Charlie Angus

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent example of the sort of monkey funhouse mirror that we see with the Conservatives. From a distance, they say they are going to clear red tape and make government simpler, yet when people try to use government programs, they find that working their way through them is exceedingly complicated and arcane. The Building Canada fund is an excellent example. I remember working for the Algonquin Nation before I was elected, dealing with small hiring projects for young people, and the burden of following through every single week was actually not worth the value of the grant for hiring people, because we had to do so much reporting. Although these were fairly simple projects, this is a government obsession. The Conservatives are not making things simpler; they are actually making things harder.

We can ask any veteran how easy it was to access services when they were being turned away, or we can ask how easy it is for people to get a disability tax credit or benefit. It is a straightforward thing, and they are being turned away.

The Conservatives are very interested in what they believe is reducing red tape, so if it is Suncor, the Conservatives will strip all the rules that they need to get it through. However, if a veteran needs access or a single mother is looking to get basic support for her child, they will jump through hoop after hoop. When a municipality is filling out these forms, we hear about it all the time. That is the meaningless red tape that we should be targeting.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is correct on one part of it. It is a typical Liberal plan to use the EI fund for any of its hijinks games.

The EI fund is an insurance fund. It belongs to the people who pay into it. It does not belong to the Liberals' smoke doctors in the backroom who are always trying to come up with some shiny bauble.

We looked at it, we brought it to committee, and we realized it was just a dumb idea.

It is not nearly as vicious, though, as the $57 billion that the Liberals took out of EI. They used the EI fund, they stripped it bare, and they called that an example of Paul Martin's great visionary economics. Now they want to come around with this idea that this was going to create tens of thousands of jobs. It is such a fiction, and it is an unfair fiction when in some parts of this country, seven out 10 people who pay into EI are not able to get their own insurance money back. The Liberal Party would take their insurance money, the money that they paid into EI, and use it for their schemes to promote the Liberal leader, the member for Papineau. That is unconscionable.

We will always stand up to defend the rights of people to have the money they put in. Just like their pension, just like their EI, these are things to be protected, not to be played with.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is amazing that my colleagues have to redact so much of what their witnesses say.

The member should have actually read the full statement from Canadian Federation of Independent Business, about its concern about the hiring tax credit, which the New Democrats are supporting, and which it is not. If the member wants to stand up and promote a bill that is smaller than a fig leaf when it comes to economic credibility and economic defence, he may.

The real issue is that the federation agrees with New Democrats on the issue of the small business hiring tax credit. This is the issue at hand.

My hon. colleagues can stand up there and say whatever they want, but the fact is that they have bet the bank on the tar sands and they blew it. The Prime Minister made a promise that we were going to be this economic super power and he was going to force the pipelines through and cut all the environmental protection.

What did the government get out of that? It got zero, because when the law was not followed and when the proper regulations were not used, the government did not build trust. If there is no trust from members of the Canadian public, they will not allow these super projects. After eight long years of bluster, the Conservatives have blown it.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, that was an editorial interjection that I do not mind.

How is it, in God's name, that Arthur Porter could be a member of the Privy Council? How is it? However, of course one is used to hanging out with criminals, like Bruce Carson, a convicted felon.

Ladies and gentlemen back home should ask themselves how a convicted fraud artist could get past all the security checks to be the Prime Minister's inner adviser. The Prime Minister likes hanging out with crooks.

He appointed Patrick Brazeau, and there were red flags all over Patrick Brazeau when he was appointed. Everybody knew this was not going to end well. It was Kory Teneycke who said that all these partisan ankle-biters were attacking a great man like Patrick Brazeau. They loved Patrick Brazeau. They threw their arms around him. They used to get him out at all their fundraisers, and then suddenly he was toxic. With Mike Duffy it was the same thing.

Arthur Porter, of all people; he is in a Panamanian jail. He could actually still call up his buddy the Prime Minister to ask for a secret security briefing as a member of the Privy Council.

This is the kind of madhouse show that the Conservatives are running over there.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, Bruce Carson is another well-known criminal.

