Bill Blaikie

[Health, March 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question, like my first question, is for the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has made a big deal about how Canadians need to get to the bottom of the sponsorship scandal before we have an election. Can he tell us why Canadians should be expected to go to the polls without the Prime Minister telling us what his long term intention is for the long term funding of health care in this country?

[Health, March 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, we in the NDP have always maintained that the real united right is the Liberal Party. It does not surprise us that the Leader of the Opposition is having fantasies about crossing the floor, or that the Prime Minister is welcoming him, because given the excessive conservative nature of the budget, this all makes sense.

I ask the Prime Minister, can he tell us why, given the surplus, there is no mention of the Romanow report in the budget? There is no long term health care funding improvement. There is nothing for home care. There is nothing for pharmacare. There is nothing for any of the things that Roy Romanow recommended. Could the Prime Minister tell us why he has chosen to do it this way?

[Softwood Lumber, March 23rd, 2004]

It appears, Mr. Speaker, that not even the Prime Minister wants to defend his decision to fire Mr. Gagliano any more.

I have another question for the Prime Minister. It has to do with the ruling that came down yesterday, the WTO ruling on the softwood lumber case which ruled in Canada's favour.

Will the Prime Minister now pick up the phone and tell George Bush to call off the dogs? How many times does Canada have to win this before the Canadian government acts, or does something for the communities involved if it persists in waiting?

[Sponsorship Program, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the right hon. Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister himself fired Mr. Gagliano and surely the Prime Minister had reasons for firing Mr. Gagliano. Mr. Gagliano seems to think that there was no good reason for firing him.

I wonder if the Prime Minister could tell us why the Liberals on the committee are making it impossible for committee members to verify why it was that the Prime Minister fired Mr. Gagliano the way he did.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the member's point is well taken. The whole question of outsourcing of jobs is becoming an issue in the upcoming American election. It will be interesting to see how that debate pans out in the United States.

I take the hon. member's point as a glimmer of hope on the government back benches that they understand what I am actually talking about because one would never get that idea from listening to the answers that I have received over the years from people on the front benches.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am not exactly sure what the member is referring to in terms of the former minister of international trade, but he speaks of naivety. I never know whether it is naivety on the part of the government when it comes to a lot of these issues or whether it is a wilful blindness on its part as to what is really going on in the global economy.

I have seen it so often that there is a kind of feigned innocence with respect to how the global economy works. We see it not just from the Minister of International Trade but also from the member from the Conservative Party who just spoke, that somehow everything is reduced to a question of efficiency and competition, as if there is never anything like exploitation and ethics; what is right and wrong. It is always reduced to some sort of economic language which conceals rather than reveals the reality of what is going on.

He is the only person I have ever seen get up and basically defend the Maquiladora corridor and say that things are coming up roses there for Mexican workers, that they have tennis courts. I guess we read different literature because from what I hear it is terrible there, particularly for Mexican woman.

Again, it is a naivety on the part of the government with respect to free trade and also on the part of others.

I am sorry if I am not fully answering the member's question but I think there is a lot of wilful naivety and blindness. In the Bible they talk about ears that will not hear and eyes that will not see. When it comes to corporate globalization there are a lot of eyes that will not see and ears that will not hear just exactly what is going on as a result of corporate globalization.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I do not think the hon. member was listening, or he only hears what he wants to hear, because I was not arguing that anybody be shut out. I was just saying that the terms for being in ought to be that people can try to organize a union in their country without breaking the law, without being persecuted, without ending up in the river, and without losing their jobs.

I am not talking about trying to get rid of competition. I am talking about unfair competition. Unless the member wants to maintain that there is no such thing as unfair competition, that whatever people do in order to get an edge on their competitor is okay, and that constitutes efficiency and that is always the definition of efficiency, whatever works, whatever gives one an edge in the market, then he and I just live in different moral universes.

Unfair competition is wrong. We ought to be able to get up here and make an argument about what we think constitutes unfair competition without being told that somehow we want to shut the third world out of the global economy. That is not what I am talking about at all. What I am talking about is having a global economy in which everybody respects core labour standards, the kinds of things that people everywhere in this country have said for years that they apparently uphold, except when it comes to anywhere else, when it is not in the interests of certain corporate owners, or when it can be described as inefficient.

