Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise and speak on this bill, a bill that has great significance to me and to my riding, indeed my province and my section of Canada.
I had to redo the presentation that I prepared because I was assuming that this bill would get unanimous support in the House. I was surprised and I might even say disturbed to find that this bill does not have the support of the Reform Party. Perhaps if I had been here last week I would have known about this. I fail to see the logic of why it cannot accept this bill. Perhaps later during the debate today some hon. members from that party will be able to express to the people of Newfoundland and to Atlantic Canada why they do not find it in their hearts to support this bill.
I think it is a very important bill. It is important to the people of Newfoundland. It is important to those plant workers in this particular case who have been employed in the industry all their lives, generations, who have not been able to and are unlikely to find work with the devastation of the industry.
Rather than speak directly on the bill, perhaps with the idea of having the Reform Party revise its outlook on this, I would like to give some indication of the proportion of this tremendous catastrophe that has befallen us. I am not going to attribute blame. I am not going to talk about the politics. I am going to give the dimension of it.
I can appreciate that those outside the fishery would find it very difficult to understand what has befallen those people in Atlantic Canada through the loss of the groundfish. They know now the industry may not be allowed to rebound for a decade. The best scientific advice is five to seven years.
To understand the proportion of this catastrophe, in terms of the Cashin report it is a called a famine of biblical proportions. I do not think that is an exaggeration.
The sea is to those who fish like land is to those who farm. Any farmers here or representatives of farmers would appreciate what that statement means. Fishing, like farming, is more than a job because the relationship of the fisher to the sea is more than economic. It is organic. It is a way of life. It is a community.
I come from a family which has been in the fishing industry for seven generations. My grandfather was in the business until he was 66. He was in it from the time he was a young man.
There is a sense of belonging. There is a sense of accomplishment. There is a sense of community. There is a sense of past, present and future involved in this kind of organic relationship, in this case, to the sea and to the fishing industry. I cannot think of any more global terms or inextricably linked terms in which to put it.
Having said that, the devastation of the industry affects not just one industry towns. It is not a question of Catalina, Bonavista, Port Union, Melrose or a single town, it is a whole coastal area. In the cases I just talked about, it is the whole Bonavista peninsula. The plant in Port Union that employed 1,200 people supported 65 communities. That plant's closing down essentially means that most of the working population for men and women will not have jobs, not just in the three or four communities that are served by this plant but by 65 communities. I know that is hard to realize.
Again I would like to express the importance of the industry to Atlantic Canada. The parliamentary secretary said that in the case of this bill, 75 per cent of those affected are from Newfoundland. I want to concentrate on Newfoundland because that is the area I know the most about.
We have very few centres in Newfoundland that are not dependent on the fisheries. I will give the exceptions in case there is any doubt in anybody's mind. We have three pulp and paper towns, Corner Brook, Grand Falls and Stephenville. There is one mining town in Labrador City. There is one town that is based on hydroelectricity and that is Churchill Falls. There are a handful of very small farming communities. I have a few in my riding, I suppose the best known is Codroy. There are also several administrative and business centres like St. John's and Gander.
Almost all of the other 800 communities in the province depend entirely on the fisheries. Indirectly, even the administrative and the business centres that I talked about depend on the fisheries as they exist in large measure to provide services to the fishery dependent communities. The loss of groundfish fishery for a period of five to ten years can trigger the collapse of whole coastal areas, as I talked about earlier.
Let me be more specific and quote figures for those who may not be as familiar with this as some others in the House. Almost every fourth person in the goods producing sector in Newfoundland relied on the fishery-one in four. Regarding the plant worker, viewed from the manufacturing sector, every second person was engaged in fish processing, which is now virtually wiped out.
Let me talk to my colleagues from Ontario and perhaps from Quebec. If a calamity of similar magnitude befell Ontario's manufacturing industry some 800,000 people would lose their jobs. In Newfoundland 16 per cent of the total workforce depends on the fishery for all of its income compared with 2.6 per cent in Ontario in manufacturing, auto industry.
If you compare 16 per cent in one province with 2.6 per cent related to the auto industry, putting this another way, the devastation of the fishery in Newfoundland has the same effect as five times closing down the automobile industry in Ontario.
You are from Ontario, Mr. Speaker. I do not have to tell you what that would mean. That is another indication of the kind of proportion that we are talking about.
Let me go back a few years, the year that I was elected, 1988. Harvesting and processing in the fishing industry provided employment income to about 48,000 people, which generated a total income of approximately $700 million a year.
In 1994, 1995 and beyond much of this purchasing power, sustaining thousands of families in hundreds of communities along the coastal areas, will be severely reduced.
I have 260 communities in my riding. Everyone relates to the factors that I mentioned. As a result, the majority of these people and their families will suffer sustained income loss. I am just talking about the families and those who are directly affected.
I want to talk now about the cumulative effect. What is the second, third or fourth order effect? The multiplier effect will reverberate through an already weak economy. The official unemployment rate hovers at about 25 per cent, but the unofficial rate is over 50 per cent. I do not have to tell many people in the House that this is the case.
People say to me that I have Hibernia in my riding. Hibernia cannot be viewed as a significant offset to the devastating problem in the fishery. It cannot absorb all the communities. It cannot absorb the unemployed. In many cases it cannot even cope with the training period, the training opportunities and the skills that are developed. It could cope with some, yes, but Hibernia at its height could not even cope. We are talking about 48,000 people.
