Wendy Lill

[Employment Insurance Act, March 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak in favour of Bill C-299 presented by the Bloc Quebecois member for Laval Centre.

Bill C-299 proposes to amend the Employment Insurance Act in two ways. First, it proposes that the Employment Insurance Commission set the UI premium rates. Second, Bill C-299 would create a separate UI account to ensure the unemployment insurance fund is used to help unemployed workers.

One might ask why these measures are necessary. We would think that the unemployment insurance premiums we all pay are used exclusively to help unemployed workers while they are looking for a job. Unfortunately this is not exactly the case.

For the last five years the unemployment insurance fund has been collecting huge surpluses. That is not necessarily a bad thing, if the money was being spent to help the unemployed. Unfortunately these surpluses have been used by the Liberal government as a slush fund to eliminate the deficit on the backs of the unemployed.

That is why Bill C-299 is important. By having the Employment Insurance Commission set the UI premium rates, we are guaranteeing that political motivations do not become a factor in setting the premium rates.

The NDP would go even further and create an independent UI commission. We recommend that this commission be comprised of one workers representative, one employers representative and a president who would be chosen following consultations with the representatives of workers and employers. The commission should also be comprised of five part time worker commissioners and five part time employer commissioners. It should be gender balanced and reflect the regional diversity of the country.

Having the commission set premiums and creating an independent UI commission are important steps in guaranteeing the integrity of the UI program.

Bill C-299 also proposes the creation of a separate UI account. This addresses the concerns of many Canadians who refuse to accept that the UI fund has become a slush fund for the Liberal government. Unemployment insurance is a trust fund, not a slush fund.

I would like to take this opportunity to read a few comments of working Canadians who oppose the use of the UI surplus for purposes of other than helping Canada's unemployed. These comments were gathered by my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst who visited 20 cities from coast to coast to coast listening to what Canadians have to say about the changes in the unemployment insurance system and the theft of the UI fund by this government.

A worker from the Acadian Peninsula had this to say about the government's dependence on the UI fund: “The government is wrong when it says that workers become dependent on unemployment insurance. It is rather the Minister of Finance who is dependent on the unemployment insurance fund, because without it, the deficit would still be there, and his budget would show a deficit, not a surplus”.

The government has justified its changes to unemployment insurance by stating that it wants to prevent dependence. It has failed. This government has become so dependent on the UI surplus that it could not have balanced the budget without it. For all of the Minister of Finance's boasting of having balanced the budget, he forgets to mention that were it not for Canadian workers and employers, we would have no budgetary surplus.

Gary White had a very good question when he attended an event during the NDP's UI tour. Mr. White said “If someone steals from a store and gets caught, they are arrested and have a criminal record. How is it that this government can steal the money from the workers' premiums without being investigated?”

I believe this is an excellent question. How can this government take the money of workers and employers out of the UI fund? Since this government clearly has no qualms about balancing the budget on the backs of the unemployed, we need to create a separate UI fund to stop this nonsense.

Currently only 32% of unemployed workers qualify for UI benefits. Over 800,000 unemployed Canadians who have paid into the UI system are unable to get benefits. Meanwhile there is a $20 billion surplus in the UI account.

This insanity has to stop. This government is hurting unemployed Canadians and the small and medium size businesses that they are no longer able to support.

Women have also been hard hit by the government UI cuts. Fewer women qualify for maternity benefits. Only 11% of women under 25 who lose their jobs qualify for benefits. Eleven percent. Why is that? Where is the equity in that?

This government's changes in UI are hurting women, as well as young people, as well as seasonal workers. The government's changes in UI are hurting entire communities.

My riding of Dartmouth, for example, has lost $20 million a year in UI benefit payments. Nova Scotia has lost $716 million between 1993 and 1997. That is a lot of money taken out of our economy, taken out of small and medium size businesses and taken out of unemployed workers' pockets.

The unemployment insurance program needs to be reformed to respond to the realities of the current labour market. Bill C-299 is a first step in ensuring that the unemployment insurance fund addresses the preoccupation of Canadian workers.

I strongly urge members of this House to support this very important initiative put forward by the member for Laval Centre.

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, March 5th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, our public broadcaster is in crisis. This government has gutted its funding and the cuts have resulted in labour strife. There are also repeated examples of government interference with CBC operations, from Bill C-44 to the logo fiasco to interference in the APEC coverage.

