Dick Proctor

[Questions On The Order Paper, April 20th, 1998]

Can the Minister of Public Works and Government Services specify what was the monetary cost of the Canada Post mailing “We're back at our post”, the two-sided postcard sent out following the recent postal strike?

[Agriculture, April 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister will know that net cash income of prairie farmers is in free fall. According to Agriculture Canada's own projections, 1998 farm income will drop by 11% in Alberta, 15% in Saskatchewan and a whopping 35% in Manitoba. Yet in a most recent budget speech there was not one word about agriculture as the federal government continues to abandon and ignore rural Canada.

What are the finance minister and the government going to do to help stabilize the income of prairie farmers this year?

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, April 2nd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to rise today to speak on Bill C-28 which is described as an omnibus bill dealing with certain technical amendments covering a wide variety of acts relating to income tax.

Most of the amendments are housekeeping and we will not be focusing our remarks on them. We intend to confine our remarks to the significant reductions in the Canada health and social transfer that we have seen over recent years.

An earlier speaker noted that the bill is very technical and wondered how many people had read it and who had picked up a copy. I think it is fair to say that none of the members currently sitting in the Liberal benches have looked at the bill. I might also say that a member might need two hands to pick up the bill because it runs to over 400 pages. We believe it is absolutely ridiculous that parliament or Canadians should be expected to deal with such a complex bill which uses language that even highly paid tax experts would have difficulty deciphering.

We believe that Bill C-28 is anti-democratic in its format, its language and its content. It is wrong for a government to present legislation steeped in such isolated language and expect Canadians to be informed or to have any idea of what their government is doing.

There is a story making the rounds that a justice department official was removed from the working committee on Bill C-28 because he raised concerns about introducing such complex legislation. He was most upset with the complexity and the incredible volume of amendments contained therein.

It is fair to say that one would need to be a highly paid tax lawyer to even begin to tackle Bill C-28 in its present format. Needless to say, the lawyer's protests were not well received by the finance department and he was removed from working on this particular file.

To turn to the CHST, we noted with some interest that Tom Kent, who was recognized as the godfather of Liberal social policy in the 1960s and 1970s, delivered a lump of coal to the government on December 24 last when he lashed out at the cutbacks that the government imposed on our medicare system in particular.

There are other aspects of the CHST that I will get into in a moment.

Writing for the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, Mr. Kent accused the government of putting the 30 year old social program at a critical crossroads by simply neglecting to fund it properly. He wrote “Medicare has been sustained by the public will”, and “For this medicare, we owe no thanks to the present generation of federal politicians. It survives despite them”. Note the words, “It survives despite them. Though they pose, because of its popularity, as the defenders of medicare, in fact, they have destroyed the financial basis on which their predecessors created it”. That is where we are coming from on this.

There has been a lot of talk this morning from folks to my right, literally and figuratively, about the financial debt and deficit that we face. There is also a social deficit in this country. It is not only health care which is at risk, we have not made much progress in the fight against poverty.

I am referring to another article from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy that was issued in February 1998. The writer notes that the progress against poverty that Canada managed to achieve in the 1960s, the period that Tom Kent talked about, and in the early 1970s has stalled over the last 20 years. Poverty has increased since then. It was at 17.9% in 1996 compared to 14.2% in 1975. That is an increase approaching 3%.

In the past Canada could count on economic growth and healthy labour markets to fight poverty. Rising real gross domestic production reduced the number and percentage of people with low incomes while the faltering economy had the opposite effect.

Poverty is a result not only of the changing labour market which we have witnessed over the past couple of decades in this country. It is also linked to household structure and demographics. Gender is a critical demographic factor in the poverty story of this country.

Women typically have higher poverty rates than men and families led by women are more likely to be poor than those headed by men. The persisting inequality between the sexes is due basically to women's unpaid social and economic roles as homemakers and caregivers to children and aging parents. It is a major factor that women have lower incomes and risk higher poverty.

In addition to gender, marital status is a key factor. Single parent families, most of which are led by women, face a high risk of poverty.

Governments traditionally have played a major role in combating poverty in this country. Income security programs, also known as transfer payments, have supplemented or reduced employment earnings. Major programs such as old age security, the guaranteed income supplement, the spousal allowance and the Canada and Quebec pension plans have been crucial sources of retirement income for most Canadians.

