Dick Proctor

[Trade, October 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the good news is the International Trade Commission has ruled unanimously today that U.S. tariffs on Canadian durum are illegal. The bad news is the ITC split two to two on wheat tariffs so the United States will doubtless continue its ongoing harassment against wheat farmers as political considerations trump common sense.

Does the government intend to launch an appeal on the 14% tariffs that harasses our wheat farmers and will it help by picking up some of the legal tab which is now running in excess of $10 million?

[Agriculture, October 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Industry will be aware that within the cattle industry there is growing belief that the $460 million in federal and provincial moneys in compensation for the mad cow crisis was inequitably distributed.

There is a widespread feeling that packing plants indirectly benefited most by ensuring prices remained artificially low, thus guaranteeing that maximum federal and provincial dollars were spent.

Will the minister responsible for the Competition Bureau ask the bureau to investigate whether there was indeed collusion and price fixing within the meat packing industry this summer?

[Agriculture, September 26th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food knows that most of the 500,000 government and taxpayer dollars resulting from one mad cow went to Alberta feedlot operators. It helps explain why farmers in other provinces are beginning to liquidate a portion of their herd. In fact, a former agricultural economist and current leader of the Alberta Liberal Party said:

This program has to be the worst thought-out support program of all of the ag support programs I have studied in 35 years of ag policy work.

Why did the minister sign on to such a flawed, inequitable program that benefits a fortunate few at the expense of so many cattle producers?

[Employment Insurance Act, September 25th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I rise to speak today on Bill C-406, an act to amend the Employment Insurance Act, introduced by my NDP colleague, the hon. member for Acadie—Bathurst.

There are many parts to this initiative, including the eligibility criteria, reducing the hours—350 hours—, the calculation of benefits—66% of insurable income based on the ten weeks with the highest earnings—, the waiting period, the duration of benefits, the added benefits respecting local unemployment and so forth.

The question is, why is the member for Acadie—Bathurst proposing such radical revisions, because there are significant changes in the bill? He is doing so to return us to something approaching the unemployment insurance program that we used to have and we do not have any longer.

Simply and shortly put, the changes over the past decade are not only shortchanging Canadians, as far as we are concerned it amounts to absolute highway robbery. Women, for example, are being robbed by the program. Only one-third of women today who actually apply for employment insurance receive any of the benefits. It is a gender gap that is widening by the day.

Overall, EI coverage has been cut in half over the past number of years. In 1992, for example, 78% of Canadians who applied for what was then called unemployment insurance actually received some benefits. Today, 62% of people who apply do not qualify. It is an astounding reversal in a relatively short period of time.

This happened at precisely the same time that we underwent changes in our economy in terms of the way we looked at work and the way work looked at many Canadians. There was a move over the past decade to more seasonal employment, especially in the hospitality sector and in the tourism industry. Women were particularly impacted as a result of this changing of the nature of work.

Before the UI program was so drastically overhauled in 1996, there was virtually no difference between the eligibility of men and women over the age of 45. Today, 45% of women in that demographic group do not qualify for employment insurance benefits when they apply, compared to 58% of men who qualify. That is a significant difference. It is clear that the government has been operating the employment insurance program in its own interest rather than in the interest of the people who are paying into the plan through their payroll deductions.

It is totally unacceptable, in the opinion of the member for Acadie—Bathurst and all of his colleagues in this caucus, to have rules that prevent the majority of people from accessing employment insurance that they actually have paid for.

I think of the seasonal adjustment workers program where we have migrants who come in from Mexico and other countries in the Caribbean and who work in our fields harvesting crops. They pay employment insurance with no possibility of ever receiving any benefits from it and no possibility of ever being repaid what they are owed.

Also, there is no offsetting program that says “Okay you are paying EI benefits, we are not able to pay that out, but we could do some other things”. There is nothing. It is just a straight money grab by the federal government. I am mostly interested in talking about the impact here in Canada, but that is an aside.

Women deserve equal access, and to do that changes must be made to the program's design. That is part of what is being proposed in this private member's bill this afternoon.

We are doing it because the cost to workers, families and communities is enormous. In my riding alone, Statistics Canada estimates that the loss to the people in the riding of Palliser amounts to about $12.5 million a year and $200 million a year in the entire province of Saskatchewan. That is a significant amount of money.

I know the Canadian Alliance is opposed to the bill, perhaps for other reasons. However when I look at Calgary and Edmonton, which is where the Alliance has been strong, where its lairs are, it amounts to about half a billion dollars a year that are forgone in employment insurance for people who live in those two major cities. It is over $200 million a year according to numbers that have been forwarded to the Canadian Labour Congress based on work done by Statistics Canada.

It is mind-boggling. It is the communities that are affected but it really impacts on the individual who has lost his or her job and is unable to collect employment insurance benefits.

