Howard Hilstrom

[Agriculture, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the minister of agriculture talked about mailing out application forms when I asked him how much money farmers had received from disaster assistance. Farmers do not want the minister to talk about sending out forms. They need the minister to send out some help.

Can the minister tell the House how much money he has sent out to producers to date?

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak today on Bill C-72, an act to amend the Income Tax Act. The parliamentary secretary has asked my hon. colleagues on this side of the House to give praise at times when the government does something good. I can stand here today and say that for things like the registered education savings plan, certainly a little bit of praise has to go to the government.

It has been my experience in life, and I happen to be over the age of 20, that what the government giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other hand. As a result, the net gain any one of us happens to get out of all these programs ends up being zero, or as we have seen in the past, we are actually worse off.

The budgets in past years have been looked at in that way by Canadians. They look at the taxes they are currently paying, then they look at the program changes in the budget that increase some taxes or decrease others. At times it looks as if the taxpayer is actually winning. That is before it is announced that now there are some user fees.

There are fees that farmers in particular have to pay for government services that are legislated and mandated by government that are for the benefit of all Canadians. Lots of times, as I say, on the one hand the government giveth and on the other hand it taketh away. When it taketh away, it seems it taketh more than it giveth.

I will give an example using gross figures. In 1998-99 I think the federal budget, the revenues in any event, took in about $130 billion. That is a pretty big figure. Now we look one year later, and I have seen estimates that for 1999-2000 the federal government expects to take in in the neighbourhood of $150-some billion, as high as $157 billion I have seen.

Canadians are paying much higher taxes. When I use the example of giving and taking away, we can see that the government continues to take away much larger revenues from Canadians which could be better left in their hands as they would spend it and make jobs.

As has been expressed in the House by many members, a government should set out what its priorities are. It should set out what it intends to do, what is absolutely necessary the government should do that private enterprise cannot. Based on that, it should tax to the level which is required to pay for those essential government services.

We have a tax system that takes away from Canadians tremendous amounts of dollars, billions of dollars, to the tune of $155 billion in the next fiscal year. Then it looks for a place to spend that money. That is what is essentially wrong with this taxation system. We have the cart before the horse in that area.

I would like to speak for just a couple of minutes on what these amendments are doing for low income and poor people. People have low incomes many times due to situations beyond their control.

Farmers and ranchers fall into that low income level. Based on previous historical data, farmers end up paying in quarterly payments under the Income Tax Act. At the end of the year, when they ultimately file their tax returns about 14 months later, they will get that money back.

The government has had the use of that money for the whole fiscal year and the farmer has not had the use of that money. It is the farmer's money in the first place. Finally, he gets to put in a tax return and get some of that money back, probably in many cases all of it back. Certainly people making $12,000 to $16,000 get most of their tax money back, but in the meantime that money has been used by the government. That tax rebate gains no interest while the government has it so the taxpayer does not benefit from that.

Contrast that with a situation where the same low income taxpayer happens to cash in a small RRSP or they get a payment. In the Manitoba flood situation there was an initial $5,000 payment. That all becomes taxable. When the government is owed money by the taxpayer, immediately that is determined to be owed, it is my understanding that 9% per day is put on the outstanding amount.

I have not figured out the actual figures. But certainly the principle of the idea that the government can collect interest from the taxpayer but the taxpayer cannot collect interest from the government flies in the face of equity and reason.

We see another problem. We are looking at amendments that could have gone into the Income Tax Act over the course of time but did not. The amendments that should be going into the act should help the taxpayer and should lower the amount the government takes in from the taxpaying Canadian public. It is always designed so that does not happen.

I will refer to the agriculture income disaster assistance plan. In that plan farmers have to do their accounting on an accrual basis. Many farmers are still operating on a cash basis, which is a form of accounting that is good for farmers who have straightforward incomes.

When the AIDA program was put together, in order to comply with the various complexities of the Income Tax Act, farmers who filed under the cash basis had to convert all their records and accounting systems over to the accrual basis just to try to get in on the agriculture income disaster assistance program. When I say they tried to get into it, it is not that farmers want to get into it, it is that they have had a disaster that requires that they try to find some way to keep their farms or ranches in operation.

There are lots of amendments which could have gone in along with the amendments referred to in Bill C-72. I have already mentioned those other taxes that could be taken right out of the system, such as the user fees for government services that benefit all Canadians.

There is another issue which has been partially dealt with, or there is a capacity for the Income Tax Act to deal with it. The will of the elected members on the government side is what is in question on this particular issue. I am referring to the family trust provisions.

