Wendy Lill

[Transport, April 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, on Monday the transport minister met with his advisory committee on accessibility and they talked trains. They talked about how he broke his promise to this group by allowing VIA Rail to purchase and put on the tracks used rail cars that are not accessible to people in wheelchairs.

Even more surprising is the fact that the minister admitted that these rail cars fail to meet Transport Canada's own safety standards for new rail cars and that he has known that since last October.

Why has the minister allowed rail cars into service that he knows are unsafe for Canadians with disabilities, for railway workers and for all Canadians?

[Iraq, April 8th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the defence minister told the media that to know how the NDP was anti-American, they would have to use their imagination. I ask the media and the minister to imagine this.

Imagine a Canada that takes the principled position against an unjust war, a war which contravenes international law, instead of a waffling position based on trade and polling.

Imagine having a Minister of National Defence who believes that not participating in a war means not having ships or troops working in the combat zone and not providing our troops to other countries to free up combat troops for the invasion.

Imagine a Canadian cabinet that has a clear principled position on war, one that listens to its MPs and Parliament and is respectful of other points of view.

Imagine no Liberal doublespeak. Sadly, it is not easy if we try.

[Margaret Mary Savage, April 2nd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, at the beginning of Cancer Awareness Month, it is with great sorrow that I join with all people of Dartmouth and Nova Scotia in recognizing the passage of Margaret Mary Savage who died peacefully in her home in Dartmouth on March 31, 2003.

Margaret leaves behind her dedicated husband, John, her seven children, her many grandchildren and a community deeply indebted to her sense of love and caring for humanity.

Margaret played an active role in the life of her church, the Catholic Women's League and many interfaith initiatives. Along with her husband, John, she was the driving force behind such programs as Feed Others of Dartmouth, the Dartmouth Book and Writing Awards, initiatives for literacy, and the Christmas Full of Caring program.

Margaret saw value in everyone and made everyone feel valuable. Her patience, tolerance and non-judgmental acceptance of all viewpoints and people were an inspiration to her family and friends.

Today we offer our prayers to the Savage family and we commit to redoubling our efforts to eradicate this dreadful disease for all of our families and all of humanity.

[Income Tax Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the member has raised an interesting issue, one that I think is being addressed in this motion, and that is the idea of recognizing income derived from copyrighted work, a play that has been written or a piece of art, for example. It is the actual product of someone's imagination. Although there are many other ways to recognize somebody's status as an artist, that seems to be the one that is the most understandable or satisfying to accountants and people working in the finance department.

There are many ways to support creation. Our government is doing some very good work at supporting creative institutions such as the Canada Council, the CBC and Telefilm Canada. There are those kinds of vehicles, but we also need to look at how individuals can be supported through copyright legislation and through motions such as this which recognize copyright and the moneys attached to it. These are other methods of supporting creation in this country.

[Income Tax Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I will continue to say at every opportunity that artistic merit should be safeguarded. I look forward to having that debate in the House and in committee. Aside from that, the comments made by my colleague are not particularly relevant to this debate.

[Income Tax Act, March 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker,it is an honour to be the first person to take part in the new parliamentary system around private members' motions. I guess one could say that I will go down in history today by being at the beginning of the roster.

It is my great pleasure to move Motion No. 293 today. The motion reads:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should celebrate and encourage Canada's magnificent and diverse culture by changing the Income Tax Act to exempt creative and interpretive artists from paying income tax on a percentage of income derived from copyright, neighbouring rights, and/or other income derived from the sale of any creative work.

I am aware of one amendment that will be proposed by my friend from Quebec City, and I welcome the amendment.

In the last Parliament, my colleague, Nelson Riis, introduced a similar motion calling on the government to give a general tax exemption of $30,000 for artists. That motion was defeated largely based on an argument by the parliamentary secretary for the minister of finance of the day, who said:

It is not clear that artists, writers or performers have greater needs than any other individuals with comparable incomes. Thus, to provide a special tax exemption to an individual simply because he or she engages in artistic activities would be very difficult to defend on equity grounds. It would also lead to requests for similar treatment for other groups that also believe they are deserving of special status.

