Madam Speaker, this morning the Minister for Human Resources Development launched us on a challenge and a journey that must succeed. It must succeed not only because the Liberal government was elected with an overwhelming message of hope and jobs, but most particularly because over the last decade we have seen a generation of young Canadians who are losing hope in the capacity of our country to survive and to provide them with the kinds of opportunities that were available to those of us who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.
I was very pleased to be joined in this Parliament by a tremendous number from the generation of the so-called baby boomers and even some who are younger than the baby boomers.
I remember that as a child growing up I came from a family where neither my mother nor my father had a university education. My mother quit school at age 15 to go to work and support other members of her family. Every single one of their children had the opportunity for a college or a university education and to better themselves.
If there is a driving motivation that leads certainly Liberals to Parliament it is to create a climate whereby our children can at least meet or exceed the same level of life we have had.
Earlier there was a reference to our expectations and needs with respect to immigration. All those men and women who decided to come to Canada made that decision because they felt there was a place where they would be able to do better than their parents did, and that place was Canada.
The great challenge the minister of human resources faces is getting Canadians to believe in themselves and in their capacity to be the greatest country in the world. That requires innovation. That requires a capacity to stare change in the face without blinking.
This means all members of all political parties must be able to accept and welcome change, because the social programs that formed the basis of our society in the sixties no longer work. The members of the Bloc Quebecois know this. The members of the Liberal Party know that today, the training programs that are
supposed to give our young people a chance no longer work. We can say it is a bureaucratic problem and that it is up to the bureaucrats in Quebec and Ottawa to improve the way programs are managed. But that is not the answer. The real answer is to give people the tools they need to strike out in new directions.
We are entering into the year of the family. In 1994 the United Nations definition of the family has changed very much from the kind of family I grew up in, where my mother immediately upon getting married was required by the Steel Company of Canada to quit her job because in those days you could not be a secretary at Stelco and at the same time be a married woman. They were incompatible.
Times have changed, thank God, Madam Speaker. We are seeing women who are able both to compete in the workforce and indeed to carry more than their share in the home in a way that we have never seen before. We are seeing blended families. Indeed we are seeing single parents, particularly women, in numbers greater than ever before and who in fact are emerging as one of the under classes of society.
One question we have to ask ourselves is what kind of family do we want to support in terms of public policies. More families have both parents working outside the home. Indeed the proportion of working women has doubled in the last three decades.
The family, the workplace and society have and continue to change. There are same sex partners. The world is a changing and evolving place and it is our responsibility, as the Parliament of Canada, to be on the cutting edge of change, not to merely be the tail wagging the dog.
When we look at families we have to understand that the first transition we make is that from infancy to school. Those are crucial formative years. During this stage a child's capacity to succeed or fail in the future is very much underlined and dependent upon the support that he or she receives from family and from the greater society.
We need an integrated approach and I believe that is the approach launched this morning by the minister for human resources. We need economic growth obviously to provide hope. We need economic growth in the short term so that we can address the very crucial issue of child care.
As you know the Liberal Party made a commitment to child care that was dependent on economic growth. That is because we recognize the limitations in the pocketbooks of government and in particular, the pocketbooks of taxpayers.
We want and need to have economic growth to increase substantially the kind of support we can provide to give young children from the ages of zero to five the kind of leg up they need to be able to take their fair place in society.
Twenty years ago, Piaget realized that the most important years in a child's life were between the ages of 0 and 5. People who today have no respect for the law and believe that guns are the answer to all our problems are people who did not have the right kind of nurturing when they were young, and that is very important.
How can people who are living in poverty get out of it if they do not have access to legitimate available community supports?
The second transition outlined by the minister is the one that young Canadians make from school into the work force. This is a real priority for the government. The capacity of our young people to succeed and even to be welcomed into the real world is vital not only for individual self-esteem but also for the collective well-being and prosperity of our country.
When a 17, 18 or 19-year old young person or even a 21 or 22-year old has done all the things we have said such as get an education and then finds that the job market cannot be cracked, what kind of signal are we sending?
The third transition and one that is most critical in industrial ridings like my riding of Hamilton East, is the transition that workers are making as they move from an industrial to a post industrial economy. Job security, benefits and liveable wages are no longer a given.
That ties into the final transition and the one which will occupy a tremendous amount of the attention of this government. That is the move from the work force to retirement. Canadians are living longer. We have to be able to think about how we can most rapidly help an aging population.
It is very troubling to realize that while we are talking about the circumstances of our children, who are the future of this country, there are more than one million families living in poverty in Canada and more than one million young people under 18 who are living in poverty. Children may become the poorest group in Canada. The repercussions of poverty extend into our classrooms, where in some cases 40 per cent of school children do not get proper nutrition and care.
In some instances 40 per cent of children are going to Canadian schools hungry.
Common sense tells us that children who are hungry cannot learn. They cannot pay attention on an empty stomach. We know that poverty among young people and children is caused by the increasing number of low-income families who are unable to break the poverty cycle. These families have little incentive and few opportunities to make a change in their situation. Social programs like unemployment insurance and welfare are supposed to help them break out of the poverty cycle and recover their self-respect, their independence and especially their dignity.
Our social security system must change, both in the way it deals with families caught in the poverty cycle and with children who are disadvantaged from an early age. The transition from school to the job world is one of the most important steps in our lives.
I am sure that everyone here remembers the experience: the hesitation mixed with apprehension. We may have felt the same way when we made the decision to get into politics, because we have a number of questions that have not been answered: will we achieve full employment? Will it work? Will we have the co-operation and resources we need?
