Nelson Riis

[Petitions, March 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to present a petition, pursuant to Standing Order 36. Because of the necessity of dealing with the budget debate I will not read the petition. I will simply say that the petitioners are calling for tax reform of a comprehensive nature.

[House Of Commons, March 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, this is not a great day for Parliament. Perhaps we are being put to the test. There are a number of issues that are being mentioned, some of them, I think, indirectly, but there are only two issues that we are being asked to debate at this particular point.

We are not being asked to debate the appropriateness of the so-called flag issue. That is still awaiting your decision, Mr. Speaker, although some of my friends think this might be the point and place for that debate.

I think it is fair to say that people got caught up in an emotional demonstration in the House of Commons, motivated for the very best of reasons. Others felt it was inappropriate. But that is not what we are talking about here.

I think all of us also appreciate the fact that our constituents watch this House operate on their television sets and by and large are not impressed often with what they see. Today is a good example of that.

Today we are supposed to be debating the budget, Mr. Speaker. We are not debating the budget. We are debating some alleged comments that some people made about the procedure before the House.

This is not necessarily a question about freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not mean you have the right to say anything you want about anybody or anything. It is within certain accepted rules. How we behave in here in also based on a long established set of traditions and rules. We make a point of memorizing those rules. As members of Parliament we have books presented so that we know what the rules of order are. We know what is expected of us in the House. What is it?

You are being asked, Mr. Speaker, to decide whether or not a few days ago the proper procedures were followed. We are awaiting that decision. That is not what is before us at the moment. Brought to us by the House leader for the Progressive Conservatives was the alleged comments made by a number of members from various political parties that may bring into question your integrity when bringing down a decision about the appropriateness of behaviour in this House. That is the question before us.

I listened with interest to the spokesperson for the Liberal Party who said now they have no choice. You have ruled that this is a prima facie case of privilege that now must go on to the appropriate committee—the procedure and House affairs committee—where it will be dealt with appropriately. The so-called alleged comments will be addressed. That is where it will be dealt with.

Surely if we are going to do the right thing for this Parliament, we do not challenge your rule now. We do the right thing and vote to send this to the appropriate committee which is a standing committee of this House represented by all political parties to finalize and deal with this unfortunate issue.

I would urge my colleagues, let us make this a unanimous vote. You have asked us to support your decision. That is what this vote is all about. For goodness sake, colleagues, let us not separate at this point on this critical issue. Let us send it off to committee where it will be dealt with appropriately in a dispassionate way where everyone will have the chance to have their say. This will then be brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

I am urging, not only on behalf of my party, that we all support this motion unanimously.

[Privilege, March 9th, 1998]

That is the point. As the Reform whip has indicated, you have not made a decision but while you are considering the arguments, as the House leader for the Conservative Party put so eloquently, we ought not to be issuing comments that could be considered by yourself as a threat.

Before this ends it would be appropriate for those people who are quoted at least to indicate the point they were making if it was not a threat to the Speaker's decision. I put a simple question to bring this to an end. If it is not a problem, what were those comments intended to produce?

[Privilege, March 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I participate in this question of privilege on behalf of my party with a great deal of reluctance. However, having listened to what has been said, this is not a debate about the appropriateness of the flag or whatever.

Mr. Speaker, we made the arguments in the House of Commons in the usual thoughtful and eloquent way before we recessed. We asked that you make a decision on the appropriateness of what happened. That is the issue and you are weighing that decision now.

However, while you were making that decision and presumably looking at the Debates and contemplating the comments that were made, some members of this House—I do not want to identify them—made comments such as “he will demand the Speaker's removal if he rules in favour of the BQ”. Another person said “if he rules any other way I am most offended and I think we will have to call for the election of a new Speaker”. Somebody else went on to say “there will be grave consequences if he does not rule in favour of our position”. Another warned that the Speaker would face demands for his resignation.

Mr. Speaker, those are threats to you. People are going to demand your resignation. They are going to call for a vote if your decision does not go in their favour.

