Peter Adams

[Chamber Of Commerce, April 11th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, unlike other members of this House, I have had to deal with two GATTs this winter. One was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, also known as GATT. The other was Vince Gatt, president of the greater Peterborough Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Gatt and I do not always see eye to eye but I was delighted to see the Peterborough Chamber of Commerce wholeheartedly endorsing the National Chamber of Commerce program called Aim for a Million. This is a plan to create a million new jobs across Canada. Peterborough's share of this target is in the thousands.

Although the government can play key roles in job creation such as stimulating the economy, creating short term jobs and ensuring we have a trained workforce, in the end jobs are created by businesses. Many of those businesses belong to our Chambers of Commerce. I welcome the chamber's initiative in setting its sights on job creation. We need partners of this type.

In Peterborough both GATTs seem to be having some useful effects.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1994, April 11th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to both the previous presentations. I wonder if the member would care to comment on the situation of students.

At the present time young people are having a particularly difficult existence. We are encouraging them to stay in school. We are encouraging them to get training. However the costs of school and the costs of training become more and more arduous.

We really must look at different ways for students to pay back their loans, in particular ways which mean that graduating students who get very low paying jobs do not have to pay their student loan immediately. Later those loans could be paid back in proportion to the money they earn, in proportion to the tax they pay, rather than in a very fixed period of time which really works against those who cannot early on in their careers obtain well paying jobs.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on that.

[Petitions, March 23rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to present eight petitions. There is still a great concern in Peterborough riding about the lowering of the tobacco tax. I would like to summarize these petitions.

The first one which has 25 signatures stresses the increase in teen smoking which will be caused by the change. The second which also has 25 signatures suggests there will be more preventable deaths as a result of this measure than there were deaths in World War I and World War II combined. The third petition also with 25 signatures contains a reminder that the problem was Canadian tobacco which was being imported back into the country.

The next petition also has 25 signatures and suggests that the change could create two million more tobacco addicts in Canada. The next petition points out that between one-third and one-half of all smokers eventually die from tobacco use. The next petition which has 75 signatures stresses the effective marking of all tobacco products.

The second last petition with 25 signatures supports the idea of high export taxes rather than the lowering of the sales tax. The last one which has 34 signatures points out that in Peterborough riding alone 200 people die every year from tobacco use. It also points out that the incidence of lung cancer in women has tripled in the last 20 years.

I present these petitions which I have signed.

[The Late Kenneth Kidd, March 22nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, Kenneth Kidd, professor emeritus at Trent University, died recently.

He was born in 1906 and educated in Toronto and Chicago. He was a pioneer of modern archaeology in Canada. His work included excavating the famous Ste. Marie Among the Hurons site near Midland, Ontario and a project at the Cartier-Brebeuf site in Quebec City. He was an early student of petroglyphs in Canada.

He moved from the Royal Ontario Museum to Trent as founding chair of the department of anthropology.

In 1969 he founded the first university native studies program in Canada at Trent. This was a seed well planted as there are now upwards of 40 such programs across the country.

Ken Kidd and his wife Martha, both distinguished and productive citizens of Peterborough, received honorary degrees from Trent in 1990.

I am sure that my colleagues in this House join me in extending our condolences to Mrs. Kidd.

[Supply, March 22nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Trois-Rivières for his speech.

He mentioned in it the real problem, le vrai problème. It seems that one of the real problems we are facing, the solution to which will help everyone in Canada and particularly I hope the young people to whom he refers, is simply getting the economy moving.

I know that the member listened to the parliamentary secretary's remarks earlier about one aspect of the budget which was the infrastructure program. She stressed the jobs which will be created and she stressed the value for our economy in the future of improved infrastructure, as he knows.

There is one aspect which relates to this business of getting the economy going that she did not stress greatly. That is that through the infrastructure program which affects Trois-Rivières as it does the riding of Peterborough, already capital is being released, capital which is already there.

I do have a question about this, with respect for the hon. member for Trois-Rivières. In my riding for example, there is a seniors group which has already raised a great deal of money, some hundreds of thousands of dollars toward a new building. They are able to move on that building sooner than was the case before. I believe the flow of those moneys will help stimulate the economy.

There is also an arts group which has done the same thing. It has not raised quite as much yet but these are moneys which are there which will be released into the economy because of the infrastructure program.