Employment insurance and workers' compensation replace employment earnings lost due to unemployment, illness and accident. We know as well what has happened there. I think especially about employment insurance and the fact that prior to the changes 85% to 95% of people who applied for unemployment insurance, as it was previously known, received benefits. Today those figures hover around 40%. That is the reason there is a growing gap in this country between the very rich and the people at the bottom 20%.

Child poverty as well remains a grave problem in this country, as has been noted by our party in particular. One in five children now live in low income families. Just under 1.5 million children, or 21.1% of all children who live in what members opposite often refer to as the greatest country in the world, are living in poverty. That risk of course goes up if they are in a single parent family, especially one led by a woman.

Still other demographic factors are linked to poverty. Aboriginal Canadians are significantly more likely to be poor than the rest of the population. Canadians with disabilities, as other speakers noted earlier today, are another group at risk of poverty.

The Canada health and social transfer that replaced the Canada assistance plan in 1996 has retained only the non-resident requirement of the Canada Health Act, and the loss of the in-need criteria under CAP has opened the door to a very different welfare system today than the one we have known over the past couple of years.

In conclusion, this caucus is opposed to Bill C-28. We reject the Canada health and social transfer which has resulted in steep reductions in funding to health and education. There has been a 40% reduction in funding to post-secondary. We are advised that when the millennium fund kicks in in the year 2000 this government will be spending a full $3 billion per year less on post-secondary education.

The provinces are struggling to provide social services. They too have seen their budget allocations slashed from $18.7 billion in 1993-94, the last year of CAP, to the projection of just under $12.5 billion in 1998-99, the current fiscal year that we are debating. Therefore, this caucus will be opposing Bill C-28.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, listening to the member's speech, I felt that she gave very little recognition to the Asian situation. Also when she referred to businesses moving south of the border, there was no attention at all to free trade and NAFTA.

Given her concern about the provinces and their fiscal plight, I assume we can expect at the Reform Party convention this spring that it will be agreeing to establish provincial sections of provincial parties from coast to coast.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, in view of the lack of time, I will confine my remarks to the first point raised by the hon. member concerning education.

I think it is fair to say that this party, given the opportunity, would never have introduced a scholarship millennium fund similar to the one we are debating here and now. The problem for us is that the transfer money should go back to the provinces and the territories and not in the way that it is being done here where it is being handed out in some sort of way yet to be determined for individual students.

The government has cut back significantly on post-secondary education and on the facilities. It would have been much better if the money had been put back into those facilities so that tuition fees could be reduced and programs could be enhanced. For political reasons the Liberals have chosen to go at it another way.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for the question.

The unemployment rate remains very disturbing, as has been mentioned by a number of other speakers in this debate today. There is absolutely nothing that we can point to specially in the budget that will have any impact on reducing that. In this country in recent years we have gone from an unemployment insurance system that basically paid claims in the area of 85% to 90% to well under 50% of claimants receiving any kind of employment insurance when they present themselves to the officials. This is as a result of the changes from unemployment insurance to employment insurance.

In terms of waiting lists in hospitals and other medical facilities around the country, it is not a very encouraging sight. The lists are growing. We read about it every day. There is no new money in this budget. They are just taking less away from us to help the provinces alleviate that condition.

I touched on student loans in my remarks. I think the scholarship millennium fund will, as I indicated, help less than 7% of students. A number of students have debtloads in the range of American universities now. When I was a university student many decades ago, we had a very low rate of tuition fees. It was possible to graduate from university with a modest debt, as was my case, and to get it paid off. Students today are looking at $30,000 to $35,000 worth of debt. It is a horrendous figure with virtually no way out.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, people in rural Canada will benefit from having a balanced budget, and some very minor nod on reduced taxes.

The point in the references to agriculture was primarily how much has been slashed from the agriculture and agri-food budget by this government over the past number of years. It had gone from $6 billion in the early 1990s to $2 billion today for a drop of $4 billion. I contrast that in terms of the farming community, especially grain farmers in western Canada who have played an enormous role in helping this government balance its books by exports of grain and oilseeds. They have been rewarded by seeing their grain transportation rates doubling and in some cases even tripling as a result. They are now faced with low commodity prices.

