Brian Masse

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I do appreciate the offer. I will do that.

Unfortunately, this has been the way his members opposite have been running this in the past.

Maybe the member can help.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the question, because I think it is especially important to denote the age group he identified. Whether people are in the auto industry, the cattle industry or the farming industry, the age of 30 gives us a good example of some of the problems that we currently have with this government. Literally, we have students graduating and people coming out of school with huge debts. At the same time, they are trying to have families and get started in business.

What the Speech from the Throne did not do was provide hope and opportunity for those people who are starting employment later and who are having challenges in industry outside of their capabilities because of government policy. That is one of the important things a Speech from the Throne should drive to: it actually should have hope for all.

Similar to that is the lack of mention of seniors in the Speech from the Throne. There was one mention of seniors, the people who built this country. It is not acceptable.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Hence, Mr. Speaker, this is the way the federal government has been able to escape responsibility.

We should look at Huron Church Road. In our municipality, the 400 series highway, the 401, ends before the bridge crossing by about six kilometres. The government stopped the 401 and hung the municipality out to dry for the rest of the infrastructure. Because that is a connecting link highway, it is the provincial government that the hon. member supports which has jurisdiction on that. It has to be done in conjunction.

Second, the City of Windsor could actually get infrastructure funds if the government would actually fund municipal infrastructure that applied to this and not starve out the city. I want to read a comment here, because people do not care who is responsible; they want the funds to happen. If governments can make other things happen, they can do this:

My children attend Assumption high school. I fear every day that they may not make it across Huron Church Rd. One of their friends has become an orphan this year because a truck ran over their mother. It is irresponsible for the government to continue to ignore a problem they know puts children at risk every day, when they can decide immediate to rectify the situation. No excuse/ reason will justify the continued negligence of the government on this issue!

We cannot expect the taxpayers of the City of Windsor to pay tens of millions of dollars to put in pedestrian crosswalks for an international truck policy. By allowing us to go into NAFTA and not putting any money into infrastructure for cities to deal with this, it is federal trade policy that created the problem. It is not the citizens of Windsor who should have to pay for international truck traffic because of federal trade policy. They should not be hung out to dry anymore.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and speak about the Speech from the Throne.

I want to put some context into why we are doing this. My colleague noted that we had a situation where the government released a Speech from the Throne thinking that it would be a way of building Canada or a way of moving us forward. We know all sides of the House would expect that we could have a good debate about the ideas and about the things that we would see in the upcoming year. What has happened is that a series of other events have overtaken that and put a cloud over the government.

What I did in terms of preparing for today was to think about the last year in terms of the last Speech from the Throne which was called “The Canada We Want”. In it the government set forward a series of action items that it considered a priority at that time such as Kyoto. The government mentioned smart borders in terms of our relationship with the United States and abroad, and a number of other initiatives related to municipalities and funding.

Today the government is the same. We have not had an election. We should be looking at what has happened over the last year to see the advancement of our country, not only in terms of ourselves in our communities but as a nation abroad. It is very disappointing. That is what we need to do when we are reflecting upon this government and its Speech from the Throne that has very vague platitudes about actions that later on translate into decisions at budget time.

The government's action on Kyoto over the last year has been abysmal. Canadians have seen nothing. There has been nothing for consumers who want to purchase environmentally friendly products and services, nothing in terms of businesses that are repeatedly coming to members of Parliament from all sides saying that they have good ideas and they want to invest in a better and brighter Canada, but do not have the ability to do so.

This is important to note because this Speech from the Throne abandons that.

The throne speech talked a little bit about municipalities in terms of the GST. If we go back a year, the previous Speech from the Throne set aside money for an infrastructure fund. Grand plans were talked about for an infrastructure fund. The government was patting itself on the back about how much it would make a difference for municipalities.

I simply ask Canadians, have they seen any federal money in their ridings, their neighbourhoods, on their streets that have actually improved their infrastructure? It has not happened. Quite literally, when we broke down the numbers, it equated to approximately $50,000 per municipality in terms of infrastructure funds. It is outrageous. We are talking about a sidewalk that we might be able to install in a community or repair a small part of a road, or fill some potholes. It was $50,000 per municipality. This is not acceptable.

We now come to this Speech from the Throne and we get the GST for municipalities, that they should not have been paying for in the first place. They already had a partial rebate on the GST. Therefore, it is not a full 7% that the municipalities would get back.

I know municipalities across Ontario and in other parts of the country are going through their budget deliberations right now. That money that they are getting from the GST will not be enough to counterbalance the downloading that has happened from the federal government and other levels of government. It is an insidious way of trying to say that the government is doing something by not taking something from the municipalities and then making them say they should be thankful for that.