The member said that plants have closed down in Canada because they were inefficient. They were not inefficient. Maybe there are some plants that closed down because they were inefficient, but a lot of plants have closed down because the inefficient thing that they did was that they paid people a decent living wage. That was the inefficiency. I will not stand for a description of paying people the absolute minimum as what constitutes efficiency. What the member calls efficiency, I call exploitation and I always will.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to participating in this debate. It is an opportunity to raise a whole number of issues that do not get aired often enough in the House, or certainly not in any kind of focused or informed way. I want to pick up on some of the things that have already come up today.

First, I want to say that we support the bill. However, we support it with some reluctance because, as so many people have indicated, this is something that was developed at some point in order to create opportunities for developing countries to be able to penetrate our markets and create jobs in the third world. That is a good thing, and we have supported that.

It goes back to the north-south dialogue. I remember debates in the eighties about trying to create opportunities for third world countries through tariff reduction. However, that was before we had the kind of globalized economy that we have today. Now, we have the rather perverse effect that when we lower tariff barriers, for example, clothing coming into this country, we may not be creating opportunities for businesses in that country. We might actually be creating opportunities for our own business people to be able to go to those other countries and exploit lower labour standards and lower wages. Sometimes we have policies that address situations that are no longer quite the way they were when those policies were first created.

As I pointed out in a question and comment earlier, we still have tariffs on textiles and fabric, for which there are no domestic competitors. Again, I want to raise the example that was raised in committee by Mr. Silver from Winnipeg. He pointed out that he used a lot of denim fabric and according to Mr. Silver, the last remaining denim plant in Canada was scheduled to close. He was arguing, why should there continue to be a tariff on denim if there was no domestic production of denim?

Similar to the argument made by my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois, why should we have a situation in which manufacturers in Canada are virtually forced to make something somewhere else? They could import the fabric into the other country, whether it is Mexico or wherever it happens to be, make it there and then sell it into Canada duty free. However, they cannot import that fabric into Canada and make that product here. We cannot have the value added here. We cannot have the Canadian jobs here.

In the case of the garment industry, we cannot do what the garment industry has done arguably so well over the years which is not only to create jobs but in particular to assist new Canadians. It becomes an entry point for them into the labour market, into the workplace and actually into Canadian society.

If the government fails to act, if it fails to eliminate tariffs on input for which there is no domestic competition, why would the government be hesitating to do this? I do not understand it. Normally I can point to some kind of interest that is behind the behaviour of a Liberal government, but in this case, I have to chalk it up to inertia or stupidity or something, because there does not seem to be any corporate interest involved here. Perhaps there is and I am just missing it.

In any event, the minister said, when he was talking in the House, that this needs to be discussed further, that it is a complex issue that the interests of the apparel industry and the textile industry do not quite mesh and we need further discussions. Well, what is there to discuss? If something is not being made in Canada and it is needed by Canadian manufacturers in order to keep on manufacturing that particular product in Canada, then what is the point of keeping that tariff on, particularly when we are on our feet being self-righteous about lowering tariffs.

That fabric would continue to be made where it is made but, instead of having value added in Mexico, it would have value added in Canada. What is the matter with that? We are for lowering tariffs and we are for value added. These are the two things that we hear rhetoric about all the time. It seems to me we can have them both.

I say to the government, there may be things that need to be discussed. There may be things that need to be addressed in the longer term and there may need to be more studies. But when it comes to certain inputs, in this case I have mentioned denim, if there is no longer denim made in Canada, then why not immediately eliminate the tariff on denim so that we do not put a manufacturer, like Mr. Silver in Winnipeg, in the position where he feels that he has to move even more jobs offshore than he already has.

As he says, it will not hurt him. He will continue to make money. He will continue to be a successful businessman. However, the jobs that have traditionally been provided in Winnipeg, in particular for new Canadians, will disappear. I urge the government to abandon this position. That is something that needs more discussion.

It seems to me that there could be much faster action on this. In fact, Western Glove Works has initiated a so-called fast track submission to the CITT, requesting tariff relief on imported denim due to the fact that effective this spring the last remaining denim plant in Canada is scheduled to close.

There is a process already in place. It seems to me that if the government wanted to show good faith on this issue and show that it understood the concerns of the people in the industry, this is one particular item on which it could move. The Canadian Apparel Federation is concerned not just about denim, obviously. This was just an example. It is concerned about other things as well.

I have a letter from the Canadian Apparel Federation, dated March 16, to Mr. Roy Cullen, the chairman of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, in which it makes it very clear that if the government wants to pass this particular bill, as it obviously does, there are other things that need to be done to address the concerns of the Canadian apparel industry.