Sadly, the debate rules of that day did not allow for rebuttal on my part, so I would like to take a second to address the notion that artists want special status and how that would be inequitable, or the other arguments from that day saying that the status of an artist is a hard one to define.

On matters relating to who is an artist, the motion I have put forward today gives a much clearer idea of what part of the income would be eligible for income tax relief and what part of the income would be limited specifically to the direct income from the sale of creative works. This would help to define, in my estimation, what income would be allowed as an artistic exemption and it gets to the issue of what exactly is an artist and brings it into the realm of the marketplace, that if a work of art is sold then it becomes income that is eligible under this motion.

In terms of the cost to the treasury, the motion calls for only a portion of income to be deductible and that level would be set by the Minister of Finance. That being said, we know that regardless of the level this measure would not be a great loss to the federal treasury given the fact that the average income of artists in this country is around $13,000 a year.

What precedents are there for this kind of exemption? We can start with Ireland. Ireland has an absolute exemption for income tax for creators. The total cost to the treasury in Ireland is less than 10% of our expenditure on the Canada Council, a total of less than $14 million or less than 50¢ per Canadian.

Quebec has also allowed for a deduction of up to $15,000 on copyright income and that seems to be working very well in that province and has allowed art to flourish in Quebec.

I wish to address some other misconceptions that I have heard about support to our artists in general. A while back I heard from another member of the House who proclaimed that she did not believe we needed any special support for artists, the reason being that personalities and artists, such as Céline Dion and Shania Twain, have been so successful internationally, so why do we need to support our artists?

I would say that unfortunately this kind of mentality presumes that all art in Canada can be judged by commercial success in the international marketplace. It suggests that people who create outside the mainstream, which means less commercial success, are somehow less creative. It views art only as a commodity, only to be judged by its market value.

Although the motion involves changes to the Income Tax Act, the motion, strangely, is not about income. The motion is not about money, given the fact that artists are not making very much money to begin with. I would say it is more about recognition and respect for the creators in our country, and respect and recognition within one of the central laws of our country, the Income Tax Act.

The argument about special status put forward earlier by the parliamentary secretary does not stand up in many ways. In one way we have to look at it, sadly, that our current Income Tax Act is full of special statuses for classes of people, mostly people with money. We have special exemptions for family trusts so that wealthy families can shelter huge incomes for their children. We have special rules allowing entrepreneurs to deduct expenses related to their businesses. We allow the sheltering of income made by playing the stock market or making certain types of investments. When artists have come looking for tax recognition the government has said no because the finance department cries special status as if it is brand new concept. The fact is that art and culture in this country are special. Art and culture are special in the life of a nation.

His Excellency John Ralston Saul, one of Canada's most respected writers and philosophers, has had much to say on culture and its place in Canada. In 1999 he made the point that culture has been presented over the last few decades as if somehow it were a marginal adjunct to society. History tells us that this is nonsense. Culture either exists as the core element to society or it really is not culture at all. Culture is the motor of any successful society.

Up until six years ago, when I became a member of Parliament, I made my living as a playwright and filmmaker in this country. Many of my friends continue to be artists, sculptors, playwrights, directors and painters. Most of them continue to cobble together a living without one bit or one wit of security but also with little real choice in the matter because they are driven to create and to express themselves. They believe they have something to say and that they can make people laugh, cry, feel deeply or change their courses of action, that they can make people feel rage about injustice, cry out, feel deeply about humanity, about war, about terror, about deepening their spiritual journeys, about strengthening their connection to kin and community and about their sense of responsibility in their society. In a word, they believe, rightly or wrongly, justly or unjustly, or foolishly, that their tiny contributions and creations can have an impact, positive or negative, on the human condition.

