Jean-Guy Chrétien

[Canada Student Loans, May 5th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, on April 28, I asked the Minister of Human Resources Development a question about employees of the BC mine in Black Lake.

According to the information we have obtained from the placement committee, few or very few of these former employees are using active measures, with the result that only a small portion of the $3 million set aside for this envelope will apparently be used.

What I am requesting, on behalf of these former employees, several of whom are no longer receiving EI, is that the unused portion be put into the pool created by LAB Chrysotile and the Government of Quebec so that these employees, whose average age is over 52, can retire.

Of course, the best way of saving our jobs in the asbestos industry is to sell this product, which is unique in the world and has exceptional qualities. Almost two years ago, France announced its intention to ban asbestos on its territory. The entire region foresaw a domino effect and to keep this move in asbestos producing countries from having an effect in the Thetford region, we unanimously requested that a complaint be filed with the WTO against France, with respect to the agreements signed with other member countries.

All asbestos producers, the Government of Quebec, all unions, the Bloc Quebecois, the council of mayors of the Asbestos RCM, all were unanimous in calling for a complaint to be filed with the WTO.

Even a highly placed public servant—mark his name well—François Filion of International Trade, made the following statement at Thetford Mines on March 18, 1998. “For the federal government, it is not a question of whether or not we will be complaining to the WTO on France's asbestos ban, but only of when we will be doing so”. Now it is one minute to midnight. Time is of the essence. The Government of Canada should waste no time in filing a proper complaint within the next few days.

I have one question for the Government of Canada. Why does Canada not put the same effort into defending asbestos it would to defend the interests of Sherritt in the Toronto region, western Canadian wheat sales, the Pacific salmon or the famous turbot war in the Atlantic, in which Brian Tobin led the battle against Spain? Is it because the asbestos mines are located exclusively in Quebec? I am convinced that, if Quebec were a sovereign country, it would have filed a complaint long ago against the WTO, and we would have won our case.

I repeat, is the government going to continue to delay until asbestos is banned everywhere in the world, before it lifts a finger? The time for diplomacy is past. Jacques Roy could not deliver the goods, so now the Prime Minister should advise his ministers involved in this matter to act as promptly as possible.

[B.C. Mines In Black Lake, April 28th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday, the Minister of Human Resources Development admitted that, of the 250 former employees of the B.C. mine, only 40 to 50 could benefit from his active measures.

Can the minister go one step further and contribute financially to the efforts made by Lab Chrysotile and by the Quebec government to put in place a pre-retirement program for the 200 workers who cannot benefit from his active measures?

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 31st, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is with considerable interest that I take part this afternoon in the debate on Bill C-36, the Budget Implementation Act, 1998, introduced by the Minister of Finance.

As the member for Frontenac—Mégantic, I cannot go along with this bill. The budget that was tabled contains many inequities, one of which is the millennium scholarship foundation.

These scholarships are an obsession that is making our Prime Minister sick. They are raising a ruckus, not just with Quebec but with all the provinces, because he is going to show the scholarships, which are worth $2.5 billion, in the spending for 1997-98, when the bill has not yet been passed and when this amount will not be spent until the third millennium, over two years from now.

We are looking at a disgraceful duplication of public funds. Once again, I am reminded of the duplication we have in the Department of Agriculture with a Holstein cow. When her production is used for commercial milk, she comes under the jurisdiction of Quebec's agriculture minister. When her production is used for industrial milk, she comes under the jurisdiction of the federal agriculture minister. One cow and two agriculture ministers to look after her.

Now it will be the same for a student. The Government of Quebec has been giving scholarships and loans since 1960. Now, the good Prime Minister of Canada, out of generosity, and a wish to see the maple leaf on the cheques, is again going to duplicate structures and this is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just as we had one Holstein cow and two agriculture ministers, we will have one student and two levels of government offering scholarships. In reality, this will not mean one cent more for the student. That is the sad and unfortunate fact of the matter.

Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard, accompanied by most of the university presidents, came to Ottawa yesterday to meet with the Prime Minister of Canada, and to try to bring him back on track. Since the Prime Minister does not wish to lose face, the task has been entrusted for the next two months to two deputy ministers—who have already succeeded in breaking certain impasses—to keep the PM from losing face while allowing Quebec to opt out of these famous millennium scholarships.