It is obvious that the program needs more than a little tweaking. It needs a major and complete overhaul, which is what the member for Acadie--Bathurst is proposing in Bill C-406. The overhaul needs to be non-discriminatory and very clear and straightforward. It should also embody the KISS principle, as in keep it simple.

One of the key points in the bill, the basic 360 hours, should be enough to qualify for EI. This would replace the current patchwork system which, as I understand it, varies between 420 hours and 910 hours depending on where an individual works and the type of work being done. It changes from place to place. It changes from day to day. It is a mind-boggling system.

There should be flexible benefits. We should look at the hours worked in the months prior to lay off and the number of years the person has been in the labour force. We know that older workers, perhaps the ones over 45, have the most difficulty in finding work and being eligible for retraining programs. We think there should be guarantees for up to 18 months in benefits for people in those categories, and Bill C-406 reflects that.

It is time to extend regular benefits for apprenticeship training to everyone in the workforce. They need to sharpen their skills and knowledge. EI benefits should also be available to cover hours of work lost while in training or in job learning operations.

We need to balance work and family responsibilities for children and seniors. There is a growing need in this country for education, training and lifelong learning.

We believe that times are changing. Work has changed in the last 10 years and it will undoubtedly change in the next 10. Our employment insurance or unemployment insurance program must change with those times. We seem to have gone backwards when we need to be going forward. We need to keep up with the times so that people working in today's economy can count on receiving the benefits they need, the benefits to which they have contributed, when they need them.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, there is no question that a lot of people have been left out of this compensation package and truckers are definitely some of them. I know we have a very large trucking operation in my riding, Roberge Transport, that has been dramatically affected by this, but the smaller operator, the small cow-calf operator, the backgrounder, by and large has also been negatively impacted, or to put it another way, has not been able to access the BSE recovery program.

There is lots of hurt out there and that is why we need some transition steps until we can get the border open to live cattle.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to respond to the member for South Shore on this issue.

It may be that I have talked to and have met with people different from those of the hon. member. However when the industry officials came to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food back in July, there was real reticence on the part of a number of those people about changing the rules significantly between Canada and the United States. They were concerned even about the specified risk material, the changes that were announced by Agriculture Canada to lessen the possibility of mad cow, which is contracted through the spinal cord and the retina.

The other thing that is interesting as well in this whole discussion is this. The Minister of Agriculture indicated to me in a conversation in June, before the House rose, that he fully expected before the end of that month an announcement from Agriculture Canada banning all animal feed to animal feed. It is now more than three months later and there has been no announcement. I have no idea, but I can only assume that it is resistance from the industry itself that has prevented that announcement from occurring to date. I think there are concerns from the rendering plants about what they will do with all this excess material and I think that is the reason for the delay in the announcement from the Minister of Agriculture.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, the issue before us today is that there should be an all party delegation that goes to Washington as quickly as possible to intervene and get the border reopened to the export of live cattle.

We in the NDP caucus support that position although we think it is a relatively short term solution, and I will address that a little later in my remarks. Before I go any further, I will be splitting my time with the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle.

The situation is this. The border was reopened some three weeks ago to cuts of beef animals under the age of 30 months, and the United States border remains closed to essentially any shipment of live animals.

It is urgent that we remedy this as all speakers, including the Minister of Agriculture, have said in the debate today. However until that urgency is resolved and the border is reopened to live cattle, the other urgency is that there be programs in place to assist farmers, ranchers and cattle producers to get them over the hump this winter, and throughout the fall at least, until the border reopens.

Yesterday, when the federal Minister of Agriculture met with his provincial counterparts, such relief was not forthcoming. The argument was that the BSE recovery program for the mad cow case should be extended. The suggestion from the Minister of Agriculture was that we invite our so-called trading partners to countervail and put up objections to that.

I think that is patently ridiculous. That will not happen and it has not happened. Despite what the Minister of Agriculture says about the BSE recovery program, it has not been adequate. The point of proof is that three prairie provinces have put in additional supplementary programs to assist better their farmers and ranchers. Even more interesting is the United States is well aware of these additional supplementary programs and has not objected to them.

We find it passing strange to suggest that if they were to do something like this, it would jeopardize our trading relationships with the Europeans, Americans and other countries.

In rejecting the idea of extending the BSE recovery program, the government has put all its faith and trust in the agricultural policy framework agreement and has said that if provinces will sign on to that program, all the problems will be resolved and there will be lots of money there.

We know that six provinces have signed on and there are four significant agricultural provinces that have not signed on to this. I think one of the major reasons they have not signed on, but the government does not talk about it, is the fact that the industry itself is first very wary about the APF and second, they are even more concerned that we would take money from the agriculture policy framework and put it into the crisis called mad cow disease.

