous to the hon. member's speech and listened to a member talk about middle-class fiction because the middle class is struggling. Come to my riding and I can say it is not fiction.

Another hon. member's speech talked about spending and deficits because money can buy fun. I find that so distasteful and very alarming when the Liberal government will be preparing and presenting a budget that I hope we as parliamentarians will be able to be very meaningfully engaged in. The member used my riding as an excuse. Is she committed in moving forward that conscientiousness for areas like Windsor that need a commitment to health care, that need a recommitment to the—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Order. I am sorry. If you want an answer, we have to give time for that.

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Veterans Affairs.

[Karen McCrimmon, Liberal, Kanata—Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I used Windsor as an example because I was there over the holidays. I went to visit family and friends and had long discussions. It came from their personal experience of what was happening in that city. I felt very strongly for a lot of the people that I had the good privilege to speak with.

We need a different future. We need to make investments. We need to get Canadians back to work. The best thing we can do for people is to give them the opportunity to build a better future. That starts with a decent job and that is definitely the direction we are going with our growth packages as we move forward.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Before we resume debate, I just want to advise members that we only have five minutes for questions and comments, and it would be good if members could keep their questions short.

This is an important topic and we are all passionate about it, but we have to give other members an opportunity to ask questions. If members can keep their questions short, the previous speaker will be able to respond with a brief answer.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Carleton.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is great to be back here, and I would like to take the occasion to thank family and friends who supported me, volunteers who worked to help with my re-election, the electors who chose me, and even those who did not, for the privilege of serving in this august chamber. Most of all, I would like to thank the people of Carleton, my newly constituted riding, for giving me the chance.

It is newly constituted, but it is very much a historical place. Sir John A. Macdonald was elected in the riding of Carleton, and the century before, its namesake, Sir Guy Carleton, was the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec; so in a small sense, history is repeating itself with the re-emergence of these boundaries in this riding, but it is also repeating itself with the new government.

We have today, as we did almost a century ago, a Prime Minister who is a Liberal, who is a Quebecker, and who speaks of sunny ways. Of course, sunny ways is not an expression he invented; it is one he inherited from then prime minister Laurier, who of course is one of the greatest prime ministers this country has ever had. Laurier said:

Canada shall be the star towards which all men who love progress and freedom shall come.

More freedom at that time meant less government. From 1900 to 1910, federal, provincial, and municipal spending was a combined 9% of GDP. Today, it is about 40%. Low-cost government meant a low-tax nation. To quote the authors of The Canadian Century, Crowley, Clemens, and Veldhuis:

Laurier believed that the cost of government, and especially the tax burden, needed always to be kept below the level in the United States, so as to create a powerful competitive advantage for Canada.

Then, as now, Canada's low-tax plan worked. In the first 20 years of the 20th century, our population grew by an unprecedented two-thirds, and to quote the previous authors, “the wheat yield in the three Prairie provinces rose during Laurier's time...” by 500%, new and repair construction increased by almost 400%, and exports more than doubled. The rate at which the new companies formed and were chartered grew by 12 times during the first decade of that century.

That is a good moment in which to say that I will be splitting my time with the member for Abbotsford.

If today's Prime Minister were to bring sunny ways such as these, I think we would all rejoice. In fact, despite Laurier's partisan affiliation to what we call the Liberal Party, he would probably have recognized himself more in the policies of the previous government than the current one.

Conservatives in the last 10 years brought free trade, free markets, and free people. In fact, we left Canada the freest country in the world, according to the Legatum Prosperity Index. We had the sixth freest economy in the world, according to The Wall Street Journal, and according to the finance department last week, we also had a balanced budget.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has added that the projected surplus for this year, based on all the information available to him on the day that the current Liberal government took office, would have us running a surplus of $1.2 billion, and so in a sense the Prime Minister of today has inherited sunny ways from his predecessors in the recent past.

Much has been said about the gap between the rich and the poor and the plight of the middle class. I am glad we should speak of these subjects, because over the last decade the facts are clear: families moved out of poverty and into the middle class. The middle class got ahead and better off than any other country in the world. Between 2005 and 2011, during which time the Conservative government was in power, the take-home pay among low-income families was up 14%, after tax and inflation.