Will the government restore funding to allow the CBC to pay its employees a fair industry wage and restore job security? And will the minister admit this government's financial actions and partisan appointments have caused the current crisis?

[Disabilities, March 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, a year ago the government accepted a UN award on disability issues and promised the disabled post-deficit spending but delivered nothing in the budget.

Tonight the Deputy Prime Minister is supposed to accept kudos on this award but the problem is that there are no kudos to accept. Eight of the ten disability groups that accompanied the Prime Minister to New York last year are now publicly criticizing the lack of action from the government.

Will the Deputy Prime Minister outline a specific plan of action with dollar amounts attached, or are disabled Canadians forced to live with another year of empty rhetoric from the ministers opposite?

[Persons With Disabilities, March 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, last week nine national organizations sent a letter to the Prime Minister demanding an action plan with defined outcomes, with dollar amounts attached, to deal with the crushing problems facing the disabled, a responsibility centred within government to ensure new policy initiatives such as child tax credits for families with children with disabilities, an extension of the opportunity funds, mobility rights assured by national standards and a commitment to the ongoing removal of barriers that prohibit our participation in community life, and an action plan to address issues of aboriginal people with disabilities.

To the Prime Minister, the time is now. Disabled Canadians cannot wait any longer. The disabled are tired of being excluded in this country. It is time to exercise their will to act.

[Cbc Funding, March 1st, 1999]

Madam Speaker, I appreciated the comments of my colleagues around the Chamber. In terms of the member across the floor, I had hoped Liberal governments would drop the rhetoric about stable funding for the CBC and actually in the cold light of day look at what they have wrought in the public broadcasting situation. However, that will not happen.

I would like to make some comments which I think are real wake-up calls for me. I was on the heritage committee tour across the country last week talking to people about what they want in a cultural policy. Over and over again we heard about the importance of a public broadcaster. More than that, we heard terrible concerns about the fact that we are living very much in an occupied country in that our culture is occupied.

Jack Stoddart, a respected publisher in the country, says that we are at war with another culture, the American culture. One of our main defences is institutions such as the public broadcaster, our magazine industry, our publishing industry and the Canada Council. They are the bulwarks for our defence against an unending swamp of American products.

The idea of having a strong public broadcaster is as critical at this point as ever before. We are also facing enormous media concentration. We are facing foreign ownerships in all these areas. The issue is keeping a strong public broadcaster, funding it sufficiently so that it is not constantly making deals with the devil or is not constantly trying to cut here and alter there and drop services in order to balance its ever shrinking budget.

One of the things my colleague from Yukon just told me was quite astounding but also played into the issue of globalization. We are saying we are out in the world. We are dealing and marketing ourselves all over the place. Yet for some reason we decide not to have journalists in some major centres of the world, one of them being Mexico with which we are inextricably connected by a trade agreement.

Paris and South Africa are places where we need Canadian eyes and voices and Canadian values looking at what is going on. We do not need just CNN feeds. We do not need to hear another country's particular take on issues. We need to know what we think.

Apparently there was a Catholic priest who was with the Chiapas human rights centre. He was kidnapped during the Chiapas uprising. If it had not been for the meticulous and aggressive work of the CBC reporters at that time he would have been killed. He was actually saved by their investigative reporting.

I think that these kinds of things are important. I think they are signals. I am not sure how anyone on the other side of the House can actually feel comfortable about removing our eyes and ears on the world from these important bureaus simply to cut further into the budget.

In conclusion, I would ask for unanimous consent to make this a votable motion.

[Cbc Funding, March 1st, 1999]

moved:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should restore full multi-year funding to the CBC, sufficient to meet its stated public service goals.

Madam Speaker, it is my pleasure to move that this House adopt Motion No. M-432. I am proud to have the opportunity to address the House on a subject which is important to Canadians and to our culture.

It is also timely in the minds of the media, due to the current and impending labour disputes. The need for stable and adequate funding for the CBC is also very close to my heart.

Members on the other side of the House will undoubtedly say that after years of cuts they have made a commitment to stable funding. If they say that, I am afraid they are wrong.

Let us look at what funding for the CBC has been since the Liberals last promised full stable funding in the 1993 election campaign. Then the CBC received almost $1.1 billion to run the largest and best broadcast system in the world. The main estimates from 1998-99, however, show a different story.