Canadians were outraged a few years ago that a well-known family in Canada, it was reported publicly, had removed approximately $750,000 out of the country without paying any tax whatsoever. I suspect the figure is actually much higher.

I have not seen anything in the newspapers and I have not been advised in any way that the Income Tax Act has been amended to correct that system. I understand that there was already a provision in the act where the government could go back three years and look at those transactions and assess appropriate penalties and taxes.

On behalf of all Canadians, I would certainly like to see the tax paid on that $750 million. It was not $750,000. That is peanuts to a millionaire's family. It was $750 million, almost $1 billion.

I would like to see fairness for the poor in this country as well as the rich. The very rich are still not paying their fair share of taxes when we see these kinds of family trust provisions that only the rich can take advantage of.

I praised the government for the registered education savings plan. Certainly the government deserves credit for that. The problem is that someone making $12,000 to $15,000 a year cannot afford to put the basic money into those plans.

I conclude by asking that the Income Tax Act be simplified overall and made fair for all Canadians.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 1998, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to hear the member's comments in regard to the responsibility of the government members and cabinet for the Income Tax Act and for the enforcement of it. We had the unfortunate case where Susan Theissen and her husband had their income tax returns taken out without lawful release by Revenue Canada, which made a terrible mess in their personal lives.

Would the member comment on whether or not it is actually elected government members that are responsible for everything that goes on in that department? It is their overall policies that actually filter down to the bureaucrats. Would he comment on whether or not it is the elected officials as opposed to bureaucrats that are the biggest problem in Revenue Canada?

[Petitions, April 14th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present a petition on behalf of the citizens of my riding of Selkirk—Interlake who note that the Government of Canada has yet to comply with article 11 of the Canadian Human Rights Act which pertains to the rights of workers to equal pay for work of equal value.

The petitioners say that to this date the government has not complied with the tribunal order and they therefore petition parliament to instruct the government to immediately comply with the orders of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in the matter of pay equity.

[Agriculture, April 14th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the minister of agriculture has repeatedly stated that his farm aid program was bankable and would be available for farmers in the spring. Spring has arrived and farmers are beginning to put in this year's crop.

Could the minister tell the House how many applications have been approved and how much money has been paid out?

[Supply, April 13th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I was attempting to ask a question and the debate was going back and forth.

[Division No. 358, March 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is obvious the President of the Treasury Board has reached an agreement that none of us were made aware of as these proceedings were going along. This is indicative of the process of negotiations over the past two or three months, in fact, over the past two or three years. Canadians are kept in the dark along with the union negotiators.

While there may be an agreement in principle, the minister clearly did not indicate to me that this covered all the bargaining tables, the blue collar workers and the corrections workers. No one is left uncovered by this agreement in principle. That was not totally clear to us in this House. A bit of discussion with the House leaders before announcing it would have made all the difference in proceeding smoothly tonight and getting on with this business of getting the workers back on the job.

Up to this point no minister on that side of the House has stood up and said “I am responsible for the mess that we find ourselves in today. I am responsible for the negotiations that did not happen. I am responsible for not coming to an agreement before we got into an emergency debate and got into back to work legislation” which no one in the country wanted to see except the government.

We are left in the situation of looking at faulty back to work legislation tonight. There was a simple solution available to this government and that was to bring in back to work legislation with final offer selection arbitration as part of the terms.

What we have is back to work legislation which will impose an interim settlement penalizing the workers from the position the government had last offered; i.e., they were going to have lower pay and the question of increments was not covered.

What we have here at this late time is a government trying to poke and penalize the negotiators and the union people with whom it will have to start renegotiating with tomorrow.

The President of the Treasury Board did not sound very confident that it would not go through. We are left in the same situation of not knowing what is going on. He said he has an agreement in principle but only time will tell.

We will support this but only to ensure that farmers get their grain moving and their income sustained and so workers can get back to work. We will be bringing in amendments to this final offer arbitration to rid of the dictative terms of this minister and this government that are totally unsatisfactory to the union people on whom he is imposing it.

We have had unanimous agreement to allow me to share my time and I will be sharing it with the member for Wetaskiwin.

[Division No. 360, March 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, getting back to the commitment to compensate the farmers, it is absolutely vital because of the financial situation they are in which gave rise to this emergency debate.

If there is financial hurt out there, how can the government not consider compensating farmers for financial loss caused by the government and the Public Service Alliance of Canada negotiators? It is only fair. It is only right. Why should farmers suffer due to the actions of other people?