Arthur Porter was the man who the Conservatives say was able to oversee CSIS, as they allow it all manner of extra rules that have not been in place before. This is not to say that we do not necessarily need more tools to go after terrorism, but we need the rule of law. To them, that is needless red tape.

Who else was overseeing CSIS? It was the northern gateway lobbyist. What was the lobbyist's name? Chuck Strahl. Chuck Strahl gets parachuted in because he is a party favourite and does not tell anybody he is an Enbridge lobbyist. They have northern gateway, so all the Conservatives are standing and denouncing these terrorists, who as far as I could tell were just ordinary citizens of British Columbia. Was Chuck Strahl getting briefed on the northern gateway, the supposed threat, while he was overseeing CSIS? These are questions. This is the government's idea of red tape.

Getting back to this bill, we see Conservatives stand to speak about red tape all the time, but they do not deliver. I ran a small business for 10 years, and one of the biggest issues of red tape I had to deal with was the Conservatives' beauty of GST-HST, where they had moved the burden from the large corporate bodies down to individuals and small companies. I know that as the economy is tanking and people are trying to get back into the workplace and find other work, HST has to be collected starting at $30,000. That was the rule back in the 1990s.

If a man has lost his job or his wife is wanting to get back into the workforce to do some consulting, hairdressing, web design, or the husband wants to do web design, these are micro businesses that can be grown into small business that may start to employ people, but they have to start paying the HST at $30,000. People really cannot do much at $30,000. I know people who told me they wanted to start small businesses, but if they were only making $32,000 or $33,000, the administrative burden of dealing with the HST actually was not worth it. It simply was not worth going back into the workforce to do that.

A reasonable government would raise the minimum on HST, say, to $50,000 over 20 years, from the 1990s to today. That would be a reasonable move. People could get themselves established. They could find out whether their home project could become viable, whether it is making stained glass, crocheting, or whatever, and then a small business gets established.

With the New Democrats' idea of helping small business, one of the big issues we have been pushing is credit card fees. Talk about needless impediments to small business. Ask any small business owner, such as a taxi cab driver or someone running a small restaurant, about the credit card fees. We will never see the Conservatives deal with this.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I remember when Jim Flaherty stood and said he was going to go to the banks and deal with all of this. He came back like a chastened altar boy. He was just going to leave it to them.

This is where regulation is important. These sectors of the economy have to be regulated because, if basic rules are not in place, people get ripped off. Government needs to ensure regulation on the credit cards. One of the other things was that they deregulated cable and phone rates. We have among the highest cellphone rates in the world, but they believe that, if they just leave it to business, it will do it. We believe that certain regulations are important, to protect the market and to protect the ability of consumers to have fair play.

In terms of supporting small business, we would say in a time of economic uncertainty, when the Conservatives have literally bet the entire Canadian house on Fort Mac, that we need to ensure that small business can innovate and do its job. Let us drop the tax rate from 11% to 10% to 9%, because we know this money would go directly back into the economy.

Small business reinvests that money all the time, whereas the current government put in large corporate across-the-board tax cuts, believing the theory of trickle-down. We know the only real thing that does trickle down in economics, and it is not money. The Conservatives cut that tax rate on the large corporations, and any economist will say that we have dead money. It is money that the large corporations have taken out, that they are giving in CEO bonuses or putting offshore, that they are not reinvesting. If the Conservatives are going to work with business, they should offer an incentive for innovation. An innovation tax credit makes sense. What we are dealing with here is a bill that would offer nothing to small business, except the false image that they are going to deal with the needless regulations.

I think back to when I was documenting the life of people in my region in terms of the hard-rock mining industry. If they go underground in Stobie Mine in Sudbury, or go underground in Timmins, wherever they walk there will be signs that say not to put one's hands here or not to stand there. An old miner said to me one day that every one of those signs and regulations was paid for in blood. They would only put up a sign telling them not to do something if someone had been seriously injured, not just once but usually two or three or four times, or killed. Those regulations were important. We saw in the mining sector again and again this effort of self-regulation. Allowing companies to do it does not work. There are certain regulations that are important.

