Charlie Angus

[Business of Supply, April 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, very quickly, the point of this motion is that we have to put up a warning signal to other communities: the people in Voisey's Bay who are suffering, the people in Sudbury who are suffering, and the people in Timmins who are seeing the copper-refining capacity of Ontario permanently removed. It will never come back.

We never would have thought this possible. We never would have thought a government would abandon our regions and our economy so badly as has happened under this government. That is why a signal has to be sent to other parts of this country to say that their sectors are next, because this government is sending out a clear signal that it is open to selling whatever off to whoever wants it, and they can come in and take it. It will be an awful fire sale, and it will affect every one of our communities.

[Business of Supply, April 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague's question, because I think it is very pertinent. Before Xstrata was allowed to walk off with Falconbridge, China Minmetals attempted to walk out, and my colleague is very aware of that file. We raised that question then. The Liberal government was going to allow that sell-off, and doing so would clearly have been a detriment. This had to be looked at.

We have to look at Vale as well. Vale is part of the Brazilian government. When we look at Vale's plan for Sudbury, they are saying we now have to be like Brazilian workers. We have to go down to their standards.

There are some serious questions that have to be addressed, and certainly when we are talking about telecommunications, as my colleague pointed out, there is a national security interest. Telecommunications has been identified as a national security priority for 20-some years in this country.

These are questions that have to be reviewed. That is not to suggest that when sales happen they will not be allowed, but they have to be reviewed, and they have to be reviewed with due diligence.

[Business of Supply, April 28th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to speak in the House today to this motion, with the work of my colleague from Nickel Belt and, in particular, the work of my colleague from Windsor West who has raised these issues again and again.

I am also proud to stand here as the member for the riding of Timmins--James Bay. My grandfather, Charlie Angus, came to Timmins from the Hawkhill tenements of Dundee and he died on the shop floor at the Hollinger mine. My mother's father, Joseph MacNeil, left with the waves of Cape Bretoners to work underground in Timmins. He broke his back in a fall of ground, which, in those days, was not even commented upon in the newspapers because life was cheap.

When my grandfathers were working underground, the average life expectancy for an east European man was 41 years of age, and that was considered a norm and considered perfectly okay by industry. I am here today to say that my grandparents' generation fought so that our communities would benefit and there would be a decent way of life in the mines in northern Ontario. We are not about to turn back the clock at this point, in 2010, and allow companies like Vale Inco and Xstrata to run our resources into the ground, and that is what this motion is about.

This motion is about the Conservative government's absolute failure to stand up for national interests. We have to condemn it for what has happened at Stelco, at Nortel, at Xstrata and at Vale Inco because that will be the template it uses on industry after industry, and Canadians need to see what is coming down the pipe.

I would like to say at the beginning that this is a very clear discussion. This is not about foreign investment. This is about scrutinizing foreign takeovers. I will give an example.

This week, the first diamonds ever from Ontario went on sale from the Victor diamond mine on the James Bay coast. I will tell the House about De Beers. De Beers came and built a billion dollar mine. It hired people and signed impact benefit agreements with first nations communities. I know there are people in some of my James Bay communities who do not believe that they got the best deal they could out of it, but I have worked with De Beers and when we won the fight to get a school in Attawapiskat, the CEO of De Beers called me that day and asked how his company could help.

That is foreign investment. That is something that we must welcome on all sides of the political House. We need to have an investment climate that welcomes companies to come in, invest and see the potential. However, there is something fundamentally different between the behaviour of De Beers and Vale Inco. There was a brutal, nasty, nine-month needless strike when the price of nickel would give Vale the kind of profits that its shareholders could be pleased with. Even more striking for me is that this week Xstrata is moving to shut down the copper refining and zinc refining capacity of Ontario.

This has to be really understood because the Conservatives were warned about this. Xstrata had a less than stellar record. In 2006 we were on the verge of seeing the merger of Inco and Falconbridge, which would have created, out of two world-class mining operations, a world-class super-operation. At the time, there was a lot of excitement and interest in the mining industry because of the synergies between Inco and Falconbridge, the kind of technical expertise. These were the most productive base metal mining companies in the world and they were on the verge of merging, but they were held up in a regulatory hurdle. That is when Xstrata, this corporate raider, came along to try to take Falconbridge.

