Suzanne Tremblay

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 5th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question, and I thank my colleague for his comments.

The Minister of Social Development must face the fact that she is sitting there because she is the member for Verdun—Saint-Henri—Saint-Paul—Pointe Saint-Charles and she is from Quebec. She represents the nationalist wing of the Quebec Liberal Party.

She must understand that, just because someone wants something, that does not mean he should get it. Just because a teenager wants a Ferrari at age 18, that does not mean his father will buy him one. Just because 83% of the population wants something, that does not mean the federal government should be the one to provide it. The federal government has to sit down and say, “83% of the population wants this, what can we do together? We are partners in providing it to the public”.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 5th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for his very interesting question.

The act of taking the GST and giving it to municipalities is not something I oppose, but I do object to the way it is being done. The municipalities are creatures of the provinces. Tomorrow morning, the provinces could pass a law and say that the cities no longer exist. They could say, “We are managing the citizens directly and creating a different structure”. That is why this government must go through the provinces and say, “Look, we intend to do such and such; what do you think about it?” Because we are partners and collaborators, we must talk to each other before decisions are made. It is not right to present us with a fait accompli. When the first ministers met with the Prime Minister at a football game in Regina, they could have talked about it then.

And as for the portion of the GST they are prepared to give away, perhaps it would be better to give it to the hospitals or the education system. I have been in this House for 10 years and every time we have a day devoted to the problem of illiteracy, we ask that the GST on books be removed. Ignorance is taxed in Canada. We have been asking for 10 years that the tax on books be removed, but nothing gets done about it in the budget.

This is not about getting rid of the GST and giving it back to the provinces; it is about the way it is being done, and the way it is being done without any discussions before decisions are made. If a new way of doing things is announced, we need to see a change accordingly. Things must not be worse than before. If a change has been made, I hope it is for the better.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 5th, 2004]

Thank you , Mr. Speaker. The Prime Minister promised he would do something. When the people of Charlevoix, the sans-chemise and the Mouvement Action Chômage read the speech, or heard it read by the Governor General, they said to themselves, “This makes no sense. We have been totally betrayed”. There was not a single word about employment insurance. Not one word.

As a result, they were extremely disappointed. We cannot see things continuing like this. When we in the Bloc are campaigning, we will be asking the people of Quebec to keep in mind that not one word from the Liberal Party of Canada can be believed any more. This is at least the third time they have lied.

They lied when they campaigned on the promise to scrap the GST. Now they have decided to give part of it back to the municipalities, which are the creatures of the provinces. Then, on page 6 of the throne speech in French, page 5 in English, they say, “Jurisdiction must be respected”. Now they want to talk directly with the municipalities, big governments that they are, because they are looking for political allies, of course.

Since there has not been much going on in government between November 10 and February 2, I have had a lot of time for reading. My recreational reading included Jacques Attali's

Le dictionnaire du XXI

e

siècle

, published by Fayard in 1998. On page 68 of this dictionary of the 19th century, there is a definition of Canada. I was curious to see what this might be. It reads:

Canada: Laboratory for Utopia....

As you know, Utopia is a scheme planned for planning for better and for worse. Continuing the definition:

Canada: Laboratory for Utopia. Its future will depend on the future of Quebec.

That is what it says in the dictionary by Jacques Attali, dating from 1998. He understood what the Bloc Quebecois has been explaining here every since 1993: the future of Canada is tied to the future of Quebec, and the future of Quebec is sovereignty. That is what we will continue to tell people. Particularly after a throne speech such as the one we have just had, there is no reason for us to set aside our plan for the future, a plan so dear to our hearts: to have a country of our own, and to have it as soon as possible.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 5th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, would you please ask that person to be quiet and let me speak?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, February 5th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Rosemont—Petite-Patrie.

I am extremely pleased to take part in the throne speech debate. I know how much all members want to voice their views on this document, which is short on content. It is probably the longest throne speech on paper since we became elected officials but the shortest on content. Many have commented that it could have been written by the former prime minister and that it probably would not have been much different.

I was particularly struck by one paragraph, on page 5 in English and page 6 in French. In order to understand the true meaning of this sentence, I checked to see if, perhaps, the translation carried a certain nuance. I could hardly believe that this was what the government really meant. It states, and I quote:

Jurisdiction must be respected.

