Madam Speaker, I am pleased to join in the debate. I congratulate the Conservative Party for putting the motion forward. It is a very timely motion.
I will not deal with the taxation part of the motion so much as I will deal with some terms used in the motion such as burden of poverty. I doubt if any member of the House has more firsthand knowledge of poverty than I have. It did not really affect me too much, but I was born in a period of time in southern Saskatchewan known as the dirty thirties. That period of time had a great commonality: everybody was poor. In our house we were so poor we did not even have mice. That may be a joke, I say it in fun, but I know what poverty is all about.
As I travel across the country it bothers me to come face to face with poverty, particularly young children suffering from poverty. That to me is the most horrendous sight. It is bad enough to see it on television in third world countries, but when it is face to face it shakes me up because I have been there.
I do not know if I was ever hungry. I do not know if I ever had too much cake or pie. I do know that my mother could make beautiful loaves of bread, fry some sour dough and we could afford a bit of syrup.
Today the burden of poverty should not exist. I encourage the House to listen to the words in the Progressive Conservatives supply day motion where it says “encouraging self-sufficiency”. That begins in the home.
Because of my background we grow a huge garden every year. My wife and I have taught our children to do the same. What is the reason for it? I grow a huge garden to give it away. Before I was elected I set a goal to grow a tonne of vegetables. With the modern black squash which they call zucchini, I did not have to wait very long to get 300 or 400 pounds of those. We would give them away. I would pick out families I knew in a huge area to come and get vegetables mainly because they had children. There are ways in which to encourage self-sufficiency not only from an individual level but from the level of the provincial government and the level of the federal government.
It bothers me that we declare to society what the poverty line is and we have a mother and a father with two children living below the poverty line and Revenue Canada is still extracting taxes. Let us think about that.
In the words of the motion, self-efficiency is destroyed. People ask themselves what is the use. Dad is out working. Mother is out working. Grandma may be looking after the children. They have to pay income tax when they are many thousand of dollars below the declared poverty line.
What about self-reliance, in the words of the motion? Self-reliance brings to the individual a sense of pride in what can be accomplished. It broke my heart less than three weeks ago to have somebody come into my office to say: “Thank you for getting me a job but I am only $5 a week better off with a job than I was before”.
How by government's means do we create and encourage a sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance when we fall prey to heavy taxation? I want to give a couple of examples.
While I was in Estevan, Saskatchewan, which is part of my constituency, a young fellow came to my office and told me about his dilemma. His EI had been cut off. He was employed by a construction firm that often lays its people off but he was on call. They had to get the machinery ready to remove the snow from that small city. He got in three days of work and bingo. He would have been better off if he had not got that work. We do strange things to destroy pride in the individual. He did not have very much money. I went down to his boss and got his boss to get him a loan to spare him until he got back on EI.
Let us take a look at some very serious problems. Let us start teaching people. Let us start seeing an attitudinal change and looking at the things we can accomplish. I picked up the list of boo-boos that governments make in spending. I think of how that money could be used through proper channels. We could certainly alleviate a whole lot of poverty.
What would happen if this became an issue not only at the federal level but at the provincial and municipal levels? We should somehow get the politics out of it, from what I am hearing today back and forth. Do we think that five and six years old who do not have enough to eat at home know what a Liberal, a PC, an NDP or anyone else is? Do we think they care? We care when it comes to wanting to provide all the help and dignity we can to elevate the self-sufficiency, pride and self-reliance of these people. Too often we go about it the wrong way.
In closing I will use an illustration. There is an idea in government that all it needs to do to cure a problem is to dump more money into it. I could spend from now until midnight talking about programs the government has dumped money into which have not solved the problem.
A World War I veteran lived eight miles up the road from me. During the thirties when I was a boy he decided to raise sheep. It was not too profitable, but he shipped three carloads of sheep to the Burns slaughterhouse in Winnipeg. Mr. Kimmerly got a letter back reminding him that the sale of the sheep did not cover the cost of freight and asking him to kindly remit $3.78. He wrote a letter back saying very nicely that he did not have any money but he could send some more sheep.
Money is not always the answer. We should look at the question of poverty in the light of becoming involved not from the political viewpoint but from the human viewpoint.