I would remind the House that clauses 29(1) and 25(2) do not, in fact, allow Quebec or other provinces to opt out.

It will not be the milk cow that will be penalized in this case, but the students. When they mess with our future, when they mess with our children, that is really tragic. I trust that the government will get back down to earth within the next few months.

Another point that prevents us from accepting the Minister of Finance's bill is the fate he has in mind for the hundreds of thousands of housewives. I have had the pleasure of speaking to dozens of women in my riding who belong to the AFEAS. I have, for instance, met Mrs. Yvonne Provençal and Mrs. Marie-Paule Giroux of the Disraeli region. In Lac-Mégantic I have had the pleasure of meeting with AFEAS members from Piopolis, Woburn and Lac-Mégantic, and they too have shared their concerns with me.

They are totally justified in being concerned, for the Minister of Finance plans to consider total family income when determining the amount of old age pension they will receive. This is true for most women who stay at home or on the farm to raise children.

Mr. Speaker, your mother, who played the role of nurse, educator, seamstress and cook and who comforted you when you were young, was not on any company's payroll. To determine the amount of the cheque she will receive when she reaches 65, the government will take her spouse's revenue, A plus B divided by two, to obtain an average.

In the great majority of cases, homemakers will again be the first ones to be penalized, which is very sad. I hope my Liberal colleagues opposite will stand up to make the finance minister, a millionaire who has completely lost touch with Canada's and Quebec's reality, come to his senses.

Another thing that convinces me to vote against Bill C-36 is the two year EI premium holiday that will be given to employers only. My colleague from the New Democratic Party, who defeated the former Minister of Human Resources Development in the last elections, was telling us this week, and rightly so, that we are opening a door that will allow employers not to contribute to the employment insurance fund. That is dangerous for workers, who pay ever increasing EI premiums without being fully entitled to benefits. That explains why it is estimated that the employment insurance fund will have a $19 billion surplus next year.

Let us turn now to another issue that prompts me to vote against Bill C-36. Two weeks ago, here in Ottawa, during the recent biennial convention of the Liberal Party of Canada, Dr. Wagner, a distinguished resident of Saint-Hyacinthe, put the following question to the Prime Minister of Canada: “Mr. Prime Minister, are you going to put money into hospital care?”

Dr. Wagner knew full well that, during the last four years, the Liberal government has cut nothing less than $42 billion in transfers to the provinces. Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and all the other provinces had to cut in health care and seniors' homes.

I want to point out again that the government has no idea of what is going on in the countryside, in our villages and in our towns. The finance minister is no model for the government. Instead of doing the right thing and paying his taxes here in Canada, he has registered his fleet of ships in some tax havens. It is a crying shame to have this guy managing the $160 billion we put in his hands, year in and year out. If he were to do the right thing and to pay his taxes here in Canada, he might have more money to manage, we might have less money to pay and he might do his work a little more conscientiously.

[Judges Act, March 30th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, in some ways I agree with my hon. colleague from the Reform Party, particularly on the issue of retroactive raises back to January 1, 1997.

To make a quick calculation, a supreme court justice earning $148,000 and getting a 4.1% increase would end up with about $6,000, or $120 a week, more.

When I visited a sugar bush operation in my riding on Sunday, a group of women told me their average wage was $240 for 37 hours. So the increase weekly to a justice would be about half of what these women are earning for 37.5 hours. Four per cent of their $8 an hour makes 32 cents, but 4% of the justice's $148,000 makes $6,000.

I do not believe that at any time in the history of mankind, a superior court justice has resigned because he was underpaid. I personally have never seen such a thing.

Worse still, when the time comes for a judge to be appointed, nearly all of the lawyers belonging to the party in power call upon their MP, or the minister, or the Prime Minister to remind him “Keep me in mind, it ought to be my turn for a court appointment”.

I have a question for my distinguished colleague in the Reform Party. In order to make the Canadian judiciary a little more transparent, should we not add a clause to Bill C-37, precisely so as to facilitate appointments, to make them more transparent and to move away for once from a type of patronage comparable to what happens, for instance, in Senate appointments?

[Judges Act, March 30th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask my distinguished colleague for some additional explanations concerning clause 26, which would create a three- to five-member commission.

He indicated that, if there were three members, one would be appointed by the Minister of Justice, one by the judiciary, and the third by the first two, in other words, those appointed by the Minister of Justice and the judiciary. If there were four or five, what would be procedure be?