The point I attempted to make is this government has retrenched in terms of its commitment to agriculture and the result has been much lower expectations in the agricultural community.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to stand in this House at any time but I am particularly pleased today to participate in the debate on Bill C-36, the budget implementation act.

In his budget speech last month the finance minister congratulated himself and the government for balancing the budget after almost 30 years. Bill C-36 which is before us today puts in place the mechanisms to carry out certain provisions outlined in that budget.

My adopted province is Saskatchewan. Our party, which is now the New Democratic Party and before that the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation party, has been in government for most of the last 45 years in the province of Saskatchewan. We have had some financial messes to clean up.

Of our previous premiers, I think of Tommy Douglas who inherited an atrocious mess from the provincial Liberals back in 1944. As premier of the CCF and later the NDP government of the province he proceeded to balance the books for a full 20 years.

In the 1970s the NDP government under Allan Blakeney, for whom I had the privilege to work for a time, guided the province of Saskatchewan for 11 years. In every one of those years the Blakeney government delivered at least a balanced budget and in many of those years modest surpluses.

The Conservatives came to power in 1982. They virtually bankrupted the province of Saskatchewan. They managed to run up huge deficits, basically $1 billion each and every year for the nine years. It was clearly the worst government in the history of the province of Saskatchewan. It probably can be fairly said it was the worst provincial or territorial government in the history of Canada.

The Devine government was succeeded in 1991 by the Romanow administration which inherited this enormous mess. Over the past seven years in the best traditions of social democratic fashion, the Romanow government has gone back to work and the results have been stunning. The Saskatchewan budget for 1998-99 was tabled last week. For the fifth year in a row the Saskatchewan budget is balanced.

The point I am trying to make is that there are great differences in how Saskatchewan and Ottawa have achieved the goal of balanced budgets.

This year Saskatchewan was again able to balance its books as I have said, but at the same time it has increased spending on health care, education and on getting more children out of poverty. There is more money for agriculture and highways. The provincial budget also includes increased investment in jobs and economic growth. This is after totally eliminating the deficit. Saskatchewan continues to pay down the debt inherited from the Devine administration by an additional $500 million in this fiscal year.

As I said yesterday when we were debating Bill C-28, it is backfilling every dime the federal government has taken out of medicare as a result of slashing transfer payments to the provinces in 1995 and the years thereafter. To preserve and protect this country's health care system particularly in the province of Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan has put back in every dollar that the federal government has taken out.

This is a stunning achievement. As Saskatchewan finance minister Eric Cline indicated last week, the credit belongs to the people of that province. As the minister said, those people are now seeing the benefits which flow from the sacrifices they had to endure in the past several years.

The Saskatchewan budget is one thing. The federal Liberal budget is quite another. In my humble opinion it is a cynical budget, a testament to the black art of accounting.

The finance department always hires slick, highly paid media professionals to put a positive spin on the budgets. In 1995 the government did its polling. There were focus groups in advance of the tabling of the budget and it was found that Canadians would stomach no more tax increases. Therefore the finance department packaged a budget that contained few new tax increases.

All the television news programs began that budget evening with the Peter Mansbridges and the Lloyd Robertsons saying “Budget '95, no new taxes”. Of course that was not the case. What the 1995 federal budget did contain was an unprecedented attack on health, education and social programs, on unemployment insurance and billions of dollars in cutbacks in transfers to the provinces as I indicated a moment ago.

Those same or similar spin doctors are at work once again. This time they are patting themselves on the back by saying that they balanced the budget. Don't worry, be happy. Happy days are here again.

The Minister of Finance in the federal Chamber has to hope that Canadians have short memories about these billions of dollars that have been slashed from spending on education, health care, unemployment insurance and agriculture.

The minister now announces that he will not proceed with further cuts scheduled for this year on health care for example and then he portrays this somehow as new spending and new money. Having mugged Canadians for five years, he now gives them 35 cents and urges them to go and purchase some coffee.