The APF was designed almost two years ago. It was agreed to in Whitehorse at a time when the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was telling Canadians that mad cow disease, or BSE, was “a European disease and it certainly couldn't happen here”.

The APF was designed for floods, drought, hail and all the other problems that farmers ran the risk of being affected by. It certainly was never designed for a crisis such as this, which is costing the country upwards of $10 million a day or more.

On a tangential point, the minister suggested that the money had all been paid out very equitably. I want to note for the record that one of the program designers at Agriculture Canada was quoted earlier this summer as saying that right from the start people who were designing the program were concerned that equity could become an issue but no one had a solution to control whose cattle went first to the slaughterhouse.

I want to underscore that point because I am aware that there were a lot of people, small operators, small producers, who desperately were trying to get their 30, 40 or 50 head of cattle into a packing plant this summer when money was available through the BSE recovery program, but they could not get their cattle in. Why? Because the feedlot operators had basically a monopoly on it, working closely with the packing plants, so it was business as usual.

In one incident a farmer in the Moose Jaw area tried every day to get his 40 cattle to market. The day after the recovery program ended on August 28, the packing plant called and said that it would be happy to take his cattle after rejecting him all summer. Of course the only difference was that he was no longer eligible for the approximately $500 of the federal money to offset the low price that the producer was being paid. That was the situation.

We have another situation now that I addressed the minister on earlier, and that is the whole matter of cull cattle. In a joint proposal from the Canadian Meat Council and the Cattlemen's Association yesterday, they proposed that there be a program to help get cull cattle to market. This would cost $195 million and would provide the producer with a choice of marketing the animal or wintering it, the feed costs of course being higher. It is examples like these that the minister said that would invite a countervail so we could not go there.

Going to Washington is a solution but it is a short term solution.

The Minister of Agriculture said in his remarks that until we had this health problem we effectively did not have an international border when it came to beef and beef products. The reality is that 60% of our live beef are shipped to the United States for packing and processing. That has never made any sense to me, and it makes even less sense today. It is akin to shipping raw logs to Japan or somewhere else in the world and buying back finished lumber.

Why in the name of higher employment would we not want to build packing plants and have the jobs here, then ship meat products into the Untied States and elsewhere around the world rather than ship the live cattle? However it is typical of the way we have always treated our overabundance of resources.

It does not want to hear this, but the Canadian cattle industry is far too heavily integrated with the United States. The two major packing plants in Canada are both foreign owned, the one in Brooks, Alberta, and the other, the Cargill plant, in High River. We should give serious consideration to building another packing plant Canada, perhaps on the western Manitoba border or in eastern Saskatchewan, somewhere in there, where there would be more opportunity for shipping beef and producing boxed beef to go into the United States.

To wrap up, we are in lockstep with the United States on this issue and the industry in Canada does not want to hear any suggestions that we should not be in lockstep.

For example, we should consider eliminating the use of bovine growth hormones and potentially opening up markets to the Europeans and Japanese who are not interested in buying our products because of that. The Canadian side of the industry does not want to hear that. They do not want to talk about banning all animal feed to animal feed.

These are just some of the examples we need to look at to have a more Canadian market and less of a market with the United States.

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the minister knows in the breakdown that a lot of the big feedlots got the vast majority of the money. There was a cheque written for almost $5 million to one feedlot. There were a heck of a lot of cow calf operators who did not see a dime of that $500 million and are not likely to in the near future.

I specifically would like to ask the minister about the issue that came up yesterday on cull cattle. This is the glut in the system that we need to get out, recognizing that a lot of the slaughterhouses in Canada really cannot process those culls that are normally processed in the United States. We only processed a little over 3,000 last week as opposed to 15,000 that need to be culled between now and the end of the year.

What plans does the minister have to see that glut and backlog reduced so that we can go ahead with the younger animals being processed here in Canada?

[Agriculture, September 22nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, farmers and agriculture ministers at the provincial level are frankly tired of national agricultural programs that never seem to work.

The BSE crisis is a case in point. Three Prairie provinces have all kicked in additional money over and above the 60-40 that this government always says has to be done, and incidentally, the federal government has not paid its share. The United States, more importantly, is aware of these provincial add-ons but is not taking any action because it understands the length and depth of the crisis that we have.

Again, how can the Minister of Agriculture justify the countervail bogeyman as an excuse once more?

[Agriculture, September 22nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, one mad cow equals 90,000 angry farmers, and today we can add several provincial agricultural ministers to the list, because the federal agriculture minister told his provincial counterparts earlier today that the BSE recovery program cannot be extended without running the risk of countervail.

How is it that the United States and the European Union can add additional programs to assist their farmers but every time it happens in this country the government cries countervail?