Even Andrew Coyne, who had previously endorsed the Liberals, admitted:

In 2011, the last year for which StatsCanada has figures, the proportion of the population living on low income...fell to its lowest level—well, ever. At just 8.8%, it beat the previous record of 9.0%, set in 2010. As recently as 1996, it was at 15.2%.

In other words, poverty fell by almost half in 20 years.

Of course, child poverty would be expected to rise during the great global recession that resulted from the financial crisis of 2008. In fact, according to UNICEF, the opposite happened here in Canada. While children around the world were falling into poverty, here in Canada the child poverty rate decreased from 23% to 21% during the recession, pulling roughly 180,000 children out of poverty.

How did this happen?

First, the reality is that we increased the amount that Canadians could earn before they started paying taxes and removed one million low-income Canadians from the tax rolls altogether. The parliamentary budget officer said, “In total, cumulative changes have reduced federal tax revenue by $30 billion, or 12 per cent. These changes have been progressive, overall. Low and middle income earners have benefited more, in relative terms, than higher income earners.”

The same report points out that the “highest 10 per cent of income earners benefit least, with after-tax gains of...1.4 per cent...”

Our government enacted policies to free people from poverty, allowing them to enter the middle class. Yesterday's poor are today's middle class.

What is the state of the middle class? The ultra Liberal New York Times had something to say on this subject. “Life in Canada, Home of the World’s Most Affluent Middle Class”, was the screaming headline.

The same article went on to say, “After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States.” That must have been a very tough admission for The New York Times.

Overall, under the previous government, personal income taxes are down 10%, and take-home pay is up 10% on average across all income levels. The median net worth of Canadians went up by 44%. We reduced poverty and freed middle-class strivers to get ahead, letting families keep more of what they earned. They earned bigger and better wages in a big, open, opportunity-filled, free-enterprise economy.

There are other ways than tax relief to free people from despair and poverty and allow them to get ahead. I suggest that all of them are based on three pillars: work, family, and community. It is not government, but work, family, and community. A job is the best anti-poverty program there is; family is the best social safety net we have; and community is what is left to take care of those people who, through no fault of their own, have no work or perhaps cannot rely on family.

I would like to share some stories that I heard along the way as we continue with this debate, but the time is now running out and members are anxious to get on with their questions. Therefore, I will just say that we in this country have an opportunity to continue to allow our middle class and our working families to get ahead if we remove the obstacles that government has put in the way, lift off the heavy burden of red tape, and continue to build an economy that is built on free trade, free enterprise, and free people.

I say this because of something I learned when I was minister of employment. There was a bureaucratic decision to close a recycling plant not far from here that takes care of all of the used sensitive documents of the Government of Canada. There were 50 special needs people who recycled all of that paper on our behalf. They do it very well and at a very low cost.

For some reason there was a bureaucratic decision to end that program. They were, of course, devastated. This was the place where they went, it was the place that gave them purpose, and it was a place, as they say in Cheers, where everybody knew their name.

When I announced that I would intervene and save this program, I went to visit these incredible young people. I asked one young man what he liked best about his job. He said, “work”. I asked him how we could make the place better for him. He said, “Send more paper. I don't want it to run out because I want to keep working.”

That is the kind of enterprising spirit that inspires us all to build the economy that we all want.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Madam Speaker, the Conservatives have, once again, taken the opportunity to put forward real policy on this opposition day and traded it for a chance to talk about themselves and the mirage of their own ostensibly brilliant record.

If we take the old books off the Conservative stove long enough to read them, we might find a few entries that make sense. We will not find very many, though. If we have the callouses needed to turn those still-warm pages, we will find a lot of capital assets that were quietly removed from the books, liquidated; that is, sold, trimmed from part of the inventory of supplies the government owns to provide services to the people, to a one-time supply of cash that can be ever so briefly used to show that the government is making money.