In some parts of Canada, up to one out of three students will drop out of high school. Employers tell us they need workers who know how to read, write, do mathematics and learn new skills. At a time when well-paying jobs require more and more skills, one-quarter of Canadians cannot read a newspaper, a book or a restaurant menu.
In 1992, the Economic Council of Canada warned us that if this problem were allowed to persist, the next decade would add another million illiterate young people to the labour force.
I just said that according to a 1992 study done by the Economic Council of Canada, if the trends continue where we have one-quarter of young people leaving school without being able to read and write, we will be adding one million young people to the unemployment rolls who can neither read nor write nor add up the cost of items on the menu in a restaurant.
These young people are at the greatest disadvantage on the labour market. They realize they need to improve their skills, but sometimes they have no idea where to go for help.
That is why we cannot fail in our mission to restructure social security, unemployment insurance, the whole social fabric, to give those young people a chance to get out there and to be the best they can be. Improved literacy and dropout prevention programs are part and parcel of the kinds of labour market programs that our new social security system must provide in concert with the provinces.
Including Quebec because that province is also looking for ways to improve the lot of its young people. We want to give them a second chance, not write them off by putting them on welfare, on B.S. as they call it in Quebec, and everyone knows what people think of B.S. By the way, the acronym B.S. does not stand for the same thing in French and in English. Those young people on welfare want concrete solutions to their problem.
Too many young people are falling into a black hole between high school and the workplace. The training opportunities we are identifying must emerge and we must expand into occupations where there will be good paying jobs at the end of the road. Environmental technologies, the information age and the electronic highway are opening up all kinds of avenues in a country that is as geographically and demographically diverse as Canada.
Our guiding principle must be to remember that young people have the potential to learn, to improve and to succeed. We cannot afford to write them off like some sort of debt and deficit liability. That is why the minister of human resources said today that our concern is the deficit but our concern is also the human deficit that is creating a generation of young people who have lost confidence in the capacity of society to give them the kinds of chances that I had.
When I graduated from university I applied to four newspapers for a job, two in Ottawa and two in Montreal, and I was hired by one of them. A young journalism graduate now coming out of university could send out 60, 100 or 200 job applications and would more than likely come up dry. That certainly has a real impact on self-esteem and the capacity to believe in yourself and your country.
Let us seize the opportunity to turn the situation around and build a generation of hope, a generation of talented young people who envision chances for a better life or even a life as good as that which many of our generation have enjoyed. Education and training touch the lives of every worker. The work force as we know it is changing: contract work, part-time work, at home work. They are all potential fixtures in the new
and emerging economy. Restructuring, downsizing, streamlining, whatever the buzz word, they all mean the same thing: lay-offs.
The economy is shifting. It is forcing more and more Canadians to face the prospect of frequent job loss, retraining and job hunting. Our social programs have not kept up with the workplace realities of the new economy.
To put it in context, I remember during the election campaign I knocked on the door of a gentleman who lived on Nash Road in my riding. He had worked for 23 years. His daughter was in university. He was hoping to meet the dream of getting her into a university that he never could have gone to and he was on his last week of unemployment insurance. He was on the verge of going to apply for welfare. This was a person who wanted to work but after knocking on door after door, they were closed to him.
The challenge is to get to these people and the doors that they need opened. We must help the displaced workers in manufacturing which I certainly know very well in my own riding. The fisheries and resource industries face a real tough reintegration into the work force.
We are talking about workers who have contributed to our country and communities year in and year out. They are hard working people. They need our help to get them back on their feet. They do not want a permanent welfare cheque. What they want is a trampoline. They want a system that supports their efforts to try and face the challenges of a new economy. We must enable older workers to learn new skills and adapt to changes in the workplace.
We are all aware of the changes our society is going through. More and more children will have to take care of their parents. The Canadian population is getting older. We must together find a way for the aged to keep their independence and their dignity.
These transitions form our collective experience, shared by each and every Canadian.
I can speak to the situation in my own community where a citizen action group has been offering pilot programs to help workers over the age of 50 get back on their feet and into the job market. They are using a very creative pilot project where they top off welfare benefits and integrate people into working offices. That program has been working. What the Minister of Human Resources Development is asking Canadians to do is to get our collective heads together and find solutions that work in our communities.
It does not mean that everything will be managed at the federal level. On the contrary, the experience of the last decade shows that solutions will have to come from communities. Whether manpower programs are changed in Quebec or in Ottawa, what is important is that people from Chicoutimi, Rimouski, Hamilton and Shawinigan have the opportunity to get directly involved in training. That is exactly what is proposed in the minister's plan.
I know that my community is already working to make sure that the minister's model for new employment works at the local and community level. We want to hear from Canadians.
We must also try to implement an integrated approach to social reform. Naturally, we need the provinces in order to face that enormous challenge. We cannot and we must not act unilaterally in an area affecting the lives of everyone.
We need and want provincial support. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Human Resources Development have had very positive signals from the provinces that they too see the need for real reform.
The task is enormous and urgent. The government is determined to see it through, but we know it will be impossible without the support of each and every Canadian.
That is why we want to hear from members on this issue. This is a monumental task. It is a real challenge. It is one we must succeed in, not so much for ourselves because obviously with the backgrounds we have and the support we have received, we have been able to benefit from living in a great country. But there are literally thousands of other Canadians who are asking us when will they benefit?
This package and this initiative by the minister will set in motion the opening of doors for those Canadians who are looking for their chance into the 21st century.