For this faint hope, they labour mightily in the field of culture making on average about $13,000 a year. They give up a great deal for the special status of being artists. People who have made the choice to be creators often find they have no choice but to live in poverty. To be an artist in this country means to concentrate on creating while worrying about paying the rent and buying food. It means struggling to focus on art while dealing with overdue bills and trying to practise a craft when the basic costs of the tools are sometimes too expensive. It means trying to keep a creative spark alive, a creative work moving ahead over a period of years, while working on jobs which help pay the bills. It often means forgoing family and children altogether. It often means disrupting marriages, families and home lives since people have to travel great distances to work as artists, directors and actors.

We are tremendously richer because of the sacrifice of artists in our country. Our nation would be far worse off without the stout-hearted band of creators who chronicle its course, tell its story, shine light in the dark corners and provide the strength to face an uncertain future.

That is why I take every opportunity to raise issues of culture and creation in the House: because we need to value creation as much as we value money.

I hope that in a few months we will all stand in our places here to pass this motion to start giving creators a limited income tax exemption on their income directly derived from the sale of their work.

Previous debate on this subject in this place has pointed to the organizational support that successive governments have put in place as being adequate and that therefore no extra support is needed for individual artists. People bring up the budgets for the Canada Council, the CBC, the National Gallery, the NFB and Telefilm. They usually use recent numbers, which do not show how the overall cultural supports have been drastically reduced since the mid-nineties. Most important, these moneys do not recognize individual creators' contributions. They are more usually designed to support the amorphous cultural industries.

The motion uses the individual tax return to award the individual creator. It is a strongly symbolic way of saying to the creators that our culture, our society, values their lonely efforts, their creative spirits. But we should also understand who really pays for our collective successes in the cultural sector. In 1982 Canada commissioned a study of our cultural sector; it is called the Applebaum-Hébert report. One of its overall findings was that the largest subsidy to cultural life in Canada comes not from governments, corporations or other patrons, but from the artists themselves for their unpaid or underpaid work.

It looks like things are now worse. In December last year, four months ago, the Cultural Human Resources Council issued its latest report, called “Face of the Future”. I would like to read one paragraph from the report, which looks at trends in the cultural sector:

Despite general growth in the sector, visual artists' annual income, which is extremely low to start with, is dropping. Between 1990 and 1995, Canadian craftspeople experienced a 21% decrease in their average annual income, dropping from an average of $13,480 to $10,606 per annum. In 1995, visual artists earned an average annual income of $12,600, which represented only 47.5% of the average annual income of the total workforce that year; craftspersons earned an average of $10,600 that year, or 40% of the total workforce.

So things are getting worse, and the successes in the sector are not because of government support but because of the sacrifices of individual creators.

I hope members of the House will see this motion as an important and constructive step in attacking the obstacles thrown in the way of our creators. I hope they will see it as a small way of relieving the economic grind facing them, perhaps allowing them to work in a more concentrated way on their art, perhaps allowing them to create a book or a play in one year instead of three or four. It would give them some small financial relief, but it would also give them one big boost symbolically in terms of their importance to this country.

By passing the motion we would be saying as a nation that what creators do is special to us. We would be collectively recognizing their contribution. We would be saying that we thank them, that we need them, and that we cannot exist without them.

I thank hon. members for listening to me today and I look forward to the debate that is going to unfold in the next couple of months on this very important issue and this very important recognition of artists in our country.

[Income Tax Act, March 31st, 2003]

moved:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should celebrate and encourage Canada's magnificent and diverse culture by changing the Income Tax Act to exempt creative and interpretive artists from paying income tax on a percentage of income derived from copyright, neighbouring rights, and/or other income derived from the sale of any creative work.

[Assisted Human Reproduction Act, March 26th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to Bill C-13 at report stage. This is a very important bill.

I want to point out to members that the bill and the amendments can strongly affect Canadians with disabilities by supporting the drive that biotechnology firms are creating in the medical marketplace toward producing the perfect baby. I will return to this issue at the end of my address. I would first like to talk about the progress of the work on the bill that the NDP has tried to accomplish.