There is nothing in Bill C-76 that will prevent this situation from happening again on the expiry of the tentative agreement, if it is ratified. We will see the same old routine of the last 26 years. In about two years time we will see another strike, another crisis, another back to work piece of legislation, and another loss of a $100 million to farmers. There is no hope from the government as to its future commitments in two years.

Maybe the election will come along before then and I will walk over to the other side to take care of agriculture issues along with my compatriots in the Reform Party. We will see how that works out in the future.

We have the opportunity today, not in two years time, for the government to put final offer selection arbitration into the legislation and into the negotiations it has a tentative agreement on. In all the comments of the President of the Treasury Board in this regard he never said that he had tried to get that back into the legislation for the 70 grain weighers in particular. It was kind of like the official opposition brought it up so maybe now he would think about it.

Farmers and other Canadians need a lot more than he will think about it and try to do something. They need it to be put into legislation. It could have been in Bill C-76. It could have been in the amended Bill C-26, but it will not be part of the legislation.

We have covered the costs and the idea of final offer selection arbitration. Another part that has not be thought of is that maybe the 70 grain weighers should be considered an essential service. They have held up 115,000 farmers who tried to ship their grain to the west coast. It would seem to me they are a monopoly service. They are essential to the well-being of a significant chunk of the population of the country.

Over the next few months before this parliament recesses we will see that there will be a lot of pressure from the opposition side to move in that direction to protect the farmers. We will be looking for support from the government side to bring that about.

The treasury board minister said that the reason we needed this legislation was because between now and the point of ratification there might be another strike. The tentative agreement did not really cover a lot of the things that needed to be covered, including trying to have the no strike provisions put in so it did not have to continue on with hammering the democracy of this parliament with closure.

I heard the hon. House leader from this side speak earlier about the fact that this government has used closure 50 times between the 35th parliament and this one today. This closure that we are speaking on today is the 50th. If that is democracy, it is democracy being abused.

Closure is the kind of legislation that should be available, but it should be used more along the lines of the notwithstanding clause as opposed to being used more in the way of the government dictatorially trying to get its way in this parliament. We have seen that abuse tonight and that is why we are sitting here at this early hour of the day speaking about Bill C-76.

We went through hours of amendments, some of which were very good. My friends in the Bloc, in fact, brought up the final offer selection arbitration. I thought that maybe that amendment would be one that would really improve this bill. What did we get? We saw the government members yell that great amendment down. As a result, we now continue on with this bill without that key part in it.

We have in this bill a requirement about the grain that is mostly from western Canada. However, I would like to point out that we are also going to be talking very shortly about grain from central Canada. I speak particularly of Ontario, because I am a little more familiar with it. The seaway is going to be opening up. The terminals at Thunder Bay are going to be opening up and there are going to be boatloads of grain going down the seaway and out to our customers on the other side of the Atlantic to South America.

We know there are a few Liberal members of parliament who represent the seaway area in Ontario. Maybe we will see a lot more action to make sure that the seaway stays open and that those jobs and those farmers in Ontario are well taken care of.

Why could that not also have happened for the western farmers? This government is supposed to be taking care of all Canadians, but it seems that it likes to take care of itself.

Earlier today and yesterday we heard serious allegations about the Prime Minister in regard to golf courses and hotels in his own riding. These allegations border on a conflict of interest problem.

We have the second reason that the Treasury Board says we have to have this legislation here. It is because the grain has to keep moving. I certainly agree that the grain has to keep moving. This legislation is the only way that is going to happen. As a result, I am going to vote for this legislation because it is that important.

Western farmers cannot be held to pay for ruinous type legislation and ruinous type negotiations in labour-management talks that this government seems to be bringing forth all the time.

The third reason had to do with the CXs. The CXs are the corrections workers, and I have corrections workers at Stony Mountain penitentiary in my riding. I have spoken to some of the union workers there and they are not a very happy bunch. They have been mistreated in previous negotiations with the government and they obviously have not experienced good faith negotiations in this round of talks.

In the Stony Mountain penitentiary we have an educational and training centre, not only for the guards and the union operators, but also for the prisoners who are housed there.

We had a situation over the past few years where all of a sudden the contracts for that training happened to end up with a group of educators based primarily in Ontario. At one time our local school boards managed to get those contracts.

Once again we see government interference. It is a strange method. I have not exactly had time to look into this, but I am giving the government notice tonight that I intend to look into it and determine just what it was that managed to have our local school boards not be able to win any of these contracts.

All of these things add up to why these corrections workers were in the past, and still are, unhappy with the negotiations. That is why we once again have this legislation being brought in to force them back to work.