How many of us have listened to your decisions time and time again and the automatic reaction, whether or not we agree personally, is to accept those decisions and move on. We have to accept whatever decision you take as our representative elected by the House.

[Foreign Affairs, March 9th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, will the Minister of Foreign Affairs tell this House what diplomatic steps Canada is taking to ensure that Serbia respects the autonomy and human rights of the citizens of the province of Kosovo? Can the minister also assure us that Canada will be in the forefront of advocating a concerted and immediate international response to a conflict which has such dangerous regional and global implications?

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, again that was a very thoughtful question from my friend in terms of pointing out what the government did in the budget to inflict pain on a lot of people who have been experiencing and living in pain for many years now.

This was an opportunity for the government to extend some care, concern and compassion to those men, women and families who have suffered so much during the difficult years of restraint. This was the opportunity.

The government has the money. Before it said that it did not have the money and now it has it. It had the money to improve health care. It had the money to support education. It had the money to help people who did not have jobs. In other words, the government could have acted in a number of areas that would have reflected on the value of caring, but it chose not to.

That is fair. It is a free country. However let the record show that when the Minister of Finance had the opportunity to help Canadians who needed help, he chose not to do so.

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate my friend getting up to ask that kind of question and providing me with an opportunity to respond.

I will address the last part of his question. There are two sides to education. One is the student side and the other is the educational infrastructure side. We can help students access post-secondary education but there must be post-secondary education for them to access. Therein is where this budget is sorely lacking. There are no transfer payments to assist in the development of colleges and universities, technical schools or vocational schools. That is one thing.

My friend raised the example of Saskatchewan. I will inform my friend of two or three elements he forgot to mention. After nine years of Progressive Conservative government in the province of Saskatchewan, the province was financially devastated. The debt loads were high. And which province was the first province in Canada to balance its budget? Was it a Liberal province? No. Was it a Tory province? No. Was it a Reform province? That does not exist. It was a New Democrat province. The New Democratic Party was the first political party in this country to balance its budget in recent decades. That is the first point.

There was a health care problem. The federal government cut hundreds of millions from health care year after year. Did the spending on health care in Saskatchewan decline? No. Because the provincial government backfilled all of the cuts to make up for all of the cuts by the federal government. The health care budget in Saskatchewan has been able to remain constant. No other province was able to accomplish that.

What about taxes? The provincial government decided that since it had a balanced budget it would be appropriate to reduce the provincial sales tax rate by 2%. It asked what it could do to help every Saskatchewan citizen whether they are in Lloydminster, Saskatoon, Regina, Prince Alberta or wherever. It said “Let's reduce the provincial tax. That will put money in people's pockets the next morning”, which it did.

That was its first balanced budget. It maintained health care, which no other province was able to accomplish, and gave tax cuts to the citizens of the great province of Saskatchewan.

My friend from Kenora—Rainy River should be on his feet applauding that government for setting the way, for being the beacon, for being the light, for showing what governments should be doing.

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

Madam Speaker, he is taking all the time. He is not giving me the chance to respond.

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

They are friends. They are friendly people. Let us face it, the Liberal members have nothing to do with this budget. It is the Minister of Finance. Liberal members should be getting up from their seats and running out in humility saying “We are ashamed of what we have seen in the last couple of days in this House. We are ashamed of being associated with a budget that is so cruel to so many people, that has abandoned so many Canadians”.

I want to conclude by simply saying the following. Some are walking out. That is appropriate. I give them credit for doing the right thing.

At a time when we have a small surplus budget, this is the time when the values of political parties reveal themselves. When cutting is the modus operandi for everybody, cut, cut, cut, fair enough. But now it is different. Now we see the value systems begin to emerge.

To conclude, when you abandon poor children, when you abandon the unemployed, when you abandon people who are sick, when you abandon so many Canadians when you do not have to, it reveals a great deal about what your priorities are and what your values are.

