Chris Axworthy

[Criminal Code, April 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, New Democratic Party members present today will vote yes.

[Trade, April 8th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for whomever is answering on behalf of the Minister for International Trade today.

As we know, the Liberals promised not to sign NAFTA without side agreements on jobs and the environment. The government broke that promise, as it did so many others, and signed NAFTA anyway. Now Canada is playing a leading role in negotiating the OECD multilateral agreement on investment which will prevent Canada from requiring employment targets of new foreign investment in Canada.

Yesterday the Minister for International Trade said that the Liberals will not sign unless this provision is taken out. Canadians could not trust the Liberals in 1993. Why should we trust them today?

[Petitions, April 8th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, the third petition calls on Parliament to conduct a full public inquiry into the relationship between lending institutions and the judiciary and to enact legislation restricting the appointment of judges with ties to credit granting institutions.

[Petitions, April 8th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I have a second petition which decries the lack of a federal strategy for highways. Canada is the only country in the world without a national strategy for highways.

The petitioners call on Parliament to urge the federal government to join with provincial governments to make the national highway system upgrading possible.

[Petitions, April 8th, 1997]

Madam Speaker, I have the honour under Standing Order 36 to present three petitions.

The first petition has several hundred signatures reciting the concerns of Canadians with human rights in China, and with the proposed Candu sale to China.

The petitioners request that Parliament cancel the planned sale of Candu reactors to China and immediately withdraw from all arrangements concerning financial and technical assistance to China for nuclear reactor technology.

[Internet Child Pornography Restriction Act, April 8th, 1997]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-396, an act to restrict the use of the Internet to distribute pornographic material involving children.

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a private member's bill, the purpose of which is to deal with the problem of child pornography on the Internet. We have good legislation in Canada which prohibits the production, distribution, sale and possession of child pornography, but with modern technology we have to address these concerns in a new way.

The bill would do two things. It would licence the Internet service providers and ensure that they co-operated to minimize the use of the Internet for the publication and proliferation of child pornography. It would also restrict those who have committed serious child sex offences from access to the Internet.

This is a serious problem in Canada and across the world which needs to be addressed.

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

[Canada Post, March 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the minister responsible for Canada Post.

When the Canada Post mandate review report was made public last October, the minister promised that Canada Post would not be privatized as long as it continued to fulfil a public policy role. The report strongly recommended that the corporation should not be privatized.

However, in a study that the minister commissioned by TD Securities she has asked the firm to evaluate whether withdrawing from competitive operations is consistent with the objective of possibly "privatizing Canada Post".

Does the minister agree that Canada Post should remain a crown corporation, which is what she said last fall? Or, is she seriously considering privatization which is suggested in the terms of reference in the present study?

[Middle Class, March 20th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, the endangered species legislation is currently being studied by Parliament but there is one endangered species that is being ignored, the Canadian middle class.

First, more and more Canadian families are slipping into poverty and more families cannot escape poverty.

Second, wages have stagnated or declined in Canada over the last two decades at the same time as taxes have been consistently raised. Wealth and income in Canada has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people and the gap between rich and poor is at 19th century levels. In other words, the middle class has all but disappeared.

I urge the government to include the Canadian middle class as an endangered species in the legislation currently before Parliament. Maybe if we can do that we can save the middle class from going the way of the dodo bird.

[Business Of The House, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, a while ago I asked the Minister of Finance to explain to Canadians why the government had broken its election promise to create jobs in significant numbers to address the concerns of Canadians and how did he feel about the government telling Canadians that they will simply have to accept and get used to high unemployment, which both he and the Prime Minister had done.

The Liberals have broken their promise about jobs. We know that. When they assumed office there were 1.5 million people unemployed. Now almost four years later there are still 1.5 million people unemployed.

In the 1993 election campaign the Prime Minister said under a Liberal government that it would be like the good old days, but he did not tell Canadians he meant the dirty thirties.

Young Canadians face a shameful unemployment rate, officially at 17 per cent, but we know it is much higher than that. That does not even count the thousands who have given up looking or the tens of thousands flipping burgers at Burger King for a living. The Liberals and Burger King are both famous for one thing, the size of their whoppers, whether it be burgers or broken promises.

There are millions of unemployed Canadians and millions more who fear that each pay cheque may be their last. With millions unemployed and everyone else looking over their shoulder, surely that is a national tragedy in a country such as ours.

Today with still millions of Canadians unemployed and under employed, millions of Canadians living in poverty, again the poverty numbers have increased over the last four years, another indictment of Liberal policy. With insecurity spreading across the whole of Canadian society, the last four years have shown beyond any doubt that you can never build a successful modern economy the Liberal way, on the crude and wasteful dogma of the free for all world.

The Liberal government has proven that it cannot privatize, or down load, or slash and burn its way out of mass poverty, that it cannot as a government contract out of its responsibilities to society and it cannot build for the future on Liberal economics of greed, waste and blind short-termism.

In place of the priorities that the government has forced on Canadians in a way which has failed Canadians, the country needs a government with a vision of working together for the greater good and the belief in the potential of everyone.

This requires investing in Canadians. This means investing in jobs; equipping not just the few but the many with opportunities in education and employment; a dedication to equality and social justice; the certainty of action against unemployment; and an economic policy run in the interests not of the privileged few but of the whole community.

Why has the government not required banks to reinvest in the communities that trust them with their funds? Why has it not fought to stop banks from choking small business, farms and families with service charges and inflated credit card rates?

It is long past time that chartered banks started pulling their weight and made a real contribution to job creation in Canada. Since the finance minister has been able to show some progress on meeting deficit targets, and he should be praised for that, why does he not set job targets and meet them the same way as he has set deficit targets? We could avoid double digit unemployment rates if there was a serious and explicit unemployment target.

New Democrats and Canadians believe that lives and jobs are more important than numbers done on an accounting sheet. Does the government not think so too? The Liberal message of a low paid job or no job is a message that Canadians totally reject.

I ask once again, as I did some time ago, when will the finance minister, instead of paying for failure, begin to invest in success? At that time I also asked him why would he not consult the Saskatchewan New Democratic government which has the lowest unemployment rate in the country, which has pursued a partnership agenda and which has been successful in generating an unemployment rate which is the envy of the country. There is much to be learned there.

[The Economy, March 18th, 1997]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.

Yesterday the Canadian Council on Social Development indicated that since the Liberal Party has been in government poverty has not only increased but those living in poverty live deeper in

poverty than they did before. The Minister of Finance has said that child poverty is a national disgrace.

Is the Minister of Finance ready to cast any doubt on his statements over and over and over again that the fundamentals of our economy and society are firm, effective and in good shape after seeing these numbers?