I am tempted to read the letter into the record and would call the attention of the government to this letter because I know that sometimes letters sit in files on government desks and do not ever seem to get read. I would urge the minister and others on the Liberal side to read this letter from the Canadian Apparel Federation, signed by Elliot Lifson, the president. They would see therein the kinds of things that the Canadian Apparel Federation feels that the government should do. It says:

During the hearing, [referring, of course, to the committee hearing] several concerns were raised about the apparent complexity of removing duties on textile imports. The reality is quite the opposite: It remains the prerogative of the Minister of Finance to amend the Customs Tariff as appropriate. No legislation or regulatory amendment is needed to implement these measures. As was pointed out repeatedly during our appearance before the Committee, the domestic production of textiles used by the apparel industry is non-existent in many cases, or rapidly diminishing. Many Canadian apparel manufacturers cannot source their fabric and other raw materials domestically. This is demonstrated by the high level of imported raw materials used by our industry. In previous submissions to the Department of Finance we have sought tariff relief for apparel end-uses alone, to ensure that textile manufacturers which supply other industries would not be adversely affected. This could be easily implemented, and I refer to my letter to Minister of State Paradis dated February 10th, 2004.

That is another letter I would encourage government members to get a hold of and read.

It seems to me that where there is no domestic competition, the government should move rapidly, rather than slowly or not at all, to eliminate these tariffs.

I also want to pick up on the point that was raised in the final moments of the presentation by my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois, and that has to do with labour standards.

That is the other thing. It is fine to reduce tariffs and talk about a level playing field, but if you do not have a level playing field when it comes to labour standards, and I am talking about core labour standards here, then there is not a level playing field at all. All there is is an opportunity for exploitation.

If Canadian workers are being asked to compete with workers in other countries who cannot organize a union without fearing for their lives, without fearing that they will end up in the river or that there will be a knock on the door in the middle of the night, which is bad enough but not as bad as being murdered, and they lose their job and their livelihood, is this a level playing field? By what feat of the right-wing imagination do people suggest that it is somehow a level playing field when Canadian workers are being asked to compete with workers in other countries who do not have these basic rights?

I want to stress that we are talking about basic rights. As I said before, we are not talking about imposing the Canada Labour Code or imposing a global minimum wage. We are talking about the ability of people to defend themselves, to organize collectively, to associate freely and to have laws in their own country that protect children from child labour and which also addresses the whole question of slave labour.

We do not have that. The WTO does not even want to talk about labour standards. Unfortunately, some of the very third world countries that I would have thought might have been interested in talking about labour standards are not willing to talk about labour standards themselves.

At one point perhaps industries in the first world would have been interested in core labour standards in the third world because that would have been unfair competition. When there is a globalized economy pursuant to the concerns raised by my colleague from the Conservative Party, that is not unfair competition any more. That is just another opportunity.

If we have unfair competition in China or some other country where there are no core labour standards and where trade unions are persecuted and where wages are abysmally low, that is not unfair competition any more. We will simply move our plant there. We will cut a deal with the Chinese government.

China is a country in which people now have the worst of all possible worlds. They have a one party socialist state with a capitalist economy. Those people really have it bad. They have the worst aspects of both systems. They have the caricature of both systems. They have the one party communist state and they have a capitalist economy where they can be worked over twice, by the state and the market.

People seem to think this is great. I do not, but a lot of people seem to think this is great, that things are really happening in China.

As I said when I spoke to second reading of the bill, what if everything could be made in China for dirt poor wages? Is that the globalization dream? All the entrepreneurs in the western world would be sitting there raking in the money because they did a fifty-fifty partnership with the Chinese government to produce something here and produce something there. The government is involved in almost everything there. The government takes its share. They have private-public partnerships down to a science there. It is a little different from what we are talking about here when people talk about it.

I am asking people to consider exactly the reality of what is happening on the ground. I am asking them to consider what is happening to workers as a result of what far too many people in our judgment have accepted as just the way it is with respect to the globalized economy.

It is a perverse moral hierarchy indeed when the rights of investors are protected in free trade agreements, whether they be regional free trade agreements such as NAFTA, or global free trade agreements such as the WTO, and the rights of workers are not only not enforced, they cannot be mentioned. It is a victory if they can get a reference to labour standards in the preamble to the agreement. That is a victory.

There is something wrong with this. What is even more wrong is the fact that this is not regarded as a serious problem by the government. It is not regarded as a serious moral or political problem by the Liberals.

