Mr. Speaker, I am proud to stand tonight on behalf of the people of Timmins--James Bay to speak to Bill C-9 and to set the record very clearly on what we are discussing here.
This is not a normal budget implementation bill where in the past we would debate whether we supported a certain vision of the government going forward. Of course, under a budget bill, this is a matter of confidence. What we are discussing tonight is the abuse of parliamentary process. When we look at the Conservative government, we are looking at a government whose only track record is abuse of public process and abuse of parliamentary process.
We could go through the issues of prorogation where it ran legislation. not once but twice. through the House and then flushed that legislation down the toilet because it was politically inconvenient to have to answer questions in the House of Commons, and then had to start the whole process over again, a completely staggering waste of taxpayer dollars.
We see the culture of secrecy that surrounds the PMO and all the offices of Parliament now and the inability of the public, the media and politicians to get answers from the government. We see it in the government's decision to create a manual to subvert the work of parliamentary committees, monkeywrenching committees so that work could not be done. This was handed out to the committee chairs to subvert the work of Parliament.
Now we see other examples of abuse of office. We see the industry minister, a minister of the Crown who is there to represent the interests of Canada on the international stage, acting like a cheap ShamWow salesman for some cleaning products in his riding. When that guy did not have a seat, would anybody have paid him to sell cleaning products? I do not think so. Maybe they would have hired him as a floor cleaner but not to sell cleaning products, yet he is standing there in front of a camera saying that he represents the Government of Canada and he is hocking products for buddies of his. This is a staggering abuse of the public process.
How does that tie into this bill? The government has taken numerous issues that should be scrutinized by the public and slipped them into the budget. It has insisted that we pass it right away or it will force an election. It will huff and puff and blow the House down if it does not get its way.
I am showing the people back home how big this budget bill is and telling them about all the hidden booby prizes that are left within this budget. One example is the decision to slip the HST into the bill to force it down the throat of senior citizens and people on fixed incomes in British Columbia and Ontario without debate. The government did not allow any hearings on this.
We see the decision, not surprising from a government that has become little more than the government of the tar sands, to strip more environmental assessment protections away from the Canadian public and from the environment. It does not have the guts to bring it into the House in a standard bill. No, it slips it into a budget bill and says that it is a matter of confidence.
We see the plan to sell off the AECL, our nuclear power agency, on the private market. Maybe it will get 10¢ on the dollar, who knows? That is a staggering decision to take but, again, it is not willing to bring this before the public. It just wants to slip it in and hide it away. It is an abuse of process.
Another serious issue is the destabilization of Canada Post that is under way with its privatization efforts. I represent a region that is larger than the United Kingdom. Mail is essential and mail has become more and more challenged over the years as more and more people are going online. For mail service in rural areas to survive, we need the balance and the income, and the income that it relies upon is being cut up, divided off and sold off to the private sector.
Another issue is softwood lumber. This is the government that sold out community after community to get a quick deal with the Bush Republicans, who are very much like the Conservative Party. Now we see another plan to raise lumber tariffs in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan by 10%. Our sawmills are staggering, what is left of them. They are barely able to keep going. Most of them are shut and the government is going to slip another 10% cost on that.
This is process after process of abuse. I am very shocked that what the government would do at the height of a recession is raid the EI fund and steal $57 billion from the EI fund. That is not the government's money. This is money that was paid by Canadian workers as an insurance fund.
The government has bled red ink throughout the recession. Why? It is because it gave one corporate tax break after another. There was no fiscal prudence. The government came in with a surplus and immediately started giving it away in massive corporate tax cuts. For the folks back home, to get one of these tax breaks one has to be profitable. Who was making money in the recession? The banks and the big oil companies were making money so they got the lion's share of these tax breaks.
Further and further we see this country slipping into the red and what does the government do? It decides to take it off the backs of working families. In some areas, up to 60% of the people who pay into EI are not even allowed to collect it. $57 billion of the EI fund is being stolen from workers, money that could retrain families and that could be used to help our people in communities who have been hit hard by the economy.
Just this past month, 1,000 jobs were lost in my riding. We not only lost the jobs but we also lost all the refining capacity of Ontario in copper and zinc, thanks, in large part, to the government's lack of a national vision in terms of dealing with companies like XStrata and Vale Inco. We now have 1,000 workers in Timmins who have been laid off or have lost their jobs permanently because of the government's boneheaded mismanagement of the base metal industries in Canada.
Now, just as these workers are needing EI, the government is shutting down the EI processing centres across Ontario. It is not doing this publicly. It is doing it in secret. When we ask the Minister of Human Resources a straightforward, straight-up question about why she is choosing, at this time in a recession, to shut 15 of the 18 EI processing centres in Ontario, she says that we are fearmongering. She cannot even stand up and say what her own department is doing. She cannot own up.
Those are the things that are being slipped through and hidden away from people. We see right now the EI processing operations in Owen Sound, Orillia, Kenora, Belleville, North Bay, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie, Ottawa, Brantford, Etobicoke, Barrie, Peterborough, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Thunder Bay, Kitchener and Oshawa. It reads like a bus route to nowhere. All of these offices are being closed by the government at a time when access to EI processing is needed.
Why is it closing these centres? It is because it never did believe in maintaining a balance. The minister herself said that she did not want people to get fair benefits when they are unemployed because that might stop them from leaving the province and going to Fort McMurray to work in the tar sands.