[Taxation, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, on February 20 in this House I asked a pertinent question of the Hon. Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food concerning the sheep disease scrapie.

Before proceeding, I would like to reassure all of the members of this House that scrapie does not cause any human health problems. The problem that it does cause is for the farmer, as generally the whole flock has to be destroyed.

In the few minutes available to me, I would like to touch on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, on carcass disposal procedures, and on compensation.

First of all, the new food inspection agency. It must be kept in mind that this agency was created out of thin air by this government. Since it began operations on January 1, 1997, barely 16 months ago—call it happenstance if you will—the number of flocks infected by scrapie has been rising to such an extent that one wonders whether the cuts affecting inspection do not bear a direct relationship to that increase. The reason I say this is that, when the flock at the Lennoxville research station in the riding of Sherbrooke was dispersed, the government saw fit to release sheep infected with scrapie into circulation. That is serious.

The agency must now be asking serious questions as to how the carcasses were disposed of on February 16, five weeks ago. An order was passed here in Ottawa to have the agency pay the costs of this disposal. I thought the carcasses were to be incinerated but I was wrong. Since the decision was made to pay, the carcasses are being collected by the thousands and deposited in regional landfill sites. Often this creates problems with runoff water, and our government tolerates or organizes this sort of animal disposal.

Finally, compensation falls far short. The government must sit down with the sheep producers. In this regard, I would like to pay tribute to the availability and especially the knowledge of three producers. They are Georges Pharand, Réjean Raymond and Giovanni Lebel, all from the lower St. Lawrence. They met in camera with the Standing Committee on Agriculture and were no doubt a valuable source of information for all committee members.

I am obviously impatient to hear the government's response to these three questions.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

At the expense of the unemployed.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, it is a well known fact that the Minister of Finance is a cautious person. He underestimates his revenues and overestimates his expenditures, with the result that he has a margin of somewhere between 8% and 12%.

The minister is also applying a questionable budgeting technique by including in the current budget the $2.5 billion that will be used only in two or three years for the millennium scholarship fund. This, in my opinion, is a questionable technique.

When I was the mayor of my village, people would have been upset at me if I had told them “I am collecting twice the amount of taxes this year, so that we will have a cushion in two years”. The principle is, of course, to make taxpayers pay for the services to which they are entitled, but they should pay in the year that the expenditures are made, or in the year that it is decided to make such expenditures.

The Minister of Finance will end up with a budget surplus in two years, since the $2.5 billion that he will then spend will have already been taken into account in this year's budget.

I wonder if the hon. member for Elgin—Middlesex—London could give us his point of view, if he has a sense of how budgets work, on how the country called Canada should be administered.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I too represent and was born in a rural riding. I do not know what planet my distinguished colleague from the government party comes from. In my riding, however, I have heard but one piece of praise for the February 24 budget, and that was for the two years of employment insurance premium exemptions for employers hiring workers between the ages of 18 and 24.

I have, however, heard plenty of criticism about the lack of anything to do with job creation. Nothing has been done to reduce the poverty rate in Canada and to close the widening gap between rich and poor. Dr. Wagner of St. Hyacinthe even asked the leader of the Liberal Party to backtrack on the cuts, particularly those to health.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague from the government side a question. Is there in her riding anything like the AFEAS of Thetford, which is in my riding, a group of women who have flooded their MP with letters asking him or her to call upon the government, more specifically the minister of finance, to backtrack on the issue of calculating family income when women begin to collect the old age pension at 65?

It is common knowledge that women are, unfortunately, the ones who will be penalized when the time comes for them to collect their old age pensions.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, in his speech on Bill C-29, the hon. member for Don Valley-West said the new parks agency would have a higher level of administrative authority and more power to manage the environment in a national park.

Could we have a commitment from him that we will never again see what we are witnessing in Alberta, where there is a beautiful national park threatened by the opening of a mine nearby? It would appear that nothing can be done to prevent this from happening even though this mine is sure to cause serious damage to this park established many decades ago.

Within the higher level of authority given to the new parks agency, would it be possible to plan for this kind of situation and include provisions allowing the board of directors of a park and the new agency to take control of the park and, if need be, to expropriate and enlarge the park so that hundreds of millions of dollars in investments would not be lost because of so-called progress?