In 1998-99 the Liberal government allocated only $745 million to the CBC for operating expenses. Granted the government did throw another $94 million into the pot in the supplementary estimates, but it should be noted that $88 million of that was for employment departure programs. In other words, to get rid of people. In short, the CBC operations have been slashed by this government by about $400 million and this has resulted in the loss of over 3,000 employees. It has also resulted in a drastic loss in service for Canadians.

We have seen the closing of regional TV stations. We have seen the closing of local suppertime news shows and we have seen the closing of foreign bureaus, three of them only last week.

Another result seems to have been the chaos at management level. When $3 million gets lost on the radio side of the corporation something is definitely wrong. But when the manager in charge of that problem then gets a major promotion I would say that something is drastically wrong.

Radio Canada International, Canada's voice in the world, was also almost lost and has been forced to significantly reduce its service.

We have seen cuts to the radio and stereo services as well, now called Radio one and two, meaning that almost one-third of the radio programming, before the current round of labour problems, was made up of repeat broadcasts.

Despite the cuts we have seen valiant efforts by CBC employees to finally Canadianize the prime time television schedule, but a large part of the success has been undercut because they have been forced to sell even more commercials during prime time to make up for the cuts. Thanks to this government Canadians now have to endure endless commercials in the middle of national news.

All evidence shows that the corporation is a shell of its previous self when the Liberal government promised stable funding in 1993. Some promise. Some stability.

Just before the last election the Minister of Canadian Heritage announced that there would again be stable funding. She pointed to a single line buried in an old press release.

The government's commitment to public broadcasting is similar to that kind of promise; something to be buried, to be ignored, to be lost once the votes are counted. The arrogance of this will not be lost on Canadians.

Following up on her stable funding promise the minister has, just in the last two months, presided over a significant reduction in the amount of funds available to the CBC through the Canadian broadcast television fund. She has also expressed approval for a new funding proposal for Canadian feature films which calls for an additional $25 million cut to the CBC.

This kind of treatment, saying that there is stable funding and then taking away more money, is perverse. The government has a choice to make and I call on it to make it. Either support the CBC or have the courage to admit to what is actually happening. It is basically giving it death by a thousand cuts.

Some believe that the CBC's future should be to get out of TV and to move into the new media, with specialty programming for children and news. This would be a logical conclusion if the government policy is to discontinue support, through funding, to public broadcasting. I do not believe that is what Canadians want. It may be what the government wants, but once again it is silent.

Canadians want quality radio programming, not repeats, not reruns and not mismanagement. This government even seems to have acknowledged this by giving an additional $10 million to the CBC just before the last election. Now the election is over and that $10 million is no longer part of the overall allocation. The 1997 promise for stable funding is in the same place as the 1993 promise. It has vanished.

A clear example of how hypocritical the government policy has been is reflected in the current labour dispute. During the last question period in the House the Minister of Labour said that the current labour dispute at the CBC has nothing to do with government funding levels. What an odd thing to say. Is this not a dispute about wages, working conditions and job security? Is the core of all these issues not money?

The CBC gets most of its funding from the government. The government funding cuts have created the financial problems which have resulted in the labour dispute. To suggest otherwise is to say that there is no warmth from the sun or that if you fall in the water you will not get wet.

The new Minister of Labour should know better. I had hoped she would be keeping an eye on crown corporations to prevent the use of replacement workers. I had hoped she would ensure that all crown corporations bargain fairly. That is the job of the Minister of Labour, not standing in the House denying reality.

We have recently seen Treasury Board interfering with the CBC to have it include the Canadian flag in the CBC logo. We have seen a member of the board of directors become a leading fundraiser for the Liberal Party and we have seen the CBC launch an advertising campaign, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, aimed at slandering its workers.

The workers and the programmers at the CBC are the ones who have borne the brunt of the cuts. There are 3,000 fewer employees and those still there have been accepting behind inflation settlements since the early eighties. The fact that there is still good programming on the air is mostly due to the sacrifices of these CBC employees, both in terms of the extra efforts they have made at work and in terms of the opportunities they have forgone to continue doing a job they love. For them to be treated this way by management is outrageous.

The CBC board and management were acquiescent when the Mulroney government cut them. They were totally silent when the Liberal government slashed their funding. Now they are finally speaking up to attack those who have kept them going throughout these cuts. Shame on the board, shame on the management of the CBC and shame on this government.

The Liberal government took a situation already made critical by the Tories and made it one hundred times worse. I guess one could say that the government made it $40 million dollars worse and 3,000 employees short.