This is my first opportunity to speak to this legislation. I want to add my voice to all of the voices of Canadian women who know that the need for legislation is urgent. This urgency is underlined by recent sensational news stories about experimentation with human cloning.

The urgency for me has also been brought home by a recent conversation which I had with a health expert who informed me that there are hundreds of new assisted reproductive technologies and drugs that are aimed at the Canadian market and will be arriving in the next year. We really cannot afford to leave this very critical area of public health to the mercy of the biotech market.

During the committee's examination of Bill C-13, New Democrats attempted to introduce amendments to strengthen the bill in areas that we believed needed improving. Some of our concerns were addressed, but several important proposals were voted down by the Liberal majority on the committee.

My caucus colleague proposed 13 amendments during committee stage and succeeded in gaining several improvements to the bill. We wanted the protection of the health and well-being of women added to the principles. We wanted the donors to be provided with independent information before participating and that the public be informed of the risk factors relevant to infertility. As well, we wanted the board of the assisted reproduction agency of Canada to consist of a minimum of 50% women. We wanted the addition of a comprehensive conflict of interest clause governing the board as well.

We were unsuccessful in adding the precautionary principle to make safety an overriding concern. The committee also voted down our amendment to tighten up the commercial sale of reproductive materials and to make the agency more accountable by stipulating what it would do rather than what it may do. We tried and failed to facilitate donor identification in recognition of the needs of children born through reproductive technology.

If the government had seen fit to simply follow the wisdom of the committee which had spent time, expertise and energy to review the bill, we would be seeing improvements to this legislation. Sadly, we are seeing steps backward instead.

We have seen the failure to include the basic safety provision of the precautionary principle to safeguard women's health, together with the reversal of our gender parity and conflict provisions for the agency's board. Measures needed to keep biopharmaceutical corporations at bay has left the NDP no choice but to vote against the bill at third reading. This is despite our desire to have a long overdue regulatory framework in place as soon as possible.

I would like to re-examine the principles involved here.

Our first concerns were for health protection. Women involved in reproductive technologies ought to be assured that the drugs and treatments they take are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. As well, they must have access to independent information and counselling at critical times when they may be vulnerable to promoters of technologies that may put their health at risk. We succeeded, although not in as decisive wording as we had hoped, with the formal acknowledgement that the health and well-being of women must be protected in the application of these technologies.

We were not successful however in securing that protection through the instrumental inclusion of the precautionary principle in the bill. We sought to include the precautionary principle in the principles and application and interpretation sections and again in clause 13 through which it would have been applied to all controlled activities covered by the act.

To further the objective of informed decision making by those participating in reproductive technologies, we proposed, and it was accepted, to require all those licensed under the act to provide donors in advance with independent information provided by the assisted human reproduction agency.

Commercialization is another of our big concerns with Bill C-13. Much of reproductive technology remains the private reserve of giant life sciences and drug corporations with patent protection taking precedence over the public good and with private for profit interests dominating the field.

We attempted to tighten up the bill's prohibition against commercial gain by extending the ban on purchasing ova and sperm to include offering them for sale. This would correspond to the treatment given embryos under the bill. The amendment, as well, was defeated by the Liberals.

I would like to return for a minute to concerns that persons with disabilities have around this bill and the whole issue of reproductive technology, biotechnology and the new era we have entered of designer babies.

I would like to raise some important issues which have been posed to me with regard to the whole issue of prenatal genetics testing.

I have spoken with women who have received prenatal testing. This testing has shown, for example, high possibilities of giving birth to a child with Down's syndrome, or a child with spina bifida or with a cleft palette. After this testing has been done, they find themselves presented with a barrage of very negative counselling about the need for termination.

This is a very disturbing situation because what we are seeing is thousands and thousands of times each year in doctors offices women being faced with decisions around terminations of pregnancies without being given the kind of honest and neutral counselling about the values of having a child with a disabilities and about persons with disabilities who are living and contributing in the world.