How do we deal with the issues of meaningless red tape, contradictory red tape, red tape that has become redundant as the years go on? I would put it back to my colleagues on the government side that this is where they have to ensure a standard that the ministers are going to meet. That is ministerial responsibility. It used to be in the ministerial code. They quietly took out ministerial responsibility. I find that staggering. It is as if they did not want to be on the hook for promoting incompetence. If they are competent, then they will be overseeing their department and regularly bringing forward recommendations of where regulations need to be removed and replaced with ones that work.

What we are dealing with here is just another shadow bill. It is shadow boxing with the economy, when the real issue we are facing is that the Conservatives have stripped the fiscal capacity of this country to the bare bone. The Conservatives do not know what the numbers are. We are getting contradictory numbers in terms of this budget: if they are going to be doing cuts, if they are going to be going into the contingency fund. The Conservatives do not seem to know. They are playing games with the economy, which is not the kind of message for a G7 nation to send.

At a time when we are seeing increasing economic uncertainty in Canada's west, we need to be able to tell small business people that we are going to work with them to kick-start the economy so we can balance the economy and get off this one-industry-only obsession and ensure we have a diversified economy. That is where the New Democrats are coming down on the issue. We would drop the small-business tax rate from 11% to 10% to 9%. The New Democrats would ensure that, when business people make a capital investment, they can write it off quicker. That would help manufacturing.

Some of these ideas have been in previous budgets. The Conservatives and the Liberals have had similar things in the past. However, they have given them up; they are not interested and they have moved on. We say these are the kinds of incentives that we need now, at a time of economic uncertainty.

I am, as always, proud to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay, but less proud to have to deal with bills that simply do not address the needs of Canadians.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, it is with great honour that I stand here to represent the people of Timmins—James Bay.

We are dealing with yet another Conservative game of shadow boxing; that the Conservatives actually understand the economy. It is fascinating that they are talking about helping small business when they cannot even bring a budget into the House because they have stripped the fiscal capacity of the country to the bone. They were going to allow people, through their income-splitting scheme, to claim it even though it had not passed in law. Everything was dependent in their world view on the high oil prices. The government has banked the entire economy, like a drunken gambler, on the roulette wheel of commodities, not understanding that commodities go up and down. A balanced national economy can withstand those. We have done this in Canada for the last 150 years, but we have had a government that has been completely unbalanced.

We saw all the members from the 401 area stand again and again and praise the tar sands, while the manufacturing sector was going down the toilet. Now the Conservatives have suddenly discovered the manufacturing sector.

We are talking about red tape and this chimera the Conservatives have created, that they will slay the red dragon of red tape.

It reminds me of H.L. Mencken. I am sure he is probably glad he is not alive to see that group in action. He said that for every complex problem, there was an answer that was clear and simple and was wrong. We could probably use that to define the Conservative Party over the last hundred years, but definitely under the current government.

Let us look at the issue that for every new regulation we will strip an old regulation. It sounds so simplistic, but what it speaks to is incompetence, the incompetence of the ministers in the various departments who are not overseeing the regulations right now. They think the Muskoka minister is somehow going to be able to handle the thousands and thousands of regulations, and we should trust him to cut through this.

Folks back home will remember that the Muskoka minister was the man who took $50 million in border infrastructure money, when he had only won by 14 votes, and blew it on pork barrel projects of zero significance. Then when he was asked for the paperwork, he claimed there was none. He took taxpayer money, spent it on the gazebos, the sunken boats, the lighthouses, where there are no waterways, created a fake lake, even though we had no need for one, and then said that he did not have any paperwork, which was not true. It was false. There was lots of paperwork. He made the paperwork up himself out of his constituency office and he ran it through the municipalities.

He misrepresented the spending of money. However, under the government, that kind of malfeasance and incompetence is not punished; it is celebrated. He was given the job of being the oversight for all government spending based on that behaviour.

Do not get me wrong, getting rid of red tape that is meaningless is sometimes very important. I live in the little mining town of Cobalt. Our neighbour is Haileybury where all the mine managers live. It had on the books for many years that it was against the law to walk in the streets of Haileybury with a lunch pail. That was to keep the miners from coming and using the local watering holes in Haileybury. That law was never used and it sat on the law books in the municipality for decades and decades. Most Canadians did not realize it until Paul Soles pointed it out on This is the Law in the 1970s. Maybe they got rid of it then. We should get rid of those kinds of regulations.