[The Budget, February 26th, 1998]

My friend says disgraceful. It is a disgrace. They should be walking out of their seats. They should not be sitting there. How can they sit there with such hypocrisy and say they care about Canadians when the proof of the budget demonstrates they do not? That is just health care.

If there is one thing the finance committee heard travelling across the country it was that we had a job problem that was of paramount significance in our country. As a matter of fact, just days ago the Minister of Finance was in Europe meeting with the G-7 countries. He said he was going to go home and deal with the unemployment problem, work to reduce the economic inequalities and put these in the budget.

We listened carefully to the minister and I do not think he mentioned the word job. I do not think he mentioned the word unemployment. He certainly did nothing that is going to change the unemployment problem in this country. We told him that he should at least do one thing, something he did for the currency, for interest rates and even in the budget for inflation: set a target. He told us that at least as a society we want to achieve that goal and that target. Is there a target for employment? Is there a target to reduce the number of unemployed within the mandate or within the year? No. The government does not set targets for that.

What the government basically tells us is that it is quite happy the way things are. It it were not it would do something about it. Other countries do something about it.

One of the ways to measure a country's value is to ask how that society, that country and that government treat its children. In this country when we all got up this morning, there were about 1.5 million children living in poverty. In one of the richest country in the world, 1.5 million kids woke up this morning in poverty because their parents are living in poverty.

Somehow the government decides this is something it has to accept, poverty is just a reality. We need to have a million children in one of the richest countries of the world living in poverty. However, that is not the case. There are many countries in this world where there are no poor children. We cannot find a poor child in Norway, in Denmark or in many countries because their governments have instituted programs to ensure that poverty does not exist in their countries. It is a reflection of our value.

I can only conclude that the Liberals sitting across the way, epitomized by the Minister of Finance, do not care about the poor children in Canada, could not care less about the poor families in this country and could not care less about the unemployed because if they did they would do something about it.

However, I will try to be fair and balanced. The Minister of Finance said that if a child is poor in Canada, the government is not going to do anything in this budget and, as a matter of fact, it is not going to do anything in next year's budget. But if the child waits until July 1999, it has a program that will enable the child to receive about an extra 75 cents a day. Image what a poor family thought of that news.

Why does this government not care about children? I do not suppose the Liberals are mean. I do not suppose the Minister of Finance is an evil, mean person. However, children do not have paid lobbyists in Ottawa. They do not make contributions to political parties. They do not work in campaigns. They are not at the Liberal conventions hammering away for attention. They are not schmoozing in the cocktail lounges of the government parties and so on to bring their case before the Liberal caucus and the Liberal Party.

Children are voiceless and they are ignored by the government. It does reflect our value and tells us what importance the government places on certain Canadians. Children have been abandoned, particularly poor children. Their parents have been abandoned. The people who do not have employment have been abandoned.

Who else has been abandoned? The Minister of Finance waxed quite eloquently about his concern about education. Yes, we are going to enter a knowledge based economy and society in the 21st century, so he said he wanted to take some steps that would help students. There were steps that will help some students. The centre piece is the millennium scholarship fund, a $3,000 scholarship to 100,000 Canadians when it all gets into place.

Let us face it, that is going to kick in in a few years from now. If someone is a student today they can forget that, but sometime in the future there will be this millennium scholarship fund for $3,000, recognizing that it costs about $10,000 to go to school at the post-secondary level, and 100,000 people will get that.

Over 1.4 million people are in post-secondary education which means if everybody qualifies, about 7% of young people will qualify for the millennium fund. Seven per cent. Ninety-three per cent will not qualify by definition. It is just not enough. Seven per cent could qualify. Are they the young people who really need it? Is this a fund that will support young people or others who really need financial support? Not necessarily. It is based on marks and so on. It is not necessarily based on need.

As a country we have to be bold. If the Minister of Finance actually cares about the young people seeking post-secondary education, why does he not join with the other 16 OECD countries of which he is so fondly attached and do what they do. Have tuition free colleges, universities, technical schools and vocational schools across the country. That is what they do. They are tuition free, no tuition fees. And it is about time.