The question that is raised as soon as we realize we have the ability to “screen out” Down's syndrome, cleft palette, spina bifida and bipolar disorder is this. What does that mean to the people who now live on the earth, who live among us and who are in our families who have disabilities? What does that mean to the value that they see given to their own lives?

I would like to take this opportunity to read a declaration which has been put forward by the Disabled Persons International on this subject, which I think is very germane to the topic. It states:

The right to live and to be different.

Up until now most of us have been excluded from debates on bioethical issues. These debates have had prejudiced and negative views of our quality of life. They have denied our right to equality and have therefore denied our human rights...

We are full human beings. We believe that a society without disabled people would be a lesser society. Our unique individual and collective experiences are an important contribution to a rich, human society.

We demand an end to the biomedical elimination of diversity, gene selection based on market forces and the setting of norms and standards by non-disabled people.

Biotechnological change must not be an excuse for control or manipulation of the human condition or biodiversity.

In closing, I and my party believe in that declaration. My colleague from Winnipeg Centre has put forward a very strong private member's motion on the importance of a national strategy around genetics and genetic counselling which will bear in mind and keep front and centre the value of persons with disabilities and will respect the dignity of their lives.

[Post-Secondary Students, March 26th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, deaf, deafened and hard of hearing post-secondary students are suffering due to government tax policy. They are being forced from school because of the double taxation they face for retaining sign language interpretation for their studies.

Deaf citizens pay their regular taxes as Canadians. They should not have to pay extra income tax on the money they receive from disability supports and out of country bursaries for funds used to pay for sign language interpreters.

This institutional discrimination can cost between $5,000 and $10,000 per student, per year. That additional cost means many cannot afford to pursue their studies and the number of deaf students in the system is dropping quickly.

This is a clear violation of the government's duty to accommodate deaf citizens in public services as set out by the courts in the Eldridge case.

I call on the government to immediately change the tax system so that moneys provided for a student's disability supports are not taxed as income. I urge the government to do this before the courts force it to do it.

[Canada Pension Plan, March 21st, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak on behalf of my colleague for Churchill, and her excellent Motion No. 197, which reads:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should amend the definition of “pensionable employment” in the Canada Pension Plan to include worker's compensation payments.

The motion is designed to allow injured workers who have had to take temporary leave from their workplace to, on retirement, get the same level of CPP that they would have received had they not had to leave for a certain period of time because of injury.

The idea is very simple and I believe it is very sensible. I really cannot understand why the government has not already implemented this small but significant change to the CPP.

To understand what the motion does, we have to look at the problems that injured workers face relating to the pension system.

At present, worker's compensation is not considered pensionable employment for CPP purposes. Since a retiree's CPP eligibility is based upon months of pensionable employment, each month of work a person misses due to injury counts against them when the CPP eligibility is calculated upon retirement.

In cases of severe injuries that require lengthy rehabilitation periods, such as amputations, severe burns and electrocution, these lost months of CPP eligibility can dramatically reduce an individual's retirement income or leave them ineligible for any CPP benefits at all. This is in essence a second injury.

The CPP program was created to provide Canadian workers with a secure retirement income. There is no intention in the design of the public pension plan that workers would lose their pension simply because they had the bad fortune to be injured on the job. This problem is in fact significant in size.

In the nine provinces covered by the CPP, there were over 800,000 claims via worker's compensation in 2000. The fact that these people could potentially lose or see a reduced retirement pension is, I believe, unacceptable. After all, worker's compensation systems are designed to get people back into the workforce, and most treat their clients as workers temporarily on leave from their jobs. That is of course how we should treat them.

These people want to work and they strive to work. With the proper accommodation and support, most will work. The problem is with systems the governments have in place, like the CPP, that seem to treat injured workers as individuals who have deliberately opted out of the workforce and then reduce their retirement benefits accordingly.