Let us look for a moment at what is missing from the budget, and therefore from Bill C-36. There is nothing to put right the damage done by the minister's earlier budgets to medicare. Not so very long ago, we heard on the news that Edmonton hospitals were having to send patients to Saskatoon because no beds were available. This is what the Liberals have done for health care.

What else is missing from this budget, and therefore from Bill C-36? There is no new investment in jobs for young people, no objectives for reducing overall unemployment, no objectives for reducing child poverty, no drug plan, no home care. The government may not have a deficit in 1998, but ordinary Canadians do.

We have a social deficit. Who is paying for this deficit? It is children living in poverty, the unemployed, students abandoning their studies because they are too deep in debt.

Take the case of the really nice young man who worked in our office recently. After finishing two years of university, he had to quit because he owed too much money. The minister announces that Canada no longer has a deficit, but things are very different for this young man.

What else is not in the budget? The budget speech was entirely silent on agriculture. The minister spoke in this House for almost 90 minutes and the word agriculture never passed his lips.

Furthermore, in a 275 page document which was tabled relating to the budget there were a mere 16 lines about rural Canada. Most of that space was devoted to reminding us that the minister provided additional money to the Farm Credit Corporation last year.

The only current spending mentioned for agriculture is $20 million spread over five years and throughout several government departments.

Federal government spending in support of agriculture and the agri-food sector has declined drastically throughout this decade. Spending has tumbled from $6 billion in 1991 to less than $2 billion in 1997. This year's budget confirms even further cuts.

We submit that the Liberals are dismantling rural Canada piece by piece. They are closing post offices and allowing the railways to double freight rates on grain and tear up branchlines. They have totally forgotten rural Canadians.

One might well ask where the agriculture minister is in all of this. Where is the Minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board or the Minister of Transport? What are they doing to represent the interests of rural Canadians at the cabinet table? The answer clearly is not much.

Farmers and other rural dwellers have sacrificed enormously in the fight against the federal deficit. The finance minister now says that the battle has been won, but these same people could be well forgiven for asking if we are any better off than we were when the Liberals were re-elected five years ago.

I want to turn to post-secondary education and the millennium fund.

I said that this is a cynical budget and nowhere is that more clear than in its centrepiece, the millennium fund which has been much touted by Liberal members opposite. Part I of Bill C-36 deals with the fund's foundation and its board of directors. This scholarship fund is a clear example of the budget being used as a tool of ideology, as the speaker before me so well indicated and documented. The Liberals have used the fight against the deficit as an excuse to pursue privatization throughout the economy. Now they will use new spending to privatize education.

Here is how it will work. In 1995 and the years following, the federal government withheld billions of dollars in transfers to the provinces for education. Universities and technical institutes have been starved for funds. Their roofs leak and buildings threaten to collapse onto students. The universities were desperate for money and raised tuition fees to the point where university graduates with a debt of only $25,000 should consider themselves fortunate. After years of starving students the finance minister has announced this wonderful new scholarship fund which he says will be worth $2.5 billion.

Let us deconstruct this for a moment. The millennium fund is announced with great fanfare in February 1998, although it does not actually begin until the year 2000. Coincidentally, that will be when the Liberals begin their run-up for the next federal election, but I digress. Tens of thousands of students will face another $10,000 of debt each before the scholarship fund ever kicks in. All the analyses indicate that at best the fund will help only about 7%, perhaps less, of Canada's post-secondary students.

The minister tells us that this fund will be established by a private foundation, and Bill C-36 provides for its establishment. This foundation will determine which students are worthy of receiving these scholarships. The foundation then has an amazing amount of power to decide who is and who is not worthy of receiving a scholarship. Indirectly the foundation's board, appointed by this government, will have great power to decide which educational programs are worthy of support. Is there any chance, for example, that the foundation will reward those students enrolling in university courses which focus on programs that business has been demanding all along?

As I have said before, we believe that this is the Liberal's first step in privatizing education, just as they have privatized so many other things. Having starved our public system of education, they now establish a fund for those individuals whom someone else will decide are worthy enough to attend.

What about those who do not qualify for millennium fund scholarships? As of this budget their parents are told that they can cash in their RRSPs to help pay for their children's tuition fees.