We would believe that if we had a government where we had ministers who were actually competent and took responsibility, they would be overseeing their departments regularly to see what kind of red tape was no longer needed, such as what has become redundant and where there are two regulations that are working at cross purposes. However, they are not interested in that. They are interested in creating these sideshow chimeras to take attention from the fact that they have mismanaged the economy substantially.

It seems the Conservatives have put their poor finance minister in a bag and have him hidden away. He cannot explain why he cannot add up the money, because he was counting on the high oil prices. Now they are saying that they are going to help small business. We know that is not true.

Let us look at the Conservatives' idea of red tape. Red tape is a particular buzzword for the neocons. They love this. They use red tape all the time, but they never like to talk about the effects of the red tape.

For example, it was under Mike Harris, their great guru, that they were going to privatize Ontario Hydro, which helped create the Province of Ontario as an industrial powerhouse. However, Mike Harris had it in his head that it was brilliant idea to privatize it. He blew it so badly that we are still picking up the pieces. Perhaps the only people on the planet who could mismanage a hydro resource worse than Mike Harris are the Kathleen Wynne Liberals.

We can talk to any senior citizen in the Province of Ontario on the mismanagement of hydro under the present Liberals. It is so corrupt that they spent $1 billion moving two gas plants to save three lazy Liberals their seats. Imagine what a billion dollars would do for the Ontario health economy. There was the privatization guru.

Let us remember 2008, the horrific listeriosis outbreak. How many people died in that outbreak? I believe it was 22 people with 57 confirmed cases. From the internal reports, we learned that the Canadian Food and Inspection Agency, under the government, was being told that it was no longer going to be ensuring the safety of the plants. That was red tape. The government was going to allow the companies to look after themselves, and people died.

Speaking of incompetence, what did the agriculture minister have to say to families who died because the government chose to trust the cattle and beef giants over public safety? He had lots of jokes to make about listeriosis, he thought it was funny. We remember what Conservatives did with their cutting of the red tape.

We have seen debate after debate in the House. I remember in previous Parliaments, when Bill Blaikie was here, there was a brilliant idea, which came from the Liberals originally, to let the rail companies police themselves. We were told that we did not need the oversight, that we could trust the rail companies. A cheesy little rail company running past Montreal and not following all the rules caused a huge rail disaster in Lac-Mégantic and people died because of the lack of oversight. That was the kind of stuff Conservatives were praising, getting rid of red tape.

The Transportation Safety Board came out with its report on Lac-Mégantic and expressed its deep concern about the need for government to have oversight. Speaking of incompetence, the member for Essex was out there blowing off the need for safety, blowing off the need for the report and then saying that he had not even bothered to read the report. People died because of these decisions and he had not bothered to read the report. We know what Conservatives think of red tape.

Some of the newer neocons have their sense of history which begins in 2008 or 2011. I remember when they were talking about the deregulation of the banks when Citibank was the future and Canada could not compete with all our little banks. We were the economic backwater. That was the scheme the Liberals were totally into at the time. We would allow banks to make investments, allow them to take our savings and speculate on the market because that was the way the world was going.

I remember how members were laughing at the NDP, the nanny state NDP, afraid to compete. We were saying that we needed regulations for the banks to protect people's savings. That is a fundamental principle. We stopped the deregulation. When the rest of the world that had followed the neocon-neoliberal route went down the economic toilet, it was staggering to see Jim Flaherty standing and talking about how glad he was that we had regulation. The Conservatives ridiculed regulation as needless red tape, but it saved our economy at the time.

What is some of the other red tape the Conservatives hate? They get backbenchers to stand on their hind legs and beat their chests about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That is red tape to them. The Supreme Court is more red tape. God, they hate the Supreme Court ensuring the rule of law interferes with everything.