The person who wrote the beginning of this paragraph probably forgot to read the rest of the speech, because this sentence totally contradicts everything else.

If jurisdiction must be respected, then provincial areas of jurisdiction must not be encroached on. However, almost the entire document attests to the fact that the government did just that. Before, there was a formula, the old served with a modern twist; now, it is the new served with an old time twist. That would be a better way to describe this government, which claims to be a new government.

This sentence clearly reflects a thought voiced by the Minister of Social Development and published in Le Devoir on January 21, 2004:

When 81% of Canadians, including Quebeckers, demand that something be done, it is our duty to respond. If one level of government does not want to do it, the other can do it and negotiate.

I have done many things in my life, including negotiate collective agreements. I never signed collective agreements before bargaining. I always bargained before signing. Before collective bargaining, I never publicly announced the details of the UQAR professors' collective agreement. The details are always kept very secret, except to our members, before being made public.

The federal government is in the very bad habit of saying, with its spending power and its usual arrogance, that it will do this or that, it will intervene in parental leave, in compassionate care leave, in health, it will ask the deputy minister to create another new complicated system and then spend money on the structure and officials rather than transfer money to the provinces so that they can provide the best care to our fellow citizens.

Of course, afterwards, there is a qualifier. After clearly stating that “jurisdiction must be respected”, they say:

But Canadians do not go about their daily lives worried about which jurisdiction does this or that.

Of course, if every effort is made to confuse Canadians, they will not be asking who does what. They will take what they can get. A person in need does not look a gift horse in the mouth. You do not bite the hand that feeds you, you take what you get.

They expect, rightly, that their governments will cooperate—

That they will cooperate, not go over people's heads. There absolutely needs to be more cooperation, such as making a simple phone call to the head of the other government requesting a meeting to discuss common interests, not just publicly announcing in the newspapers that the program is in effect and explaining how things are going to work. By then, it is much too late to turn back.

The current government has held three elections and it is getting ready for a fourth. It has held three elections on the backs of workers, each time promising employment insurance reform.

On June 6, 2003, when he was touring Quebec, the Prime Minister met with workers from Charlevoix and promised them that on becoming Prime Minister, he would do something about reforming employment insurance, because, he said, he realized—

[Employment Insurance, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, on June 6, 2003, during his leadership campaign, the Prime Minister promised the “sans chemise” movement that employment insurance would be reformed. Today, the “sans chemise” feel betrayed.

How does the Prime Minister explain the fact that it is so easy to change legislation to help him and his friends, but it is so difficult to honour his promise to the unemployed and that many elections later, Liberal promises still have not been kept?

[Employment Insurance, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, while the Prime Minister was working on saving hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes for himself and seven of his friends, he was taking away billions of dollars from thousands of unemployed people.

How does the Prime Minister explain his eagerness, as Minister of Finance, to save millions of dollars in taxes for himself and seven of his friends, when at the same time he was eagerly taking away billions of dollars from Canada's unemployed?

[Employment Insurance Program, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am truly pleased to be able to speak today about this motion, M-475. This motion asks for a change in the Employment Insurance Act to create a specific status for seasonal workers. Like my colleague, I wish to read the motion again, because it is very important that the people listening know exactly what we are discussing. The motion by the hon. member for Charlevoix reads as follows:

That, in the opinion of this House, the government should modify the Employment Insurance (EI) program to establish specific status for seasonal workers, regardless of the EI economic region in which they live.

Some hon. members from other parties have already spoken to this motion, including the hon. member for Calgary—Nose Hill, the hon. member for Ahuntsic, who is also a parliamentary secretary, and the hon. member from Acadie—Bathurst, who is his party's employment insurance critic and who, ever since he first entered this Chamber, has always defended this issue with passion.

We seem to be reaching unanimous agreement on the fact that EI needs real reform when it comes to seasonal workers.

Even the parliamentary secretary congratulated my hon. friend from Charlevoix. Still, she seems to be telling us that her party will not be moving ahead on this motion and will not support it, even though she congratulates the hon. member, even though she recognizes the work we have done in favour of this motion and in favour of the EI program, since we began sitting in this House in 1993.

What is surprising is that the Liberal Party campaigned in the elections of 1993, 1997 and 2000 on the promise that it would reform employment insurance. The new Prime Minister, when he dropped in at Baie-Saint-Paul last year, promised once more that as soon as he became Prime Minister he would reform EI. He would really reform it.