If no compensation measures are taken, the large and small fishery dependent communities I talked about will face total economic and social collapse. There are other results as well: the compensation expenditures, the retail trade, and the financial viability. I have had people say to me that they appreciate my standing up for fisherpersons and plant workers but that there are construction workers and other people who do not have jobs. I appreciate that and try to do what I can for them as well.
The point of the matter is that if I do not support those in the fishing industry and the compensation is not there, the corner grocery stores will shut down and the butcher shops will shut down. I suppose eventually the schools will shut down because there will be no pupils to send; there will not be any people left.
This money does more than compensate those directly involved. It keeps stores going and all the second, third and fourth derivatives. It is not only that. If there is no compensation, government revenues will decline. There will be another effect which does not affect us directly in the House of Commons. As a Newfoundlander I concern myself with its provincial budget. In 1992-93, $180 million was spent on social welfare in large part to look after people who had not been able to get compensation in the fishery or who had gone through their unemployment insurance related to the fishery and could not qualify.
In the budget of March 17, 1994 tabled by the Newfoundland government it was noted that 13.6 per cent of all expenditure in Newfoundland would be for social welfare. That is a sad note. It is even sadder to say that in this coming fiscal year there will be $29 million more needed than the year before to look after social cases, those unfortunate people who have not been able to qualify. I could go on but I think I have made my point.
It was suggested that maybe governments of the past had made mistakes. I know they have made mistakes. Governments are not perfect but governments have responsibility for these kinds of disasters. The government certainly has responsibility now to help affected individuals adjust to the calamity of losing their livelihood and with no hope of it being replaced.
Plant workers who were 50 years of age as of last May 15 or would be 55 years of age over the course of TAGS, the Atlantic groundfish strategy program, very much apply in this case. It is the responsibility of the government to look after them. It has a responsibility toward fishery dependent communities to help them adjust. This is true throughout Atlantic Canada but particularly in those coastal regions primarily dependent on groundfish.
The southern and northern coasts of Trinity Bay, all of Bonavista Bay and in many cases the northern part of Conception Bay have been wiped out. I mentioned the Bonavista peninsula earlier.
There is a responsibility to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. They have a responsibility themselves because they are dramatically affected as a society. To adjust to the disaster or the economic and social consequences is a necessity. It is not something that is just desirable or could be done; it is something that should be done and has to be done.
We cannot take conventional approaches to these kinds of adjustments. I agreed with something said on the other side a few moments ago, that some old methods of the past have not worked. I do not disagree with that.
In the summary of the report of the fisheries committee, particularly with respect to witnesses from Newfoundland on March 31, the chairman said that we would fail if we tried to be 100 per cent successful. I agree. We are not going to be 100 per cent successful.
I appeal to the Reform Party that is not going to support the bill that Bill C-30 is a measure of success which I do not think should be downgraded or denigrated. It should be viewed in the total package. It is one part of the package and I happen to think this part is successful.
The task is too great to be undertaken in the way things have been done in the past. The key to shaping the fishery of the future and dealing with appropriate adjustment programs will be involving the affected people through their own programs and through their own institutions: fishermen and industry organizations, co-operatives and community organizations. That was done in the Cashin report. That was done in the fisheries committee when it was reviewing this matter. That was done by the minister and his staff. That was done by the human resources minister in advance of the bill.
Sending in outsiders, however well intentioned, to sit fishery workers down in classrooms and tell them about the future in itself will not inspire confidence among those whose livelihoods have been destroyed. Unless governments in partnership with the industry and the people affected can shape a credible vision of hope, the coastal society of Atlantic Canada will be consumed by anxiety and despair. I do not believe there is one member of any party or an individual member of the House who would want that to happen.
I have spent most of my time putting the bill into perspective. I have relied on the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Human Resources Development to talk about the details of the bill. Bill C-30 is a very simple bill. It basically says that the minister may enter into an agreement referred to in a subsection of the Department of Labour Act to have the act apply to former employees who are less than 55 years of age. The condition is that former employees must be 50 years of age or more as of May 15 past. Significant to the debate is former employees of fish plants whose employment has been terminated by reason of a permanent reduction in the workforce at the plants because of a decline in fish stocks.
I say to those who do not support the bill that I have 57 processing plants in my riding. They will not look kindly on any member of the House who says that it is imperfect, that it is not totally the government's responsibility, that Newfoundlanders are being shortchanged and this is just adding to the situation, or for any other reason. Those who have run out of dollars to support their families and who are at an age when their prospects of finding work in a province where the unofficial unemploy-
ment rate is close to 50 per cent would not take too kindly to that either.
I stand as a member of the House, as a spokesman for my party, to say that we appreciate the disastrous proportions of the calamity that has beset Newfoundland. Whose responsibility is it? I could spend the rest of the day attributing blame and I probably would not be right. I might feel a bit better, but it would not do much for those people who have been affected.
I am saying to all members in the House who do not support the bill to take the perspective I have given, to take into consideration the 1,200 people and their families directly affected by the bill, and to take into consideration the possibility of anxiety and difficulty of living, of getting up in the morning, supporting themselves and sending their kids to school. Many of the 50-year old plant workers have young children. I know them individually. A proportion of the 1,200 plant workers in the 57 plants in my riding will be watching the newscast on their televisions today and reading the Evening Telegram or their local papers. They will be very pleased that at second reading of the bill this member, this party and this government gave full and total support to a bill that I believe is one of the most important bills the House has ever seen.