When the Conservatives tell us that they balanced the budget, what they are not telling us is that they sold the house to pay off the mortgage. Unfortunately for them, Canada has found a new place to live.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I first want to congratulate the member for some pretty impressive metaphors. He put those together rather well. I am going to avoid the metaphors and stick to the published facts, and I am going to use two sources.

One is the “Fiscal Monitor” that his finance minister authorized the publication of just last week. It showed that in the months immediately preceding his government taking office, in fact, Canada had an accumulated surplus of $1 billion. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, in a document that was published in November as well, the PBO had a projected surplus of $1.2 billion for the present fiscal year.

These are not Conservative sources and these are not books that were on the Conservative stove. We do not put our books on stoves because we do not believe in burning books. These books tell us that Canada is in surplus and that means sunny ways for us all.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Madam Speaker, I would like to congratulate my colleague on being re-elected. Since he has been here for some time, I wonder if he agreed with the strategy the late Mr. Flaherty used under the previous government. He implemented an economic action plan to stimulate the economy by investing billions of dollars.

I am curious to know if he agreed with the previous government's strategy and if he would agree with a similar strategy to stimulate our economy in 2016 and beyond, if need be.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I also congratulate the hon. member on his re-election. I gather he is still the youngest member of Parliament, and I congratulate him on that.

Of course I supported the hon. Jim Flaherty's policies. When it comes to debt reduction, we paid off $40 billion of the national debt before the global recession struck. To be fair, that is one of the reasons our debt is among the lowest in the world and the lowest of all the G8 countries. We should try to maintain that advantage by continuing to balance the budget and reduce the burden for the taxpayers who foot the bill.

I am pleased to say that, when we left office, the federal government burden was at its lowest in 50 years, at about 12% of the economy. That is why we have a free and open economy. I hope the Liberals will stay on that path.

[Sven Spengemann, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Madam Speaker, there seems to be a disconnect within the Conservative caucus. At worst, it could be seen as audacious doublespeak; at a minimum, it could be a factual misunderstanding among its own members.

Over the past two weeks, we have heard member after member from the Conservative caucus stand and tell us how much their ridings, which they characterize as middle class, are hurting. The member and his colleague from Edmonton—Wetaskiwin seem to be suggesting that the middle class is strong. Which is it?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

Madam Speaker, the reality is that overall, Canada's middle class has prospered throughout the last decade. Very recent events that have struck the world economy and have affected our resource sector have caused families to suffer, and that is precisely why we need to continue to lower taxes. We need a strong fiscal position, and we need to free up resource development projects and pipelines that would create new jobs and renewed opportunity for people right across this country.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Carleton for that excellent intervention. I am very much looking forward to engaging in this debate on the kind of fact and fiction that is often introduced in this House.

Before I do, I want to thank the residents of the beautiful city of Abbotsford for re-electing me to a fourth term. I have had a chance to serve them for 10 years, and I am very much looking forward to the next few years being their representative here in Canada's capital city, Ottawa.

What we are discussing here is a motion that affirms once and for all that, in fact, the previous Conservative government left the new Liberal government with a balanced budget. In fact, it was more than a balanced budget; we left the new government with a surplus of over $1 billion. Sadly, what we hear from the Minister of Finance, from his parliamentary secretary, and from some of the members on the Liberal side is the perpetuation of this canard that somehow the previous government left the Liberals with a deficit. That is patently false. They can actually ask the highest-serving civil servant in Canada in the finance department. He has said that the previous government left a surplus. In fact, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has said the same thing: the previous government left a surplus to the current Liberal government.

Let us talk about how we even got to this point. As members know, back in 2008-09, the world was faced with the worst global economic crisis the world had seen since the Great Depression, and like virtually every other developed country in the world, Canada and our Conservative government did what was right. We invested in infrastructure to make sure that we primed the pump. We were fortunate, because Canada was the last country of the G7 to actually slip into recession, and our policies in responding to that recession actually allowed us to emerge from the recession as the first country to do so.

We invested in our economy, made sure that our economy was strong going forward, and created jobs.