At that time we pushed the government for a simple thing. We were not asking it to stop Xstrata. We were asking it, as government, because of the interest of these national resources, to hold off on allowing Xstrata to run away with Falconbridge until both bids were on the table. In June 2006, I asked the then industry minister a very clear question about the issue, of needing to have both bids on the table, and I spoke specifically about the fact that we were talking about the infrastructure of Canada's copper industry being picked off by this company that was set up in an unaccountable Swiss canton.

My colleague from Windsor West and the industry committee passed a motion calling on the government to hold off until both bids were on the table but the government, of course, laughed it off. In fact, the industry minister had quite a little chuckle at the time and said that he had not heard any rumours that it was going to get up and move the mines.

It shows how little the government understands the mining industry. No, it was not going to move the mines but it could move the copper ore, and that is exactly what is happening with Xstrata right now. Xstrata has come in and has sent a clear message. It is not interested in the traditional compact that we have had with industry, that it is going to develop the resources and process them in Ontario. It has very clearly said that it will not meet the environmental standards. It will shut down Sudbury if it wants to. It is shutting down Timmins and, unfortunately, I am warning my colleagues from Quebec, it will be shutting Rouyn-Noranda next. This is about moving copper to China and other places for processing.

This is a complete failure by the government. If we talk to anyone in the mining industry, they will say that what was allowed to happen under the present government with Falconbridge and Inco is the equivalent of the Avro Arrow. The development of the Sudbury basin will be permanently impacted because of the short-sighted lack of understanding of what was at stake here.

In my community of Timmins right now, 1,000 jobs are being lost right off the board and 4,000 jobs in the region. The loss of this refinery is sending a very clear message, and it is a message the government kind of likes, that our resource regions will now be treated like any third world jurisdiction because being open for business, it wants us to be open for the bad players as well as the good players. That is not the way we need to do business in this country.

My colleague from the Bloc spoke about ideology. The Conservatives are blinded, as G.K. Chesterton said, by the horrible mysticism of money. They believe that capital being allowed to do whatever it wants is the only social good. Therefore, if Xstrata comes in and tells our communities that they are just another third world jurisdiction, that it does not have any obligation to process resources and that it will ship it out, the government says that is fine because capital speaks.

If Vale comes in and tells the most productive mining workers in the world at Port Colborne, at Voisey's Bay and at Sudbury that they are now a disposable workforce, the government says that is perfectly okay. However, we know it is not okay. If we are going to see this complete lack of due diligence from the government on key sectors like mining, then what will happen when it starts to sell off our telecommunications and our tar sands lock, stock and barrel to the Chinese so they can just move the bitumen out and process it elsewhere? It is a lack of a national vision on which the government has to be held accountable.

The other day we lost the third largest OSB manufacturer in North American, Grant Forest Products. When our leader asked the Minister of Industry where the net benefit was to Canada, the minister could not even stand up and give us an answer on his own. He had to read from a press release put out by Georgia-Pacific. We are not Georgia. This is Canada. The government has an obligation when it reviews a sale, and that is not to say a sale will not happen, to ensure that the people who are buying up these resources will do so to the net benefit of Canada. It is a simple thing. I do not see why it has been so hard.

The motion before us today is very clear. The government needs to be held accountable because it blew it. I am calling on my colleagues from all parties to stand with us and say that what has happened at Vale, what has happened at Xstrata, what has happened at Stelco and what has happened with the tearing apart of Nortel has been a national tragedy and the government needs to take responsibility for it. It must learn the lessons of this and Canadians need to learn the lessons of ensuring that when we are dealing with our resources that there is a net benefit.

Canada has now dropped to 14th out of 17th in western countries in terms of industrial innovation. It is no wonder, because when we are a branch plant economy, the investments are not made. Statistics Canada tells us that Canadian operations are twice as profitable as the ones owned by foreign companies in Canada because we are just a branch plant economy. We have to do better than selling off our natural resources to the detriment of our communities. Our regions and our people have a right to benefit from those jobs, which is why our country needs to stand up for this principle. That is why the New Democrats put forward this motion. We are calling on all members of the House to work with us.