Every time, there is a minister who comes into the ridings where the people are suffering the most from EI and tells the people to stop demonstrating, to be quiet, that everything will get fixed up as soon as they take power, that they will do it as soon as the election is over.

Many times over the past decade they have fooled the Canadian people. I hope that in the next election the people will remember once and for all that the Liberal Party of Canada can no longer be trusted when it comes to employment insurance.

Since the past is an indication of what the future holds, we cannot expect anything more from this party. They changed the Prime Minister, they changed the leader, but the situation is still the same, if not worse. As my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst indicated, there was not a single word about employment insurance in the Speech from the Throne, not a word about the softwood lumber problem, about the forests or about the difficulties of seasonal workers.

When will the government understand that it is not the seasonal workers themselves who are seasonal? Their situation is due to the structure of some industries in certain regions.

When one lives in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver or Victoria and is a hotel employee, one can expect to work 12 months a year because there are tourists all year round in those cities, plus there are business people who travel and attend conventions for example.

However, in Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer, let me tell you that, at this time of the year, a stay at the hotel would come cheap because the hotel is closed; it is a summer resort. People there start working towards the end of May and finish at the end of August.

That is the nature of seasonal work. Even if we tried to give work to hotel workers 12 months a year, we would have to send them to Montreal or Quebec City after the season in Sainte-Luce. There is no hotel open year round in Sainte-Luce.

In the Gaspé Peninsula, maybe there is a hotel in Sainte-Anne-des-Monts, one in Baie-Comeau, one in Sept-Îles and one in Godbout. In Rimouski, there are one or two, maybe three, but we cannot give work to all those who want to work in the tourism industry and only in hotels. It does not work that way.

In my region, fishermen do not work all year. Forestry workers do not work 12 months a year. It is the same thing on farms. Will someone in this government finally understand that, that it is the industry itself that is seasonal?

It is not the people who do not want to work. My colleague from Charlevoix said: “If there were jobs 12 months a year, our people would work. They are not crazy”. Who likes, these days, to live on $300 or $400 a week in employment insurance benefits? Who likes that? Nobody.

The cost of living is high for everybody, in case you did not know. And it is often higher in remote areas than it is in big cities. They are further from everything. That is why we should help people. We will have to finally understand that this is a real problem.

The Minister of Social Development said. “When Canadians ask for something, it means we can do something”. I hope someone tells her I quoted her. For 10 years, Canadians have been asking the government to stop fooling around with the EI plan. Canadians throughout Canada have been asking that. The situation is the same everywhere.

But this government needed a surplus. It has deceived the Canadian public by saying, “Give me money and I will put it aside in a fund and help you out when you lose your job”.

If an insurance company had done the same thing the government did, it would have gone bankrupt long ago. It just does not make any sense. We cannot go on ignoring the problem of seasonal workers. This cannot be done in Canada anymore, unless we are completely stupid.

We have to understand what is going on, we have to face reality and we have to find a solution. We will sit down. We will talk. There are many solutions. One solution is clear though; we could ask what could be done to help those people.

Committees have met. One committee sat and found solutions in my riding, in the Lower St. Lawrence. The committee proposed solutions, but nobody is listening. With arrogance, 38% of the vote and a majority of seats, this government brought us to where we are today.

I think that next time it deserves to be in the opposition. This is where the government is now. It has to go to the opposition benches because it does not deserve to keep on governing the country. It does not understand anything. In fact, it did not understand anything about the employment problems. It has to go to the opposition benches for a while to better evaluate all the problems that it created for the public.

[Social Programs, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, does the Prime Minister realize that, because of his government's stubbornness, Quebec families are losing millions of dollars, simply because the federal government refuses to admit that it is interfering in an area in which it has no business?

[Social Programs, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, in the matter of parental leave, the Quebec Court of Appeal handed down its ruling, confirming that this was indeed an exclusive jurisdiction of the Quebec government.

Given that thousands of Quebec families are still waiting for the implementation of the Quebec parental leave program, which is more comprehensive and more generous than the federal one, will the Prime Minister face the facts and state today, in this House, that he will not appeal this decision and that he agrees to give to the Quebec government the funds for setting up its own program?