People in Canada are more insecure than ever. Study after study shows that real wages and family incomes have been static or declining for years. People are selling the family silver or, in this case, the family RRSPs to help pay for the education of their daughters and sons.

This is the brave new world of the Liberals. The deficit and now the surplus is being used to support a growing gap between those who are wealthy in our society and those who are poor or of modest means. This growing inequality is continuing and I would like to elaborate on it by quoting a prominent citizen.

What kind of society do we have, when we see these gigantic salaries up there and these huge amounts of poverty down here? I think that we are reaching the point of absurdity, in terms of inequalities. There is third world poverty in this country. It is beyond belief.

Any guesses as to who might have said this? Would it have been the leader of our party, the member of Parliament for Halifax, or perhaps the head of the National Anti-Poverty Organization? The answer is no. This is a quote from the federal Minister of Finance in an interview with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen . Did he really mean it? What was he up to? Perhaps he was casting himself for a part as a left Liberal, but he quickly decided that he did not want to be in that play after all. It has been reported in the news media that finance department officials told their minister not to make that kind of statement again. He certainly has not.

Surely the Minister of Finance knows, however, that the chief executive officers of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank have take-home pay in excess of $10 million a year when stock options are considered. This is hundreds, even thousands of times what the average bank employee earns. Matthew Barrett might make an argument for a salary which is 10 to 20 times higher than that of a bank teller, but it is simply unjust for him to take $10 million a year. I very much like the suggestion made recently by the United Church of Canada that we do not only need a minimum wage in this country, we need a maximum wage as well.

In the meantime, these millionaire CEOs want their banks to merge even though Canada already has the most concentrated banking sector in the G-7 group of countries. Even the CEOs admit that the merger would result in the shredding of 10% of their workforce which amounts to about 10,000 people. We believe that the job loss would be much higher than that, probably in the magnitude of 25% of the staff or more than 20,000 jobs in the banking industry overall. The NDP is going to fight this merger every step of the way. I believe that we will be the only party to do that.

What is the finance minister's answer to this proposed merger and to the massive job losses that would occur? We are waiting for it. He has certainly looked uncomfortable when attempting to answer questions in question period on the topic.

The minister and the Liberals remain the champions of big business. We see this in spades in their unqualified support for the MAI, which has been called a bill of rights for corporations and the NAFTA on steroids.

I listened with interest an hour or so ago when the member for Medicine Hat was talking about the number of Canadians who have to flee Canada or leave Canada. Perhaps flee is too strong a word, but they choose to leave Canada because there are greater opportunities elsewhere.

But there is another side to the story the member did not talk about, which deserves to be talked about, and that is the flight of capital from this country. Successful entrepreneurs are making the decision that, having earned large sums of money here, they will now take their business and move it offshore where they can avoid paying taxes of any kind, or very modest taxes.

I guess for me there is no greater example of that than the New Brunswick multi-billionaire, Mr. K.C. Irving, who left a will a few years ago for his sons, turning over all of the assets of his very successful business to the children on the condition that they could not live in Canada. In other words, they had to go to a tax haven offshore, the Cayman Islands or perhaps the Bahamas, where they would pay no taxes.

Those are the kinds of things that all freely elected governments will have to deal with in the years to come. I would suggest that it is far more important that countries like those in the OECD deal with these kinds of issues rather than the multilateral agreement on investment.

For too long the Conservative, Reform and Liberal parties have had it their way. They have convinced many people that there was no alternative to the attacks on our communities, our public institutions and our families. I submit that is changing. I think, for example, of the broadly based coalition working for fair trade and against the MAI. I think of our party's work in the alternative budget coalition with other social movements.

Together we believe we can provide economic alternatives that once again will put people first.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1997, March 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the motion before us this afternoon is:

The Minister shall table in the House of Commons, in September of each year commencing in the year 1998 and ending in the year 2003, a report assessing the adequacy of the cash portion of the total entitlement referred to in subsection (3) to sustain the principles of the Canada Health Act—

The member for Medicine Hat indicated that he and his caucus were opposing the motion because they believe that these kinds of programs should be delivered closer to the people, a point that was added to a few moments ago by the member for Calgary Southeast. The member for Medicine Hat said that otherwise there would be protesters on the lawns of the legislatures. That is not why the member for Winnipeg North Centre is introducing this motion this afternoon.

