Peter Adams

[Canada Education Savings Act, October 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to the Canada education savings bill today. The piece of legislation before us follows through on a promise that was made in the Speech from the Throne to increase access to post-secondary education.

This particular bill embodies many principles which are dear to the hearts of Canadians and Canadian families. One of those is that our children deserve every opportunity for higher education, be it in the trades, college or university. It also includes the principle of putting aside a bit of money year after year which will eventually make the opportunity a reality. It also includes the principle that when families need a little help in accumulating those savings, the government is there to help.

Those principles are the foundation of the Canada education savings act. It is a simple and straightforward way for the Government of Canada to express support for families, especially those who need a hand in giving their children a chance for a better life. These new initiatives are aimed primarily at the children of low and middle income Canadians, affording them better access to post-secondary education.

As the Prime Minister has said:

In order to achieve our economic goals, and to ensure that the maximum number of Canadians share in the successes before us, we must commit to investment in human capital--education and training.

By investing in the measures contained in the legislation, I submit that we are enhancing the lives of Canadian families and through them we are strengthening the fabric of Canadian society. As a society we benefit from an educated population. It strengthens our global competitiveness and ensures that we as Canadians can sustain our internationally envied standard of living. Therefore, as a society we have a duty to promote and support higher education, to do what we can to ensure that every young person has the opportunity to participate in learning beyond high school, be that through an apprenticeship, college or university.

The government has accepted its share of that challenge. The Canada student loans program is one of the oldest programs designed to improve access to post-secondary education. Over the years we have added other initiatives, such as the millennium scholarships and the Canada study grants. We are also increasing our emphasis on measures to foster a culture of personal savings for post-secondary education.

Studies show that children who have savings for post-secondary education are actually 50% more likely to continue their studies after high school. Unfortunately, many Canadians feel they cannot afford to set aside enough to send their children to university or college, or to go on to apprenticeship training.

In 1998, to make the registered education savings plan more attractive to Canadians, our government introduced the Canada education savings grant, and I stress grant. For every $5 that a parent, grandparent or friend invests in a child's RESP, the Government of Canada will add another $1 in matching grants, up to $400 a year for deposits of $2,000. The government's contribution could reach $7,200 in the lifetime of the student concerned.

This program has proved to be an enormous success. So far, more than $2 billion in Canadian education savings grants have been invested in RESP accounts for nearly two million children. In a short period of time, education savings have increased fivefold to reach $13 billion in private savings. That is in five or six years.

Unfortunately, we soon noticed that low income families were not benefiting as much as we had hoped from the advantage afforded by the Canada education savings grant. Therefore, in the budget last March, the Minister of Finance announced some exciting new government initiatives that are specifically intended to support the educational aspirations of low and middle income Canadians. Those initiatives are before us now in the Canada education savings act.

A key proposal would be to enrich the Canada education savings grant by doubling the grant for low income Canadians and by increasing the top-up from 20% to 30% for middle income Canadians. In other words, depending on their income, they would get a larger government grant for every dollar that they put into the current program.

The other idea is the Canada learning bond. This is a grant. The learning bond of $500 will be available to all children born on or after June 1 of this year in families which are entitled to a national child benefit supplement. These are generally, as has been indicated by the minister, families with incomes under $35,000.

The $500 bond will be paid into the RESP that a family establishes for its child's post-secondary education. The government will provide an additional $25 to help cover the cost of opening the child's RESP account. The child will subsequently receive annual Canada learning bond instalments of $100 a year until he or she turns 15. That is for every year in which the child's family continues to be a low income family as defined here. This means that by the time the child turns 18, the child's Canada learning bond, the grant, alone could be up to $3,000 based on reasonable estimates of the rate of return.

The family would, if it was able to, make a contribution toward that. The family could put its own money into the RESP account. If the family put in $10 a month, it would receive an additional $4 in grants for every $10 put in, and the total would be $7,000 by the time the child was 15 or so years old.

Together this Canada learning bond, this grant, and the enhanced Canadian education savings grant contributions are another important way the Government of Canada will extend a helping hand to young Canadians who deserve an equitable chance at higher learning.

With regular deposits and tax sheltered growth, the assets contained in an RESP can grow substantially over 18 years.

I am pleased to say that Canadians welcome these initiatives. A recent Ekos survey found there is strong backing for financial assistance from the government for post-secondary education. In particular, respondents say that they favour instruments such as the Canada learning bond and the Canada education savings grant, which build assets and decrease the family's reliance on student loans and other debt to finance education. Other observers have also promoted an asset based approach to education financing.

Peter Nares, the head of Social and Enterprise Development Innovations, a national organization dedicated to helping low income Canadians toward self-sufficiency, has said:

One of the most important goals of any government is to equalize the opportunity of all citizens to obtain as much education/learning as they are willing and able to undertake....Financial assistance for education and learning is critical to equalizing educational opportunities.

Other people have said that this is a great step forward. By the way, I would echo that it is only a step forward. It is not an ultimate solution to the problems that face us in higher education.