It is difficult in terms of accepting this Speech from the Throne's discussion points on the actual sharing of the gas tax. It is quite simple for the government. If it wants to participate in building this country instead of providing money to tax cuts or shelters or having environmental fines be tax deductible, it could use those resources and direct them straight to municipalities as the previous throne speech did.

The federal government does not have to negotiate with provincial and municipal governments because it knows the result. The result will be bogged down endlessly and Canadians will not see improvements on their streets.

That is what people should be thinking about for the next year, going into the next election: infrastructure projects. How many construction signs are up? How many bidding contracts go out for municipalities? How many more waste water treatment plants are upgraded or improved? We should compare that to the platitudes that are espoused in this document.

It is important to note another issue in regard to the Speech from the Throne. Despite the fact that there has been a literal cry for help from municipalities, from business people and from auto workers for a Canadian national auto policy, we have not even seen a single statement on that. This is critical, because we have witnessed over this last year a series of very difficult situations for the auto industry and we still have nothing. Not only that, the government is not even discussing with the United States what it is going to do in terms of challenging the fact that the U.S. governments are actually stealing Canadian jobs by funding plants. Of the last 18 plants that have been created in North America, only one has come to Canada because there has been massive government subsidization on the U.S. side from a trade agreement that our government agreed to, yet does not challenge--and there is a dispute panel available for that at NAFTA--nor does the government say that at least we are going to create a national auto policy. That is dangerous.

The fact of the matter is that we have 98 Liberals in Ontario, with the auto industry one in six, and they could not get a single notation of the auto industry at a critical time in this nation's history. We are seeing some great technological evolution in the automobile. The key for the future of the automobile is going to be what comes out of the tailpipe for our environmental concerns, but more important for our consumers and our citizens at the end of the day is to have jobs producing these new vehicles, and quite frankly that simply is not happening.

We have these new technologies that will be rolled out, and what will happen is that the United States basically will be stealing or providing subsidies to make sure that they get them. That is what happened recently with DaimlerChrysler and its new hybrid engine that is going to Michigan. It got massive subsidies and now it has a brand new plant manufacturing a hybrid engine, which we do not have in our community or here in Canada.

I also want to talk about a specific issue, because it is important that people can at least associate some of the issues of the Speech from the Throne with their own communities. In Windsor, Ontario, we have been struggling to get the government to act on government funds committed by the former prime minister for border infrastructure improvements, with the province of Ontario, funds of $300 million. More than one year later we have not seen a single penny, despite the fact that the community literally has cried for help.

On top of that, and this is actually a scandal of national proportions, we have a municipality here that is being offered $300 million, or could be eligible if there were actually a plan for which they could apply, for infrastructure funds, but the plan has been so corrupt and so flawed that they have actually hired an environmental lawyer to the tune of $1.5 million in a war chest to fight the government's plan.

In fact, another municipality, the town of LaSalle, has done the same thing. They have hired an environmental lawyer to fight this government. How incredible is that, when we have a lower level of government, a municipality, having to reach out to the taxpayers to fight the senior level of government's implementation of their own dollars? It is absolutely obscene. It is scandalous. It has to change.

We have simple items of consensus. I want to boil this down so people across Canada understand this. One of the roadways we have to cross is called Huron Church Road. There are approximately 10 lanes, with approximately 40,000 vehicles, many of them tens of thousands of trucks, that travel this corridor per day. We have schools, churches, business and homes there. In getting to one of the schools, Assumption College, a very historic one in Canada, people cannot get across the actual streets safely. We have had tragedy after tragedy.

Despite that, we cannot get a pedestrian crosswalk. The absolute cost of this, the total, is $1.5 million. We cannot get it. The Prime Minister's company can get $10 million in government grants, but we cannot get $1.5 million to get students safely to school. Tragically, last month a mother was killed taking her children to school. How many more deaths have to happen before the government actually translates some of these things that are in the throne speech to real things that change Canadians' lives? The government is accountable.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for a very passionate speech. On this side of the House I appreciated some of the passion he contributed. On the other side they needed a cup of coffee to get through it.

Nonetheless, I want to at least note that the issues about cities, municipalities and all those things, on which we have had a lot of discussion in the House of Commons, will not be solved by simply providing something back which should not have been taken in the first place.

I am concerned with the fact that we have so many municipalities in Ontario that are literally looking at double digit tax increases coming up in the fiscal year. I want to ask one quick question related to that and a second one related to the second part of his speech.