My adopted province is the province of Saskatchewan. Saskatchewanians feel very strongly about medicare. We feel it is our gift to this country. The CCF introduced medicare and funded it on its own back in 1962. It was then adopted as a national program by the Liberal Party under Prime Minister Pearson in 1967 and was funded by the federal government.

Under the Canada assistance program and established programs financing appropriate funds were delivered to ensure that we had a national quality health care program from coast to coast to coast.

What we are seeing, to our chagrin, in recent years is that the health care program is becoming more and more strained at the edges. To go back to the province of Saskatchewan, with the sharp reductions in federal funding to health care beginning in 1994 and onward, the Saskatchewan government has backfilled every cent that the feds have withdrawn from health care.

As previous members have pointed out, all that is being suggested now is that the cuts are not going to be as deep as were originally envisaged. The government is not actually putting more money in, it is just not taking as much out.

I said that we backfilled in Saskatchewan. The budget was tabled last week. Once again health tops the agenda in terms of the amount of money that is spent. It is now $1.7 billion in a province with just over one million people. It is a significant amount of money. It makes it very difficult for the province to do some of the other things that need to be done because this government is not living up to its financial obligations in this area and has not done so for several years.

I think there is a serious debate going on in this country whereby larger, wealthier provinces which do not have such a large percentage of their budget going to health care are going to begin, in effect, to thumb their noses at the carrot and stick approach—mostly the stick approach—taken by Ottawa. The carrots are getting increasingly smaller and the provinces will say that they will go it alone, that they will provide the kind of health care they think is appropriate.

That will be the end of any kind of national health care program in this country. We will be into a two-tier system, which is, I suspect, really why the Reform Party is opposing this motion today.

We have acknowledged and given credit where credit is due in this House. The government has set, over recent years, deficit targets to reduce and now eliminate the deficit in this country. I believe I am correct in saying that the government is also establishing debt reduction targets. We fail to see why it is hesitant to introduce a target for health care; to do an annual check-up on health care, if you will, to see how it is performing and what is required to ensure that this gift from Saskatchewan continues well into the next century throughout the country. There is not only a debt and deficit problem in this country, there is also a social deficit that we are very concerned about.

Medicare has been the declaration that all Canadians deserve quality health care, regardless of how much money they have. We have said consistently that a family's health should never have to depend on a family's wealth. That is the point we are trying to make here, except we will substitute province or territory for family. The wealth of a province or a territory should not depend on the health of the people who live in that province or territory.

In recent years the Liberal government has cut health care by almost $4 billion. It has opened the door to privatization, as I have suggested. It has indulged in restricted service and user fees that signal the arrival of a two-tier system: the best care for the rich and a lower quality of care for everybody else.

It has cut the promotion of good health, including programs to prevent domestic violence, to control the spread of AIDS and even to discourage smoking.

Three quarters of all health care costs are funded through medicare or other provincial plans. Many important services remain unavailable to those who do not have private insurance or who are not eligible for provincial or territorial programs.

The Canada Health Act requires provincial health plans to be universal, accessible, portable, comprehensive and publicly administered in order for them to receive federal funding.

Both the National Forum on Health and the Canadian Health Coalition have determined that the current $11 billion, which will increase to $12.5 billion, minimum payment to the provinces promised by the Liberals is simply not enough to maintain those principles.

Canadians know all of this. Canadians who were at the Liberal Party convention last weekend know this as well. That is why they are concerned about the direction or the lack of direction, the inability or the refusal of this government to set targets.

I submit that members opposite should be supporting this very reasonable proposal put forward by the member for Winnipeg North Centre.

[Canadian Wheat Board, March 23rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the minister responsible for the Canadian Wheat Board will know that tomorrow the Senate agriculture committee begins hearings in western Canada on amendments to the Canadian Wheat Board.

Bill C-4 includes an inclusion clause that would admit new grains to the board's jurisdiction. Not surprisingly, the inclusion clause has been bitterly opposed in an attack by the business lobby and the transnational corporations.

Can the minister assure this House that he will not accept any attempt to delete or in any way weaken the inclusion clause by the unelected—