I have also had the opportunity to discuss the bill with members on this side of the House and on the other side of the House and with members in the other place. I have to say I have received generally positive comments.

I am persuaded that the approach we propose in the Canada education savings act is the right one. A more generous Canada education savings grant, enriched to promote educational savings among low and middle income Canadian families, is a valuable mechanism to achieve a very worthwhile objective. The Canada learning bond part of the bill, the grant part of the bill, is another. It too is very important and innovative. It is a way for families to start to save early for a child's post-secondary education.

We estimate that up to 120,000 newborns would be eligible for the Canada learning bond, the grant, every year. That is a significant number of kids who will grow up knowing that their family and their country are behind them in their quest for education and learning.

The initiatives proposed in the legislation before us represent a concrete and tangible way to illustrate the partnerships between governments and the people of Canada. This is a partnership dedicated to achieving equitable access to post-secondary learning for each and every member of our society.

I urge colleagues on all sides of the House to support the speedy passage of the Canada education savings bill.

[Canada Education Savings Act, October 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate the member on his speech and on his patience during the point of order.

I was very interested in the suggestion about changing 21 to 25. My colleague is quite correct. The province of Quebec, alone among the provinces, has maintained two years of free post-secondary education through the cégeps. It is something very admirable.

First, he said that typically these students would go to university at the age of 20. I would like to know just how general that is. Second, when we are talking about post-secondary education in the legislation, one must realize we are referring to trades, apprenticeships and to other types of colleges where students can obtain an education. What are his comments on that?

Is cégep the only route? Are there many students who in fact go to university before they are 20 years old? Also, could he explain to me how the cégeps are involved in apprenticeships, for example?

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, to the best of my knowledge, most of the members have that information. There is a website which I am sure the member consults on a regular basis. Information is posted there.

I receive regular information through parliamentary e-mail, as I think do all members here. Perhaps the member would care to consult with my farmers, I do not know how he corresponds with his, but in addition to my own website, I do mailings on this topic updating the farmers roughly every two weeks. I have been doing so for more than 12 months.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, when I replied I tried to respond in that vein.

In the case of cull cows, given the significance of the dairy industry in Quebec, it obviously is of special importance in Quebec. I think the parliamentary secretary's words are right. The dairy industry is important in Quebec and the cull cow problem is very important there. Whatever cull cow program we have should be, as he says, equitable across the whole country. I think that is the function of the Government of Canada.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, I draw attention to the fact that I am the member for Peterborough, in case some members opposite think that I am the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Agriculture, which I am not. I am something else. I am not privy to the Minister of Agriculture's office and the discussions that have gone on there recently.

I want to repeat my remark about consultation. I know from the work that I have done in the House that we are a government which consults with the industry.

The member mentioned the bureaucracy. I believe that the House can drive the bureaucracy. I do not believe that the House is under the control of the bureaucracy. The same applies with an effective minister and his political staff. Picture the Department of Agriculture as a pyramid. The minister and a handful of political people are at the top and there are tens of thousands of bureaucrats underneath. We can imagine how difficult it would be to drive it.

The minister's job is to drive the government's agenda. The government's agenda is to keep working at this, to listen as much as it can to the industry, and to produce programs which are as effective as humanly possible, as quickly as possible.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, I thank the hon. member for her question.

In reply to the first part of the question, people keep asking why the minister does not do this or why the government does not do that. This has been explained. Throughout this crisis we have always tried to consult with all the players in the industry. Maybe someone thinks there is something wrong with that but I think our minister should consult. At the WTO negotiations, for example, Canada was one of the few countries which took delegates from the various commodity groups to engage in those discussions. Consultation is very important.

With regard to the cull cow program, and I tried to explain this in my riding, it is my view that one part of the problem has to do with the dairy industry. The dairy industry is very important in my riding. Where there is a cull cow problem, the treatment should be the same all across the country. I am sure that is what the member would prefer.

We know the dairy industry is very strong in the province of Quebec, but it is also very strong in Ontario and other jurisdictions. I say yes to a cull cow program and one which is as effective and as vital as we can get, but it should be the same across the whole country.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Thank you, Madam Chair. My apologies to my hon. colleague, it was my mistake.

Madam Chair, I am glad to speak today. All of my colleagues on this side who have spoken are farmers. They are people with current and past farm experience. I greatly appreciate their wisdom and the advice that they give me in rural caucus.

I am also an associate member of the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food. I sat in on some of the hearings last summer that had to do with the packers. I was shocked by the way we were prevented by members of the opposition from subpoenaing packers and packers' records.

I am not a farmer. I do not have a farming background. I am a member of Parliament who has the enormous privilege of representing farmers. I have worked very hard to do that. I have come to appreciate not only the agricultural community but the entire rural community in my riding, and its enormous strengths, its enormous patience and its enormous wisdom. The farmers in my riding have gone to a great deal of trouble to try to train me so that I know the difference between a cow and a horse now and very important things like that.