As the critic for persons with disabilities for the New Democrats, I see courage and determination every day and every week from people who have had to leave work due to a disability, including a workplace injury.

What is most frustrating to these people is not that they face life with a disability but that the public support systems that most Canadians take for granted, things like the CPP, public transit, health supports and income supports further penalize them on a systematic and repeated basis.

We should have a public pension plan which acknowledges that injured workers are simply on a temporary leave and therefore should not suffer a financial penalty of a reduced pension due to their injury.

Since worker's compensation programs are provincially administered, implementation of the motion would require agreements with the provinces. Passing Motion No.197 would therefore only be a first step. It would nevertheless be an important first step as it would signal to the federal and provincial executive branches that there is a legislative support for the principle that injured workers should not have to suffer the loss of pension benefits.

This is not a huge problem because the provinces already meet with the federal government over CPP issues regularly and the provinces understand injured workers better than the federal government does.

I should note that the motion would have no impact on Quebec where a separate program administered by the Quebec government, the Quebec pension plan, takes the place of the CPP which exists in the rest of Canada.

While I wholeheartedly support the motion, I want to also take the opportunity to discuss a parallel problem and situation: another group that suffers a similar penalty under the CPP, as injured workers currently do, and that is the group of caregivers.

On March 10 in The Toronto Star there was an article by Carol Goar about a woman named Marie Taylor. I will quote a bit from Ms. Goar's succinct and well written article about Ms. Taylor's situation:

She worked all her life as a legal secretary. Her husband was head of security at the Lennox generating station in eastern Ontario. They spent their spare time building a comfortable home in Napanee to share in their retirement years.

Twice during Taylor's career, she took leaves of absence. The first was to look after her gravely ill stepson. The second was to care for her dying mother.

She had no idea how costly these acts of compassion would turn out to be.

Shortly after retiring, Taylor lost her life partner. Now she's struggling to hang on to her home.

The reason her finances are so precarious is that her Canada Pension is smaller than she anticipated. The government chopped her entitlement by 20 per cent because of the two interruptions in her working life.

Ms. Taylor was not ill herself but she was caring for others who were ill. She is in the same situation that injured workers face and that Motion No. 197 is trying to address, namely, losing retirement benefits under the CPP because of temporary interruptions in a career. But in the case of Ms. Taylor, her workplace interruption was not because she was injured or ill, but because she became a caregiver during the terminal illnesses of her stepson and mother. If she had been callous and had left her family's care to the inadequacies of the Ontario health care system, then she would not have suffered this financial penalty. Instead, she did the right thing and therefore lost 20¢ on the dollar of her retirement income.

Because of caring for loved ones, she is currently at the CPP appeals tribunal fighting for sufficient income so she can stay in her modest home and keep from sliding into poverty. Most shamefully, the federal government is fighting her all the way with its lawyers through its appeal system. The federal government should stop harassing this woman and intervene so she and other caregivers do not face penalties for caring for a dying relative.

In fairness, the government has started to see that caregivers deserve support, not punishment. I acknowledge that baby steps were taken on the employment insurance front in the budget, but our overall social safety net, both federally and provincially, has to be looked at so we can take away the barriers that persecute caregivers.

We need to look at welfare and disability programs, CPP and private insurance programs, and compassionate leave systems in the workplace. We need to institute a national home care and respite care program and reform our overly bureaucratic, financially unfair and almost incomprehensible income tax system. Other countries already have brought in these common sense, compassionate policies without causing economic problems. Some have even started to directly compensate caregivers, including Britain, Norway, Sweden and Australia, so a rethinking of our overall policy for both injured workers and for caregivers is not only doable but long overdue.

In summary, I say that injured workers need our support, not our punishment, that caregivers need our support, not our punishment, and that we should reform the CPP program in order to do this. Caregivers and injured workers do not deserve to be punished.

I once again thank my friend from Churchill for this visionary motion and I call upon the government and all members to support the motion and start the journey to a more compassionate society.