I do not know why they have to be forced back to work. The Treasury Board minister has informed us that there are about 500 of these people who are not covered as essential workers, possibly as many as 600. Union negotiators have told me that there are 720. That is part of the problem in dealing with the government and I appreciate that maybe the negotiators for the unions had the same problem in getting hard facts and commitments.

As another example of a lack of commitment, I have been arguing since early December when the Estey report came out to get a commitment from the transportation minister and the Canadian Wheat Board minister that the report actually was important, that it had to be dealt with and that it should be moved along.

I tried to get this commitment through letters to the ministers and inquiries during question period to try to get them to move along.

I was part of an industry group that was trying to move these ministers along and get a commitment from them. As of this day we still have no commitment as to where they stand on it, whether we will move ahead, move backwards or move sideways.

That is the same lack of commitment that we see in trying to negotiate these wage agreements with the various unions around the country. In particular, I am speaking out on behalf of the corrections workers, some of whom are my neighbours and friends, and in fact I would like to say that they should not have been included in this back to work legislation. The jobs of the 500 to 600 workers they are talking about could quite easily have been done by the other thousands of employees at the corrections offices.

If they had set up pickets, it well may have turned out that other union workers would not have crossed their picket lines. Once again, we would have the same situation that we have with the grain weighers on the west coast. When they put up a picket line the other unions would not cross it.

Now we see that the government understands that this is a problem. In regard to the corrections workers, it has built into Bill C-76 the fact that while this agreement is on the go, and once it is ratified, there will not be any strike action and the work will have to continue on.

It was vital to get the grain moving. We had to ensure that the western farmers were covered, as well as the west coast workers. However, in fairness, there should have been a negotiated settlement and we should have continued on with the negotiated settlement with these corrections workers. Instead they will be arbitrarily forced back to work if they go out on strike, which I assume they will if this is not passed.

We are going to see the same thing with the corrections workers that we saw with the postal workers. We are going to see them 16, 17 or 24 months down the road with no contract. With the grain weighers, in two years, which is the average before another stoppage comes along, we will be in the House again with back to work legislation and a big crisis. That could happen before the next election if this bill is not improved.

I will have to check how the House works with regard to the technicalities, but I would like to think we could move some amendments tomorrow at third reading stage that would bring in final offer selection arbitration that we so desperately need in this legislation.

It is time that I pass along to the next speaker, who will no doubt be saying a lot of the same things I am saying. I have pointed out clearly where this government has fallen down. The people of Canada will know it. The western farmers will know it. The unions will know it. One last attempt to put in final offer selection arbitration will be made.

I am going to support this bill to get these workers back to work and to keep them on the job just because of the drastic consequences there are to the western Canadian economy and the whole Canadian economy due to the lack of productivity, and for the individual farmer trying to make a go of it this spring with all the vagaries of agricultural life, such as drought, too much rain, floods and all of those things.

This government has really turned the House off tonight by the way it has handled the closure motion and by bringing in the tentative agreement at the last minute.

I would now ask that the member for Wetaskiwin be permitted to speak in the time remaining.

[Division No. 360, March 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I no longer ask for that consent. I would like to speak my full time.

We are debating Bill C-76, an act to provide for the resumption and continuation of government services. The short title is cited as being the government services act, 1999.

Tonight we have had amendments in committee of the whole to put in place the tentative agreement that was announced tonight by the President of the Treasury Board between the government and the table two blue collar workers of the PSAC union.

I would like to note that we have had the bill along with a booklet setting out the details and the wages that are part of the back to work legislation. We attempted to get the details of the tentative agreement which is now part of Bill C-76. However, we were unable to get them tabled in the House even though we are expected to debate those very provisions. It is not particularly fun or appropriate to have to debate something when we do not have the exact facts in front of us, but we will debate what we have.

Bill C-76 is in two parts. The first part deals with the operational groups. Being the chief critic for agriculture, the one I am particularly concerned with is the grain weighers at the west coast ports. The second part deals with the corrections workers in our federal penitentiaries who are not designated essential.

Tonight we came to debate this back to work legislation in good faith and with good intentions. But tonight the government handled the issue of the surprise announcement of the tentative agreement in much the same way that I believe it has handled the negotiations with the unions over the past three months, with confusion, a lack of complete facts, and a spinning of the facts which left no trust and no faith in the process.

Back in 1993 when the Liberals took over as a majority government, many workers across the country were in a wage freeze. They knew at that time that the wage freeze would end. In 1997 the Public Service Alliance of Canada gave notice that bargaining would be taking place.