Let us face it. A few years ago we as a society decided that grade 12 was the minimum education necessary to become a productive citizen. We said that anybody would now have access to that level of education, grade 12. That was in the 1930s. Surely to goodness we can all agree that grade 12 is now inadequate. We need grade 13, grade 14, grade 15, grade 16. Let us be bold and say to young people and others that for the first 16 years of their education, we will at least eliminate tuition fees to remove that barrier to becoming a contributing citizen in the country.

It seems simple. I noticed with some encouragement today that the premier of British Columbia said it is about time we started to move in this direction. British Columbia is going to move to eliminate tuition fees in the first year of university and college. That is a progressive move. Twenty-seven other countries around the world do this. It is nothing new.

It is not a new idea. It has been practised for decades and decades in many countries, countries that put a value on their young people. They are countries that put a value on their most important resource, their human resources. They do not want barriers impeding their people from becoming productive citizens through education and training, but apparently we do.

I want to talk a little about poor children. We can no longer abandon the 1.5 million children living in poverty. I remember the Minister of Finance standing up not long ago saying that when growth in our country hit 3% for a three year period, the Liberals would introduce a comprehensive child care program. Remember that?

We have accomplished that. We are there now. Was child care mentioned in the budget? Not even a word. Was home care mentioned? That was the main plank in the Liberal platform. The Liberals were saying that they would introduce a comprehensive home care program to complement our health care program across the country.

Was home care mentioned? I do not remember home care being mentioned at all. Home care has been jettisoned. Not only that, there was no funding in terms of returning funds to the transfer payments for health care. We could understand perhaps that that would take place if the government had announced a major home care program to complement the hospital work, but it was not even mentioned.

We would understand that there might not be any transfer payments to health care if there was a pharmacare program introduced. Was pharmacare introduced? That was promised. I do not think that was mentioned either.

No pharmacare, no home care, no child care, no elder care, no care. This government does not care.

I guess the other highlight, what the government is trying to put a positive spin on, is that it will give everybody a tax break. Anyone who believes that would believe there are pink elephants floating around this Chamber. People would rather have a job than a tax break. And yes, they want decent access to education. They want a decent health care system.

Let us just talk about the tax break aspect. I give the previous Liberal speaker credit because I have a great deal of admiration for the work she does. But I guess what she was really saying is that the government should have addressed the whole area of bracket creep. I know bracket creep sounds like an odd term, but I think people who know taxes know what it means. It means the basic personal exemption has not been increasing because of the increase in inflation over the years. Consequently the government is collecting billions and billions of more money than it should be. Taxpayers should have that in their pockets to spend. But the government did not move on bracket creep.

Second, let us face it, we have changed the CPP system. The premiums are significantly increased. When we look at what people are paying out and the minor tax break, the reality is that Canadians are going to be paying a whole lot more than they did as a result of this budget. That is the reality, a whole lot more taxes of one kind or another. From CPP premiums alone it is $874 million this year.

This is a budget of hypocrisy actually. This is a budget of smoke and mirrors. During armed forces exercises they lob over a smoke bomb and it blurs the reality. That is what this budget is, a smoke bomb just chucked out all over Canada. Even some of the journalists for whom I have a great deal of respect said that there were some good things in the budget. We have to look long and hard to find some good things in the budget that will have any significant impact.

We have 400,000 young people out of work today. Talk about immorality. This ought to be enough to call an emergency debate in the House of Commons to find ways and means to find jobs for these 400,000 young people. What does the government do? It says “We are going to act”. Its concept of acting is pretty weird. The Liberals said “We are going to introduce a program that is going to create 5,000 jobs over the next two years”. For 400,000 people. That does not even register mathematically. That is it in the budget. The government is going to make some changes to EI which officials say might create an extra 6,000 jobs. Four hundred thousand young people in this country are desperately looking for decent employment and the government brings in a program that may create 11,000 jobs over two years.

This is pathetic. This is wrong. This is cruel. Yet my Liberal friends sit there on their benches—