Now we have a Minister of Canadian Heritage who believes that providing stable funding means cutting back and that the CBC is an arm's length organization as long as some board members help raise money for her political party. We have a Minister of Labour who believes that $400 million in government cuts to a crown corporation has nothing to do with the monetary issues in collective bargaining. These Liberal ministers should look for a career change. They should be asking for funding from the Canada Council to write fiction, not to be in charge of the greatest gutting of cultural programming in the history of Canada.

The Liberal government promised it was not going to cut the parliamentary allocation to the CBC and it did. It promised it was not going to fill the CBC board with a bunch of political hacks and it did.

The government promised it would defend the validity and the vitality of our world class broadcaster. Instead, it has plunged it into rancour and turmoil. Instead of being the saviour of public broadcasting, it in fact has been bent on destroying it.

I am calling on this government to change its disastrous course, to ditch its boisterous rhetoric about concern for public broadcasting and instead truly recommit in spirit and deed to stable multiyear funding for the CBC.

I am calling on this government to leave as its legacy not just more broken promises but a strong public broadcaster. Canadians want and deserve a confident, courageous and clear voice in this multichannel universe. Give us back our Canadian window on the world, on our communities and on our neighbourhood. Give us back the CBC.

[The Budget, February 18th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I remind the hon. member for Charleswood St. James—Assiniboia of 20 years ago when I was doing documentary work in Winnipeg on the native urban migration and this same member was a radio announcer at the CBC. At that time it was indicated that within 20 years we were to see massive problems with native people in the city unless we took some real initiatives on their behalf.

We now have gangs roaming the streets of Winnipeg. We have one million poor children in this country. The members of the government ask us to look at the demographics. I say look at the demographics 35 years from now. What will those poor children be doing? What will be the strains on the justice system, the human misery, their families? Where on earth do members see this as being a positive budget for the poor people in this country?

We are seeing an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the elite and the street, and this is a shameful budget when it comes to addressing those problems.

[The Budget, February 18th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am interested in the comments of the member about this being a budget. The bottom line is that this is a budget for people and it is very good for the people of her riding.

Some of the people in my riding of Dartmouth will benefit from this budget, there is no question. We do have some millionaires in the riding of Dartmouth and they will get an $8,000 tax break. But there are a lot of people in my riding who will not benefit from the budget and I am very concerned about those people. I am concerned about the fact that we have high levels of disabilities in my community, and Nova Scotia has the highest level in the country. In this budget there is $5 million earmarked for the disabled and that is an incredibly pitiful amount, given the state of disabilities in the country today.

I am also very concerned of the fact that there is no money for social housing. There is no money to go back into the EI fund which has been in fact robbed in order to allow the Minister of Finance his so-called health budget.

I would like to know how the member believes that this budget is reflecting the needs of the one million poor children in this country who received nothing whatsoever from the budget, not at all affected by the child tax credit. How is the budget good for these children?

[Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 17th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, this morning millions of Canadians woke up to find their beloved CBC missing.

Over 2,000 technical staff who work at the CBC went on strike for fair pay and decent working conditions. They have rejected the most recent offer of zero, zero and zero.

This Liberal government has cut public funding to the CBC by 25% and we are now seeing the results.

Management at the CBC seems hell-bent on the elimination of regional programming and forcing more and more concessions from dedicated programmers.

It is criminal that those who support better broadcasting have to walk a picket line, while those who seem dedicated to destroy it sit in management, on the CBC board or in the cabinet.

Canadians expect quality programs from the CBC, not reruns. Canadians want fair labour practices from our public broadcaster.

New Democrats and concerned Canadians demand that this government intervene now to get management back to the bargaining table with a meaningful offer so Canadians can once again wake up to the CBC.

[Hiv-Aids, February 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, communities across the country are working hard to stop the spread of AIDS, yet the federal government has not increased the level of funding for the AIDS strategy in eight years.

The AIDS strategy funding does not take into account the increased need for services or the money needed to support new programs, prevention, support services and new clients. The result is that many existing programs are actually receiving less money than they have in the past.

In Windsor, Ontario, the Aids Committee of Windsor had its funding cut by $100,000 this year even though Windsor has the fourth highest HIV rate in the province. That means people living with aids and their families may not receive the important information and support they need. Despite the rising HIV rate in Ontario only 20 out of 36 agencies that needed funding actually received it.

We cannot afford to let these urgent needs go unmet. I call on the government to address this serious problem and join communities across Canada in the fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS.