Eleni Bakopanos

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Is there a limit? Is it you, as members of Parliament, who decide? Unfortunately for you, that is not the case.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is not Bloc Québécois members who preside over this assembly, it is the Chair. I believe it is up to you to decide.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member, who is the critic for the New Democratic Party, for his party's support of the bill.

I was listening very carefully to the hon. member's speech and to some of his comments on some of the issues that we will be tackling, together I hope, both on the committee and within the lifespan of this Parliament. He raised some very important issues with which we will struggle and, as a new ministry, we will learn. As I have always said, we always must learn from the past.

A question that came up earlier concerned the seniors' supplement. I think the minute the government knew there was a problem it put measures in place to assure that ever senior who was entitled to the supplement received the supplement.

Canadians who are listening to the debate should know that 1.5 million seniors receive over $5 billion in guaranteed income supplement benefits and that since 2002, 285,000 letters were mailed out by the department to seniors who had not applied for the supplement and who might be eligible. Letters and personalized application forms using our tax system were used and over 172,000 more people subscribed.

It is the responsibility of every one of us in the chamber to make sure that even if there is one senior who is entitled to the guaranteed income supplement that the senior will have access to it. I put out a householder encouraging them to do so. If any member in the House knows of any senior who is not receiving the supplement and should be, I encourage them to please let the department and the minister know.

I also want to talk about eliminating poverty because it has been an issue in the House for far too long. Even if one child lives in poverty, we cannot be proud of that. We must make sure that we eradicate the social deficit, as the hon. member said, and as effectively as we eliminated the economic deficit in the country.

After the report of campaign 2000, certain measures were taken to decrease child poverty and poverty in general in the country. The opposition members referred to the $5 billion that is on the table for the national child care program. They said that it was a very good initiative and that we should be putting money on the table for a national child care and early learning system.

We did introduce the Canada child tax benefit which has provided $7.7 billion in income support to low and middle income families.

The member talked a lot about the poverty issue. Besides the fact that we have put measures in place and that campaign 2000 said that these measures were in the right direction, would the member say that the establishment of this new ministry is a step in the right direction in terms of assuring that programs and services will be--

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I cannot let the words of the hon. member go unanswered. Of course, the hon. member tells us what the Quebec minister said but I can assure him that the minister was there at the table with us. He was there to negotiate. That is what was said, they are prepared to sit down with us to negotiate. At the moment, the final agreement is not signed.

No one on this side has said that Quebec's child care program is not the best in the country. On the contrary, we have said it is the best. I am from Quebec. My riding is in Quebec. I know exactly what services are available.

There are a few problems, however, as far as training is concerned. That is what I hear from people in connection with day care and the situation needs to be remedied. I think that the $5 billion we are prepared to invest and to share with the provinces will enable us to create a program, or continue the one in place, where there is one. The minister has said that thought will be given to this in January when we again sit down with the representatives of the provinces. Mr. Béchard is part of the negotiating group.

That is the difference between the way things were in the days of the Parti Québécois government, and now that there is a Liberal government in Quebec. They are prepared to sit down, to negotiate, to work together.

So I ask again: should we not have a negotiating table, precisely so that we can negotiate in areas where there is shared jurisdiction between the federal and the provincial governments and where we can work together? We are prepared to work together.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am not surprised at the speech made by the hon. member for Laval, who is a new member of this House, because I have been hearing the same thing for 12 years in this House. For 12 years, all the members of the Bloc Québécois have been saying the same thing on this subject, that it comes under provincial jurisdiction.

But we are well aware that in their opinion, Canada should not exist, and the departments that have anything to do with Quebec should not exist either.

There was a report by a House of Commons committee which proposed, after careful analysis, that the two departments should be split. There was a minority report, based on the same argument we keep hearing in this House, the one about provincial jurisdiction.

Nevertheless, there was a department to look after Canadian citizens from birth to death, from the beginning of their lives to the end. This department existed. Therefore, this bill had to follow up on the committee's recommendations. That is what we are doing today in the House. We are not talking about a social engineering project like the Bloc proposes.

Moreover, since this department was created, we have experienced very good collaboration with the federalist government in Quebec. Therefore, we will continue to work together on the areas in this department's portfolio, bearing in mind the people it serves. It is a form of collaboration, after all. We must work together with our provincial colleagues, with all the non-governmental organizations and with all the volunteers. That is what we are trying to do with this bill, to give legal form to something that already existed and has now been split into two parts.

I have a question for the new member, for whom I most certainly have great respect. I am familiar with her commitment to voluntary and non-governmental organizations. With regard to the programs under this department, should we not have such cooperation with the provincial government, to ensure that, especially where Quebec is doing good things, we can provide the resources? Should we not continue to collaborate? That is my question for the hon. member.

[Ukraine, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Yukon.

Ukrainians are living through an historic moment and we are living that moment with them. The presidential election was a great opportunity for Ukraine to show that it had developed into a fully democratic country.

Unfortunately, the events we witnessed on the weekend have made a mockery of the election. The voting can in no way be considered democratic. The problems that occurred were not minor, nor were they technical. The international community has been led to conclude that it was a daring attempt by the Ukrainian authorities to steal the election for their candidate, Prime Minister Yanukovich.

The list of electoral violations is long. A lot of the hon. members in the House have listed them. The following are some of the things the international election monitors saw: fraudulent proxy voting; multiple voting; ballot box stuffing by administrative officials and electoral commission members; violence, threats and intimidations against voters and international election observers; voter list manipulation; and ballot box destruction and vandalism.

Those are only the most blatant examples of fraud that were reported by international observers, including our colleagues in the House, especially the member for Etobicoke Centre who saw firsthand the lack of respect for the democratic process.

These many instances of serious and significant electoral fraud I just cited are neither minor nor technical. They are serious and significant. Why am I speaking on this topic? Because I sat in the Chair as an assistant deputy speaker and as one of the assistant deputy speakers I was involved in a process in which, through our CIDA project, we were trying to equip the Ukrainian parliament with certain tools to help them along in terms of procedure and democratic practices in the House.

I visited the Ukraine parliament on at least two occasions and had discussions with some of the Ukrainian parliamentarians and staff who worked for the parliament of the Ukraine. It was a very enlightening experience. There was a mood in the Ukraine parliament to move along the democratic process. It looked to Canada as a model of the type of parliament, the type of democratic process and system that it wanted in its own country.

I can now visualize all the young people who worked with me on that Canada-Ukraine project. Some members have said that they were in touch with some of those young people who had actually come on another program in this Parliament, the parliamentary internship program. I also have had two students from the Ukraine in my office. I have had some experience with these young people and know of the hope these young people had that their country, Ukraine, was on the right road toward democracy.

I received an e-mail from one of those young students who, unfortunately, feels lost at the moment. After all the effort he put into learning about our democratic process and how his country could move along and become perhaps much like Canada, a country where democracy and elections are held in a democratic way, he felt that he had no hope for his country.

I feel sad tonight, as do a lot of my colleagues who had invested their time in terms of teaching these young students in the internship program about how we do things in the House. I feel sad today for that young man and all the young people with whom I worked over the last two and a half years. That is why I am here speaking on behalf of what the young people are looking for in terms of the future, what they want for their country, Ukraine. There was so much hope but these elections, unfortunately, cut that hope down. That is a sad thing.

I want Canadians to know that we have worked as a country, as a government and as a Parliament with the parliament of Ukraine to give all parliamentarians, as well as the administrative staff and some of the young people, the tools they needed to have a properly run democratic parliament.

Today I am sad for all of those young people and the hundreds of Canadians of Ukrainian origin who also share our anger and frustration that the investment we have made over the years, in terms of helping Ukraine along the democratic road, was stolen away from the young people, the people of Ukraine and from all of us.

I am really very disappointed. I am disappointed that these election results show that there has been fraud, so much fraud that Canada must react immediately.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has declared that the election does not meet democratic standards. The Canadian international observers have listed many offences committed during the voting and in the counting of ballots. They noted cases of violence, widespread intimidation and an improbably high turnout in certain regions.

I am troubled by this because for years this is exactly what we have been trying to do: reach an agreement with Ukraine to establish democratic standards.

What should we do? That is the purpose of our debate here tonight. What should Canada do? CIDA has provided $235 million in aid since 1991. We should not abandon this investment. We must invest in democracy and the Ukrainian parliament.

We must act and, tonight, as parliamentarians, we demand that Canada respond. And the Deputy Prime Minister said today in the House that Canada would be doing just that.

Tonight, we are going to do something for the good of the young people who came here in the hopes of having a fully democratic country. These young people are counting on us, counting on Canada. We have a democratic system that we often take for granted. These young people are counting on us; they are counting on us to do what is necessary with our international partners.