I appreciated what one of my colleagues opposite said: that one of the purposes of debates such as this, a take note debate on this critical issue, is to raise interest in the general public, particularly in the urban public, not just in the big cities but in many of the small cities where people either have forgotten there is a crisis underway or have misconceptions about it.

What I would like to do in the short time available to me is speak to that and try to again explain what is going on to people who are not as involved with it as my colleagues in the farming community are.

First of all, there is the point that has been made again and again. Over a year ago now, one cow was discovered with BSE and was very quickly traced and did not get into the food chain, but that triggered this crisis we face. Most of us, and this includes the farmers, I think, although we knew some of the things that happened elsewhere in the world with BSE, thought it was going to be a short crisis.

By the way, the medical and science experts, not only here but in the United States, the international science panel, which the Americans actually paid for themselves, said that it was going to be a short term problem and that the border, which was closed because of this risk of transfer of disease, would be open.

They were proved partly right, because in fact, very quickly, as some of my colleagues have said, we succeeded against all the odds in having the border opened to meat of younger animals. That meat has been flowing over the border ever since. I think that is one of the reasons why people think the crisis is over.

Now we know that we are faced with this longer term problem. The problem has nothing to do with health and nothing to do with science. It has to do with politics. The Americans will not open the border. Our colleagues have given some suggestions, the Prime Minister has tried and our ministers of agriculture have tried. We have tried to operate through customers of the United States, such as Japan, to encourage them to encourage the Americans to open the border. Those things have not worked.

Now we are trying to deal with the longer term problem. That is why I am glad we are having the debate. We are going to build new slaughter capacity in Canada because we do not have enough capacity to slaughter the animals we are producing, the animals we previously were selling into the United States.

We have the set-aside program, which has just come in and which is to fill in the gap between the building of the new slaughter facilities and to get some animals on one side and help the farmers a little while that capacity is being built. There is also a cash advance program, which is on now.

Our minister, as we speak, is in the east trying to open up other markets and diversify, which by the way is something we should have done long ago. The Prime Minister is in Russia and is pressing agricultural exports with Russia. By coincidence, about a year ago I had the opportunity to speak to President Putin of Russia for 45 minutes, and half the time I spent talking to him about restocking the genetic pool of the Russian agricultural industry from Canada.

He himself said at the time that we are such a good fit with Russia, with our climate and so on, that the Russians want our genetic stock and that they are looking forward to trading with us. That is a part of the program. There is no health problem. We are trying to deal with what is now a long term political problem.

There is another misconception out there. In addition to the fact that many city people think the problem is over, many people think it is a western problem. Goodness knows it is something that has hit the west very badly. We know from Alberta and Saskatchewan exactly what the impact has been out there, but this is a nationwide problem. It is part of this extraordinary food producing system that we have in Canada.

In the east and in my riding, the problem is not meat as such. People imagine that sides of beef are going over the border. In my riding there are over 1,000 livestock farms. Almost all the traffic is in livestock. The animals used to go over the border live. It is quite a complex industry, as some members here have said. We are talking about all ruminants. In my riding alone, in addition to cattle, there are llamas, buffalo, goat and sheep farms.

For the benefit of members and the people watching this debate, of the sheep farms in my riding, one of them produces milk and cheese, others are more focused on meat, and others are more focused on genetic stock. Before the border was closed, the Canadian sheep industry was in the process of replacing the genetic stock in the United States.

I have hardly spoken about beef, which I will do very briefly to explain because it is a complicated industry. As my colleague from the Bloc said, I have 125 or so dairy farmers. They are faced with particular problems from this crisis. I have people who are cow-calf operators, people who are essentially feedlot operators. Their problems are all different and they are all suffering.

I hope people watching this debate who are not farmers will feel for the farm families in this amazing, complex food industry that we are so proud of. In my riding over 1,000 families are directly suffering and many others are being affected in the rural areas and in the city by that suffering.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, I stood to ask a question. Could I ask for unanimous consent for my colleague to respond?

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, I thought it was questions and comments for my colleague. I do not recall anyone asking him a question.

[Agriculture, October 12th, 2004]

Madam Chair, I listened with interest to what my colleague had to say. I have to say that I have great admiration for the place of agriculture in the society of Quebec. This is an admiration I have had for many years, which is now increasingly being shared by my constituents. I am not now simply speaking of beef or of meat. I am speaking of the whole farming system. I know the strength of the dairy system in the province of Quebec.

One of the things that has impressed me, which is what I would like my colleague to comment on, is that it seems to me that in the province of Quebec--I can only speak for Ontario and I have to be a little careful because I am elected in Ontario--in times of crisis in one sector where one commodity is having a problem, in some fashion agriculture is organized in Quebec in such a way that the other commodity group farmers come together and stand very solidly with the people who are being harmed or experiencing a crisis at that particular time.

Over and above the cull cow issue and all of the others which he quite rightly raised, would my colleague care to comment on that? Are there mechanisms in the farm community in Quebec which encourage them to help the commodity groups that are in a particular crisis?