We made a promise back then, because to invest so heavily in infrastructure at one time to prime that pump I referred to, we had to go into temporary deficit. When we did so, we did something that our Liberal and New Democrat friends opposed: we set a clear goal to return to balance in our budgets. In fact, in 2011, during the election when we were elected as a majority government, we pledged to Canadians that by the year 2015, we would actually return to balanced budgets. In fact, we achieved that a year earlier than expected. Even now, in this fiscal year, we have left the new government with a surplus.

How did we achieve that between 2008 and 2015? There are four key things we did. I already mentioned the $33-billion worth of infrastructure we invested in across our country. Much of it was transportation-related infrastructure. Much of it was knowledge infrastructure. By all accounts, that infrastructure investment was made in a timely, efficient way and delivered results.

The second thing we did was recognize that in a recession, Canadians do not need extra taxes. In fact, we continued to reduce the tax burden on Canadians. We reduced taxes to the point where today, the tax burden on Canadians is the lowest it has been in over 50 years.

The third thing we did is something the Liberals have found tough to do. In fact, a previous leader of the Liberal Party said, “Do you think it's easy to make priorities?” No, we do not believe it is easy to set priorities. Setting priorities is tough, but fortunately, Canadians had a tough-minded government in place that knew how to set priorities and make tough decisions. We were able to control the growth of government. We were able to control government spending.

The fourth thing we did, and something I am personally very proud of, was embark upon the most ambitious trade agenda Canada had ever seen. I am glad to see my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade is here. I look forward to working with him to ratify the trans-Pacific partnership, and also our free trade agreement with the European Union.

Since our government was elected in 2006, we were able to negotiate trade agreements with 46 countries. We were able to negotiate a megadeal with the European Union. We negotiated a trade agreement with South Korea, which is a market of 50 million well-heeled consumers. We concluded negotiations on the trans-Pacific partnership with 11 other partners within the Asia-Pacific region.

We did that because we wanted to open up new opportunities for Canadians in markets around the world, new opportunities for Canadian manufacturers, Canadian investors, Canadian service providers, Canadian innovators. We opened markets for Canadian exporters and importers. Our consumers benefited because tariffs were eliminated.

Of the dollar value of known economic benefits and expected economic benefits of all trade agreements that Canada has signed, 98.5% of that value was negotiated under Conservative governments, not Liberal governments.

It started with the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement which then morphed into the North American Free Trade Agreement, where we brought Mexico into the fold. Then there were 13 years between 1993 to 2006, where virtually nothing got done, while the rest of the world was moving ahead, full steam, opening up new markets. Our Liberals friends negotiated three small agreements with Chile, Costa Rica and Israel.

I am very proud of our record of an additional 46 markets opened up to Canadians, driving economic growth and prosperity in our country. These temporary deficits that we embarked upon provided an impetus to our economy back in 2008-09 and they paid off because we handled it in a responsible way. We returned to surplus budgets one year earlier than expected.

We are very proud of that achievement. We are also very sad to see the new Liberal government embark upon a set of policies that are just upending that apple cart of stability, of common sense.

The Prime Minister within days of being sworn in, without consultations, without warning to Canadians, made an announcement, not in Canada but in Malta, that he was going to be spending $2.65 billion of taxpayer money on climate change initiatives, vanity projects, not at home, not in our country, but in foreign countries. There is no accountability. The money is going to foreign agencies where we have very little oversight, and there is very little transparency.

We see that with the the approach of the Liberals to taxes. We see that in their approach to big spending, and their promises of big deficits. In fact, during the election, the Prime Minister promised Canadians that he would only run deficits of about $10 billion per year each year, and in the fourth year of his term, he would balance the budget. Guess what? Economists are now in agreement that these deficits will be much higher. In fact, many people are predicting deficits in the range of $30 billion to $40 billion a year. So much for making promises.

Will the Prime Minister and his government reach a balanced budget in four years? Any economist we might speak to will say that it is virtually impossible unless there is a huge hike in taxes on Canadians.

That is not the kind of government Canadians elected. As we discuss the finances of this nation, there are not many things more important than being transparent and forthright about the state of those finances.

May I suggest for the Liberal government, the Minister of Finance, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance, and all members of the Liberal government that they be truthful when they talk about deficits. I expect the truth might set them free.