I also mentioned that we often work with the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. We must continue to work with the organizations that are already on the ground and who have helped Ukraine get to the point it was at before this election.

As the Minister of Justice said, we cannot countenance the fraudulent actions in this election. We must continue to work with Ukraine.

Canada has been a long-time friend of Ukraine, as I said earlier. That friendship we hold dearly. We hold it dearly because there are Canadians of Ukrainian origin who have contributed to the fact that we have as great a democracy as we have and who counted on Canada to help their country of origin move along the road of democracy.

For Canadians and for those young people I have worked with, we have to continue to push for a multilateral force, in my opinion, both in the legal part of it and perhaps in other measures. I am hoping that perhaps there will be some discussion at NATO, at the OECD and at the United Nations and that we as the community that Canada is a part of can work together with certain other bodies to assure that these elections are declared undemocratic, that the proper results of this election are in fact brought to light.

It is for the Ukrainian people, especially the young people who have been to our country and have visited our Parliament and who have been working very hard to ensure that there will be a democracy in their country, that I stand in the House today. I want to tell them that I hope they know, and I will make sure they know, that Canadian parliamentarians will help them to ensure that democracy does return to their country and we will continue to assist them.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I listened very carefully to the hon. member's remarks and I want to go back to what I said in my own remarks about the June 2000 report of the human resources standing committee. I would like to quote something and ask her opinion. I was not a member of the committee at the time but, apart from one minority report, if I am not mistaken there was agreement in terms of what was said by the committee at that time. The report states:

Given the Committee's conclusion that HRDC's structural makeup has proven unsatisfactory, we believe that the federal government should reposition itself so that it can better address issues that concern Canadians but that cut across existing departmental boundaries.

It goes on to say:

The Committee believes that it is time to rethink the whole concept of a department of human resources development in light of changing conditions and current needs.

We recommend that:

1. The government should divide HRDC into several more homogeneous and focused structures.

I admit that I do not know whether the member was a member of that committee but that was the June 2000 report of the standing committee.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, when we signed the multilateral framework for early learning and child care, we came to an agreement with the provinces that they were accountable first to their citizens and not to the Canadian government. They also are accountable in terms of reporting what results they have had in terms of the amount of money, for instance, the $500 million that was given in the multilateral framework to the provinces. Some provinces have reported back and shown what progress they have made in terms of those programs.

As far as the new child care agreement and the early learning agreement, there have been discussions and will continue to be ongoing discussions with the provincial governments and territorial governments to see what mechanisms can be used in terms of those provinces reporting to their citizens in terms of the results.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the honourable member for his question. This is also an issue that is often raised in committee.

As we have said already, since December 12, 2003, the departments continue to share existing services and programs delivery network. We cannot establish another administrative structure, because we already have a mechanism that can provide all these services to Canadians. This is the network that we will continue to use.

However, as regards the decisions that will have to be taken regarding social policies in Canada, the Department of Social Development will be responsible. Somebody will have to coordinate all the policies in all the federal departments for the Canadian government.

With respect to services to Canadians, I believe that my fellow citizens in the riding of Ahuntsic want somebody to address their needs. When there is already a mechanism in place and a single window for everybody, which meets their needs, a new administrative structure should not be created. In fact, this legislation does not establish a new administrative entity, except as concerns social policies and the coordination of those social policies throughout the federal government.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member I understand is also the critic for social development. The body of my remarks was to say that yes, we have been doing things and I could run down the list for him: the national child benefit, the child disability benefit, the early childhood development agreement, the multilateral framework for early learning and child care. There are a number of programs that we have introduced in the last 11 years with significant amounts of money.

What was indicated in my speech in terms of the splitting up of the two departments was to give vision in terms of social policy issues and the responsibility to one department. That is what we are trying to do with this piece of legislation.

I do not think, as I said in my speech, that once the ministry is split that is the end of the types of policy issues that we will be working on and dealing with. We have a record. The record is the programs that have been put into place since 1993 when we became the government. We have provided income support and other programs to Canadian citizens.

We want to have a more coherent way of delivering those services. That is part of what the bill proposes, one stop shopping, if one wants to call it that. Canadians can go to one place and have access to all the programs and services that the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development provides because we did not want to duplicate administrative costs. The responsibilities in terms of the social agenda will be on Social Development Canada.