First, what types of things should they lock the money in? If the government's intention is to lock this money in municipalities and make them do certain things then what should those things be?

The second and most important question has to do with the racial and ethnic profiling that is happening. I live on the border in Windsor, Ontario. We have watched the United States government fingerprint and photograph our citizens. Doctors, lawyers, professionals and working class people who have employment in the United States have actually been pulled over, fingerprinted and photographed and the government has not spoken up about it yet. When will the government do that for our citizens?

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the hon. member for her speech and for her service as a Speaker of the House prior to her new position.

I come from the background of the social economy. I worked for the Association for Persons with Physical Disabilities and for the CNIB as a board member. I also worked at the multicultural council, mostly in the capacity of assisting people with employment and youth counselling as well as career work.

We have been basically thrust into a position where a lot of our not for profit organizations in the supposed social economy are on the brink. There is one specific I would like to ask the hon. member about. Why can the government afford tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest in the country but not provide at least a write-off or notification for voluntary service, which is eligible in other countries including the United States?

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, February 4th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, one of the things I think we would all agree on in the House of Commons is that we all want to debate issues and priorities and in which direction we want to take the country. Every party has a different perspective and independents have different perspectives and that is healthy.

One of the things that I have seen is just terrible in terms of democracy, and we were supposed to have some reform today but it was vacant again. It is the mere fact that we do not, as parliamentarians, have any type of genuine accounting in terms of the resources that are available to Parliament to make decisions in the country.

I am talking about the fact that the government continues to play the game of saying it has no money one week and the next week it has lots of money, then it has no money again and then it is going to find some by looking through the books. How many years after 10 years in government do the Liberals have to look through the books and find more billions of dollars, all in a manner of moments? That is not right. What we should be doing is understanding our finances, understanding the ability and time when the money is coming in and debating intelligently on how we want to spend it. That is fair.

I was very disappointed that the throne speech had a number of different promises, suggestions and platitudes but it did not address the principal fact that we have a problem right now. The Prime Minister was $40 billion off in his financial projections. That is not democratic. That is a huge deficit there. It does not matter if it is actually stealing money from workers and using it later on for other situations. The reality is we as parliamentarians need to make educated decisions about those resources.

How does the hon. member feel about the fact that we did not get that reform or commitment in the Speech from the Throne and what does that do for the Prime Minister's democratic reform platform?

[Speech from the Throne, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday's Speech from the Throne and today's debate highlight the difference and widening gap between those of us in Canada in the NDP who want to build this country as opposed to the government that attempts forgiveness for past sins.

The government desperately attempts to address the problems created by a decade of neglect. On health care, there is still no commitment to the Romanow commission. On the environment, there is still no plan for safe water, clean air or clean food. For students, there is still no commitment to address their lifetime debt load. On the economy, how is it possible that we do not have an auto policy, we do not have a shipbuilding policy, and we do not have a steel policy?

It was ironic to watch the Liberals give a standing ovation to the Prime Minister for a legacy of corporate tax cuts at the expense of building this country for all, not just for some.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, one interesting part of the Speech from the Throne and one I often hear from Canadians is the question of accountability and integrity. The Prime Minister has spoken a great deal about those, everything from ethics to a number of different initiatives that he feels will improve the Canadian belief in democracy and ensure that Canadians are re-engaged.

However, one thing really troubles me, and it really goes to the heart of democracy. The Speech from the Throne did not mention the debate about how we spend our resources. Whether one is a resident, a business or a group of citizens who contribute, we have to decide where we want to put our resources. As in our homes or businesses, we know we have a budget and we know we have choices and priorities.

What we continually see from the government is the mismanagement and an attempt at deception to shortchange Canadians from that debate by having surpluses emerge at the last moment.

We know what has been happening over the last couple of weeks. We have been hearing there is not enough money, that there is just over $2 billion. Then we hear that within the next couple of days we might actually find some more billions. This is from the same government which has been here for 10 years. All of a sudden it is going to come up with billions of dollars without any type of due process that allows Canadians to debate where those billions should go.

That deception should have ended with the throne speech. There should have been some accountable practices to say that this nation has a certain amount of resources. Let us choose together and debate in earnest how we want to spend our money.

[Address in Reply, February 2nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the government has watched the auto industry slide in the country. It has watched it dissipate. It has made sure that issues like the Windsor border, which has become clogged, have put the industry on its knees.

I would like to know why the border is not addressed properly in the throne speech and why can we not move on adequate infrastructure improvements instead of the jargon. Lastly, why is there no national Canadian auto policy when one in seven jobs is affected by that?