[Joël Lightbound, Liberal, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Madam Speaker, my hon. colleague went back a bit in history, so I would like to do that myself.

He mentioned that we emerged faster and stronger than the other G7 countries from the financial crisis. If we look back in history, one of the reasons for that, among others, is that while the former prime minister, when in opposition, was advocating that we deregulate our financial industry, a former Liberal minister of finance said no. This is one of the reasons our banking industry, our financial sector, was so much stronger than perhaps our southern neighbour.

Another reason we emerged from the financial crisis perhaps more rapidly was, as he mentioned, and I give him credit for that, the financial stimulus package to which we agreed.

Who else agreed to this financial stimulus package back in 2009-10? The IMF did. I have heard a lot of his colleagues quote and invoke the IMF as a justification for that.

This is what the IMF had to say recently:

The findings suggest that in countries with infrastructure needs, now is a good time for an infrastructure push. Many advanced economies are stuck in a low growth and high unemployment environment, and borrowing costs are low. Increased public infrastructure investment is one of the few remaining policy levers to support growth.

Does the member agree, this time around, that the IMF is right and that we should invest in infrastructure?

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, I believe that the member has been engaging in some revisionist history. In fact, if we look at the 10 years that our Conservative government was in office, we consistently strengthened the regulation of the banks. We understood what it took to maintain a strong economy.

With respect to his specific question, he has suggested that high spending is what is being recommended as a solution to the world's economic problems. We have seen where that led in places like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland. Now we hear that there are other countries in Europe that are facing significant headwinds, Norway being one of them.

We were very clear for over 10 years. We believed that it was responsible government accountability to taxpayers that would keep us on the right course. That is why, even today, Canada is one of the few countries in the world to still run a budget surplus.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Madam Speaker, throughout the debate, we heard a number of Conservatives talking about how they restored a balanced budget. However, they are forgetting to say how they managed to achieve that. The main reason is that they asked each and every department to cut its budget by between 5% and 10%. The member should know something about this, since he was a minister and he must have had to make cuts in his own department to come up with the money that Treasury Board was asking for.

I wonder if the member would at least acknowledge that the reason why they might have, possibly, balanced the budget in 2015-16—although the numbers suggest otherwise—was that it would have been done at the expense of services to Canadians and public services in general.

[Ed Fast, Conservative, Abbotsford, BC]

Madam Speaker, one thing that we as Conservatives will never do in this House is apologize for keeping government spending under control and keeping the growth of government under control. We wear that as a badge of honour. It is what has allowed us, as a country, to have finances that are the envy of the world. That is why we have a budget surplus, the one the Minister of Finance and his parliamentary secretary want to deny. All the evidence to the contrary, they are still in denial mode.

We have a stellar record when it comes to managing the finances of this country.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Resuming debate.

The hon. Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade.

I just want to advise that there will only be about four minutes for that speech. The member will be able to finish his speech when the matter is resumed at another sitting of the House.

[David Lametti, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to follow the hon. member for Abbotsford. Let me take a moment to salute his record as the former minister of international trade. We look forward to future collaboration with him.

Why are we here? I would rather not focus my closing remarks as they were on this day in Parliament on actual numbers but rather ask what the cost is. I am willing to grant that the previous government did its best to spend as little as possible, but that is not necessarily a good thing, particularly because it did leave us in debt anyway because it failed to balance a single budget between 2008 and 2014, but more importantly, because of the costs that this had in Canada over that period of time. Let us not forget that.

Over the past 10 years our economy has been characterized by fundamentally weak growth. Perhaps some of the gains that the hon. member for Abbotsford made acting as minister of international trade in negotiating trade agreements, which our government believes were generally good, could have been better. Had we developed our manufacturing sector, had we put money into innovation, had we put money into becoming a stronger and more diversified economy, then perhaps we would have been able to profit from those agreements much more than we have. We have done the opposite. We effectively cut infrastructure spending over that period of time in real terms and have ended up with an infrastructure deficit that cries out to be rectified. Cuts were also made to veterans affairs and social programs, including programs for social housing.