Also in the public sector I would have to say one of the townships in my riding has money from dump fees. J'ignore l'expression française de ce terme.

The township is in fact being paid for the discomfort of having a dump on its property. It has accumulated those fees and it is going to spend them constructively on local projects with some jobs and by the way local raw materials, sand and gravel and things of that type.

Once these projects start, and in my riding we are talking about scores of construction projects in 17 or 18 townships, in the city, in the county, in the university and in the college, scores of these projects all starting when the frost is out of the ground. Again the wages will be paid, the wages will be spent. This capital which I have mentioned will flow across the country.

If it scores in Peterborough, I do not know if it scores in the Trois-Rivières area, hundreds if not thousands of those projects will take place and all of them we hope will stimulate the economy and that will help the young people and all the people of Canada.

I wonder if the member would care to comment on that point from the point of view of what is going to happen in Trois-Rivières once these projects start.

[Petitions, March 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions from citizens of the riding of Peterborough. All of them deal with the lowering of taxes on tobacco. Each makes a different point.

The first petition from 47 people of Peterborough stresses that the government should deal with smuggling in some other way.

The second petition which has 25 signatures says that the tax will cause between 175,000 and 350,000 more teenagers to smoke in Canada.

The third petition which also has 25 signatures stresses that the tobacco industry knows that lower taxes simply mean higher profits for it.

I present these petitions under Standing Order 36.

[Walmart, March 17th, 1994]

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

The Walmart purchase of Canadian Woolco is now a fact. A network of manufacturers and suppliers in Canada was built up over the years to service Woolco stores. Some of those are in my riding of Peterborough.

Could the minister give us his assurance that he will do all he can to ensure that Walmart does not abandon these Canadian suppliers where they can show they are competitive with the U.S. suppliers?

[Supply, March 14th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the member spoke about the infrastructure program.

As the frost comes out of the ground across Canada, hundreds and thousands of infrastructure projects are going to start creating jobs, improving our infrastructure and stimulating local economies. He spoke about the residential rehab program. Thousands of Canadians are going to improve their basic investments in their homes.

He spoke about the science and engineering program. Does he know that whereas in Japan virtually every manufacturing company with 100 employees has an engineer, virtually none of our equivalent corporations does.

My question to the member is can he assure us that no municipality in his riding is going to take advantage of the infrastructure program?

[Supply, March 14th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his remarks.

I would like to ask his opinion about a particular part of the motion to which he was speaking. This, as he knows, is a Reform Party motion and it is an attack on various things, one of which is the government's attempts to help young people.

As has been suggested earlier, other parties in other countries which have had the Reform Party approach of cutting and burning have increased their deficits and debts. They have also produced very high levels of unemployment. That has happened in Canada.

One thing that has not happened yet in Canada is although we have high unemployment, particularly among young people, we do not yet have the chronic unemployment which exists in these other countries, for example Britain and the United States.

As bad and sad and tragic as high unemployment is, chronic unemployment for young people is worse. Chronic unemployment means that we have a generation which because during its formative years it has not worked is never really able to work. I believe that is a real tragedy.

In this motion the Reform Party is attacking our attempts to help young people now. I believe that it is already late to help our young people. They want to leave this to the forces of the economy. I believe that to avoid chronic unemployment among young people we must act now.

I would like to ask the member what he thinks of the Reform Party's attempts to cut down the efforts we are making to help the young people of Canada now.

[Supply, March 14th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening with interest to speeches from the other side of the House today, attacking our efforts to assist the young people of Canada, giving derogatory descriptions of the youth corps before it has been possible to put the youth corps in place and see what can actually be done. From what I hear people think it is a make work project, moving sand and gravel from one place to another; whereas in fact it is a program designed to help communities and young people to gain experience which will bridge the difficult transition between school of various sorts and the workplace.

The member just said that the youth corps program was our only alternative for these young people. I wonder where the member has been in the last 10 years, the years in which the deficit has grown to these astronomical levels.

We think in the United States of Mr. Reagan, in Britain of Mrs. Thatcher and in Canada of Mr. Mulroney with their slash and burn policies which not only created these huge debts and deficits but created in each of the jurisdictions serious unemployment problems, particularly among the youth who are being attacked by this motion of the Reform Party today.

What suggestions does the member have other than slash and burn for helping young people today, next week and the week after?