I have been to most of the WTO ministerial meetings over the years, beginning with the first one in Singapore, then Geneva, Seattle, and most recently in Cancun. I missed the one in Doha. The Canadian government is a constant embarrassment when it comes to the whole question of labour standards.

People will know that I am not generally a great fan of the American administration, particularly the current one, but the one before with President Bill Clinton made speeches to the WTO. Perhaps he was only putting us on and maybe he was just feeling our pain, but at least he was willing to acknowledge that there was a problem with respect to labour standards, but the Canadian spokespersons would not. It has always been a source of great embarrassment and frustration to me that the Liberals have been so timid in defending the rights of workers around the world.

In conclusion, we support the bill but we see it as just an extension of an existing policy. To not extend it would obviously be an affront to the desire we have to continue policies which create openings for third world countries to penetrate our own market. On the other hand, if we continue to ignore the question of labour standards and the way in which this perverts our best intentions, assuming that the government has good intentions, and if we continue to ignore the fact that there is a need now to eliminate tariffs on fabric and other inputs particularly in the apparel industry for which there are no domestic competitors, then the government will stand accused and convicted of acting in a way that destroys Canadian jobs needlessly.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I feel compelled to intervene on what was first raised in the closing remarks of my colleague from the Bloc Quebecois and the question from the member from the Conservative caucus.

Each in their own way pointed out what I and other New Democrats in the House have been trying to point out for a long time about the current nature of the corporate globalization model which enables people to shop around globally for the lowest possible labour standards or the lowest wages.

For years we have been asking that at the WTO and in other international and regional trade agreements that there be a recognition and enforcement of core labour standards. We have not had much support in that request. As the member for the Bloc Quebecois said, it is not a question of imposing Canada's minimum wage on Mexico or Cambodia. It is not a question of imposing the Canada Labour Code, although I am not sure it is as good as we think it is because recently it was of absolutely no help to Canadian workers in the context of the CN rail strike where Americans were brought in.

Everything depends on political will. We used to say the Soviet Union had a great constitution but nobody cared about it, nobody enforced it. We have many laws like that here in Canada, particularly labour laws.

I recall in 1994 when the NDP did not have party status in the House, moving amendments to the WTO implementing legislation. We were calling on the House to recognize core labour standards, and moving amendments that had to do with prohibiting the import of goods into Canada that were produced through child labour or slave labour. That was a very lonely experience.

I welcome the kind of comments that I just heard. This is the kind of argument that was made by some entrepreneurs before the committee. They said that if the tariff on fabric was not removed, it would not hurt them because in the current economy all they had to do was make it somewhere else. They would still make money, and maybe even more money.

These tariffs were designed when Canadian manufacturers, Mexican manufacturers, Chinese manufacturers, or whomever, were all separate companies. Now, those manufacturers might all be owned by the same people or the same company. Because of the global free trade economy that we have, we have a whole set of old rules that do not work in the new context, and yet we keep having debates in the House as if the world has not changed on us.

I invite the member to comment. I will be speaking next so I will probably have some time to elaborate on this point.

[Customs Tariff, March 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member related to the issue before the House. The hon. member will know that during the committee hearings on this bill, Canadian apparel manufacturers appeared as did other people from the clothing industry.

They have made a rather compelling argument that what the government is doing now through the extension of the LDC tariff without doing some other things together might constitute some harm to the industry. I think of the argument they made about reducing or eliminating tariffs on input to their industry. I think particularly of the argument of Bob Silver of Western Glove Works about the tariff on denim fabric which comes into the country. As of this spring nobody will be left in Canada who makes denim.

Who is this tariff protecting? In fact it is creating a situation, as Mr. Silver argued quite eloquently before the committee, in which he may be put in a position of making these clothes somewhere else where he can import the denim duty free. He will make the clothes in Mexico or somewhere else and then sell the clothes in Canada. As he said, it does not matter to him. He still makes money. It is Canada that loses because the jobs in Winnipeg or elsewhere are affected by the inertia of the government in not removing this tariff on inputs that no longer have domestic competition.

Canadian jobs and particularly new Canadians will be hurt. New Canadians tend to work in his industry. As he says, they are not just producing jobs, they are producing Canadians. This is the way people enter the labour market. I am asking the question because a lot of good things happen here, and they are at risk because of the government's apparent unwillingness to move fast on this.

Will the government move fast now to eliminate these tariffs on inputs that no longer have any domestic manufacturers thereof?