I spent the past 20 years teaching in one of the world's finest law faculties in one of Canada's finest universities. I could see the cuts to university research that the previous government undertook and the devastating impact that had on research programs in pure science, applied science, and the social sciences. That was one of the reasons I decided to put myself on leave from that tenured position in order to go into direct public service: to rectify what I saw as an incredible problem in policy that the previous government chose to follow.

Not only did the previous government cut university research for the sake of balancing budgets, but it destroyed archives, weakened research and development in this country, and put our innovation agenda way behind other countries, including countries like Scandinavia for example.

Yes, it is fine to talk about budgetary numbers, but let us not forget the costs. When it is time to reinvest in an economy, reinvest in infrastructure, reinvest in Canada's people as it is now, a government needs the courage to do it.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

I apologize for having to interrupt the member. It is now 6:15 and we need to move things along. Unfortunately, I said a while ago that the member would be able to speak to the matter at a later date but this is an opposition day motion and so he will not be able to do that. I am sorry.

It being 6:15 p.m., pursuant to order made earlier today, all questions necessary to dispose of the opposition motion are deemed put and a recorded division deemed requested and deferred until Tuesday, February 16, 2016, at the expiry of the time provided for oral questions.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I suspect if you were to canvass the House you would find the will to see the clock at 6:30.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker, NDP, Carol Hughes]

Is it the will of the House to see the clock at 6:30?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

Foreign Affairs

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Madam Speaker, leaders from Canada's Jewish, Sikh, and Muslim communities got together to write the government a letter calling on it to renew the mandate of the office of religious freedom. The letter reads:

Dear Minister,

As Canadians from various faith and cultural communities, we are writing to express our support for the valuable work undertaken by Global Affairs Canada's Office of Religious Freedom.

Today, hundreds of millions of people around the world are the target of threats, discrimination, state persecution, or violence every day simply on the basis of their religion. While we acknowledge that diverse communities are subject to persecution as a result of multiple factors, the suffering of religious minorities in numerous countries is particularly acute and often qualitatively different from other forms of discrimination. For example, in the context of the current Syrian refugee crisis, it cannot be overlooked that many refugees seeking resettlement in the West are religious minorities targeted by ISIS on the basis of their faith. This is an issue that touches the conscience of all Canadians, regardless of any particular religious affiliation, many of whom arrived in Canada as refugees fleeing religious-based persecution overseas - whether recently or in previous generations.

The Office of Religious Freedom, under the capable stewardship of Ambassador Bennett, has proven an effective advocate in highlighting the issue of religious persecution, partnering with Diaspora communities in Canada, and raising our country's profile as a world leader in human rights promotion on the international stage. Perhaps most importantly, we are grateful that the Office is engaged in a series of on-the-ground programs and initiatives to alleviate religious persecution in various countries (toward which the majority of the Office's modest $5 million is allocated). While these projects do not always make headlines, we believe they laudably reflect a practical and effective role Canada can play in mitigating the plight of persecuted religious minorities around the world.

Those are the words of Canada's Jewish, Sikh, and Muslim leaders speaking together.

In response on the letter, the minister told the House that they valued religious freedom, they just did not want it to be isolated. Comments like this suggest that unfortunately the minister is not even aware of what the office does. This office is not a silo of activity away from the department. It is an integral part of the department, and it provides training and expertise to the rest of the public service. In addition to funding direct programs, it builds the capacity of the public service to respond effectively to faith-based discrimination.

All Canadians support and benefit from religious freedom. The Office of Religious Freedom's external advisory committee even includes representation from the atheist community.

In general, the government's claim to be committed to religious freedom is highly suspect. There is absolutely no mention of religious freedom in the minister's mandate letter. If this move to do away with this office was really about supporting religious freedom in a different way, then why no mention in the mandate letter?

Will the government finally take the opportunity to answer the original question more seriously? Will the government listen to the pleas of Jewish, Sikh and Muslim communities speaking together with one voice? Will it renew the mandate of the office of religious freedom? If it is intent on killing the office, would it at least give us the reason why?