At that time it would seem to me that it would be incumbent upon the negotiators, and I guess the ministers responsible for the negotiations, to set a timetable to ensure a bargaining agreement was in place at the expiry of the wage freeze. That would have had the advantage of there not being a strike because there would have been an agreement.

If there was no agreement and a sensible and reasonable timetable had been set out by the treasury board minister, he could have looked at back to work legislation at a much earlier point.

We ended up with a whole lot of innocent third party Canadians seriously being harmed by the negligence of the government to get the agreement in place and by the fault of a certain number of union negotiators not to work in conjunction with the government. I said earlier that if I were to apportion blame I would probably put about 75% on the government and 25% on the union.

Let us talk about what has happened in the past with regard to grain exports and the agriculture sector as it relates to stoppages due to wage negotiations. In the last 26 years there have been 12 work stoppages at west coast ports. We could think about that for a minute. Almost every two years there is a stoppage in grain movement to the coast.

We must remember that every time there is a stoppage of grain movement to the ships going to our customers overseas it costs our farmers money. It costs the union people who have to go out on strike pay and it hurts our reliability.

This year the Canadian Wheat Board has exports of a little over 50% of what they were a year ago. We are seeing the cumulative effect of our grain sales being considered unreliable to our customers overseas. We cannot apply a dollar and cents figure to that very easily. However we could look at the sales of our competitors, the Americans for instance, which are down only about 10% as compared to ours being down close to 50%.

Of the 12 work stoppages we see that 9 of them involved grain and 7 of those involved back to work legislation specifically because of grain stoppages. Both the Sims commission and the west coast port inquiry identified grain disruptions as a catalyst for back to work legislation in labour disputes at west coast ports.

I do not happen to have the chronology of the House as to who was in power over the different years, but I happen to know they involved the Right Hon. Lester Pearson, the Right Hon. Pierre Trudeau and the Right Hon. John Diefenbaker who came from my home province and was just one fine fellow.

This situation should not have been any surprise to the government sitting here today in 1999. There are 26 years of history. I look at the other side of the House and I know there are members over there who have been here for at least 28 to 30 years. I believe the Prime Minister has something like a 34 year record. If the leader on the other side cannot remember the harm, the damage and the tremendous number of stoppages of grain movement to the west coast, there is no hope of a negotiated wage settlement being done in a proper manner, on schedule, and in time to prevent the harm and the hurt by farmers.

The Western Grain Elevator Association is representative of Sask Pool, Agricore, a new grain company out west, United Grain Growers and Cargill. These grain company foresaw major problems with their exports of non-wheat board grains and wheat board grains that they were handling on behalf of the board.

On January 27, 1999 they sent a letter to the treasury board minister and to the Prime Minister identifying that a big dark cloud was looming on the horizon, a cloud of disruption, a cloud of trade and losses to farmers, and a cloud of loss of exports of grain in particular. I do not think the government bothered reading that letter too much because it went ahead with its negotiating plan which resulted in the mess we see here today.

Along with my colleagues I had to force the government into an emergency debate to get this movement going. What did we see? We saw trickery on the part of the government up to the very last moment when it brought in a surprise tentative agreement at a late hour.

The treasury board president tonight in committee of the whole identified that he would consider the possibilities of doing an investigation and determining what were the actual costs to farmers as a result of the loss of exports during the strike by grain weighers. We should hold him to that. Can we imagine the billions of dollars in loss over the last 26 years, not thousands or millions, that my grandfather and my father and the grandfathers and fathers of many people in the House suffered due to a lack of action by governments of the day? The disappointment is that the present government cannot learn from the mistakes of the past, some of which were committed by present sitting members, I might point out.

Who will pay for the losses of these farmers? When we look at the Canadian Wheat Board and its loss of sales due to the snow storms of 1996-997, we see that the Canadian Wheat Board went after the railways. It negotiated a settlement with CN. We will never know how much it got. Then later it achieved a $15 million settlement with CPR because farmers were innocent third parties. The railways saw fit to move products and commodities other than grain and gave preference to commodities like coal, sulphur and whatever. As a result there was a liability on behalf of the railroads to the wheat board and therefore to farmers. Tomorrow and on future days I will be calling upon the wheat board and the government to identify the costs to farmers and to compensate them for those losses.

The government brought forth the agriculture income disaster assistance plan. The agriculture minister bears full responsibility for that plan which went out to farmers. We found from the initial reaction of farmers who filled out those forms that the plan would not help them very much when it came to financial compensation.

[Division No. 360, March 23rd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, tonight I believe we are about to—