We have a justice minister who is so incompetent. Speaking of the incompetence of this world, this man has had more recalls of legislation than Ford had with the Pinto. He ignores the legal reviews of legislation, brings it into the House time and time again, and is told it will not pass a charter challenge at the Supreme Court. He bangs his head against the Supreme Court and then is outraged when it says it will not pass a charter challenge and he has to return it. One would think he would be chastened. In the private sector, he would probably be gone if he had that many recalls, but no. Conservatives stand, beat their chests, and go on about that outrageous Supreme Court defending the rule of law.

I see my friend has just entered the chamber, Mr. Enemy of Red Tape, who is going to allow new anti-terrorism measures and all manner of control to CSIS with no oversight, because it is red tape that is protecting the private rights of Canadian citizens, this needless red tape. That is staggering. Conservatives say not to worry, the oversight body is already able to do the job, the oversight body that the Prime Minister appointed, Arthur Porter. Is he still in a Panamanian jail for gun running, money laundering, or fraud? He was a friend of the Prime Minister. He is just one of the many criminals with whom the Prime Minister has chosen to hang around.

[Red Tape Reduction Act, February 3rd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague.

Bill C-21 is yet another bill in which the government passes off fluff for action. It is as if the government has created itself as Don Quixote and is going to go after windmills called red tape.

The government has systematically attacked the basic systems that are in place to ensure a viable economy. One example is its attack on the environmental legislation, which stripped all of the water protections, and the government's dumbed-down idea that it would somehow make it easier to get the pipelines approved. Then it has run into one bit of opposition after another because there are no clear rules in place.

The Conservative government is afraid to bring in a budget. It cannot have a plan and cannot even count the money, and yet it has created this false attitude that it is going after red tape.

Could my hon. colleague tell me why he thinks we are wasting time on a bill like this flop, rather than dealing with clear issues like the budget and protecting citizens?

[Business of Supply, February 2nd, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague's passion. I remember when the cod fishery collapsed because of years of federal mismanagement. The cod fishery was one of the reasons that Canada as a nation was founded. It was this incredible resource that brought so many Europeans over here, who created settlements on Newfoundland and Labrador.

One of the agreements when Newfoundland and Labrador signed on with the federal government was that it would be better within Confederation, that there would be a quid pro quo with the province.

The loss of the cod fisheries was a symbol of federal mismanagement. Therefore, I understand the deep suspicion that the people of Newfoundland and Labrador have when an international trade agreement is being brought forward and it is being asked to give up some of the sovereignty it has wanted to maintain over its fisheries in order to be part of an international agreement. It has to be able to trust that the federal government is going to make sure that the agreement works on its behalf, not just on behalf of anybody in the Conservative Party, but on behalf of the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

I am very concerned by this backtracking. We saw how Danny Williams stood up. We saw the movement of “anything but Conservative”. We know that Conservatives cannot be trusted in the Maritimes, just like they cannot be trusted anywhere else.

What does my hon. colleague think about a government that is reneging on a deal that sends symbolic concerns to the people of Newfoundland and Labrador?

[Ethics, January 28th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, Conservatives are telling senior citizens that they can walk through the snow for their mail because they need the exercise, and anyway Canada Post just cannot afford to deliver it. However, Canada Post can afford to give out hundreds of pro hockey tickets to their insiders and pals.

Now the Liberals made their name filling the box seats with cronies, but surely to God we have a higher ethical bar than the one used by the Liberals.

Middle-class Canadians would love to go pro hockey games, but they would pay their own way, so I would like to ask the minister why it is that the Conservatives are allowing Canada Post to give out such expensive perks to insiders and pals?

[Natural Resources, January 27th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that the Conservatives are cutting $11 million out of the FedNor budget for northern Ontario over the next four years. This is on top of the fact that we have already lost 30,000 jobs in the north. If that was not bad, we actually then have to deal with the provincial Liberals who do not seem to understand the Ring of Fire is not a karaoke song; it is a $9 billion investment in the future.

I want to ask my colleague this. Where is the action plan? We have communities like Timmins, Thunder Bay and Capreol being sidelined by this lack of investment that would help our businesses, our communities and our first nations.

Where is the plan?