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, Mexico is a strong ally of Canada and a great trading partner. We have numerous relations with Mexico. Mexico has a number of democratic institutions. It has the rule of law and police. Yet, it also has a drug war that is spiralling out of control with greater and greater levels of violence in many communities.

We had the case of a young Mexican woman who was under threat from the drug cartels. She sought refuge in Canada because her life was at risk. She was refused refugee status because Mexico is not perceived as a place where we take refugees from. She was returned and ended up being kidnapped in June 2009. They found her dead. She had most likely been killed by these drug cartels. She was only 24 years old.

There are horror stories like this in many jurisdictions and it is sometimes difficult in Canada to assess what will happen if a person is sent back to a violent situation. I am concerned again about the safe country designation. I think we may be taking some of the few rights that exist for people who are in these very unstable situations and are trying to escape violence. I am concerned that people with legitimate concerns for their safety who come here would no longer be given the same level of protection.

In terms of where we need to go with this bill and what we need to change, does my hon. colleague think that the area of safe country designation is one of the areas that we will need to look at to ensure the bill is just and does protect the people who deserve to be protected from threats of violence?

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague has done great work in the area of refugees. The discussion before us to resolve the refugee issue simply and to everyone's satisfaction is like coming in and untying the Gordian knot. I recognize the difficulty that is before us and we need to find ways to work together beyond all parties.

My concern is on the designation of safe countries. We do recognize that there are countries that have been identified by the UN where refugees are taken from, but we also find now that there are many areas of global unrest, where there are drug cartels, extreme gender violence, whether it is violence on sexual orientation, that these refugee claimants would still have legitimate claims and yet they might not be covered under the list the government has provided.

I would like to speak specifically to the issue of, for example, the labour activists in Colombia who have been targeted over the last number of years. We have read the names of the labour activists and organizers who have been killed in Colombia while the free trade deal has been negotiated, and yet it would not be politically expedient for the government to allow any of these activists into Canada because it would recognize that they do have some fundamental human rights problems in Colombia.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague how we square the circle. How do we ensure that those people who are fleeing situations of violence are given a fair hearing while separating that perhaps from the aim of a political treaty or the negotiating aims of a particular government at a particular time in history?

[Balanced Refugee Reform Act, April 27th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, one of the key elements concerning me about this new refugee bill and what is missing in it is that when we look at the refugee boards, those are life and death decisions that are being made and if they are being made incorrectly, the damage obviously to the families who go before them will be very serious.

I am concerned about the issue of how these people are chosen because we know that one of the key elements of the Federal Accountability Act was that the government was going to put in place a commissioner for appointments, so that we would not just have party pals, party volunteers, party bagmen and party hacks put into these positions. We see that the Conservatives love putting their pals in everything from the Senate all the way down to all kinds of appointment boards, yet it has failed to bring in this element.

I would ask my colleague, does he agree with me that when it comes to the refugee boards, we need to have people who are chosen because they understand the issues, because they are not simply going to be doing political favours for the government, and whether or not we need to push the government to have independent people chosen and not just political appointees?

[Petitions, April 21st, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by hundreds of residents of northern Ontario who are very concerned about the failure of the government to protect Canada's serious and vital interests.

These people are concerned about the decision by Xstrata to shut down the Timmins smelter, making it known that it is cutting all the refining jobs out of Ontario, hydrating the deposits in Sudbury and laying off thousands of workers. It is the same situation we see at Vale Inco where one of the greatest mining operations in the world is being turned into a third world operation. Of course, today we see that right after the government got a commitment from Georgia-Pacific that there would be no job losses, it has already started to fire people in Englehart, Earlton and Mississauga.

The petitioners are calling on the government to open up section 36 of the Canada Investment Act so that the regions that are being completely ripped off of their resources by these foreign companies can have access to the secret agreements that the government signed so we know when the government is failing to stand up for the interests of northern and resource-dependent communities.

[Criminal Code, April 20th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to speak to this bill. I would say at the outset that I think the House of Commons is the place for this debate. I have received thousands of letters from my constituents who are deeply concerned about this issue.

This is a discussion that is worth having because the issue of suffering, the issue of death is perhaps one of the most profound issues we can deal with as a society. It touches each of us. Each of us is brought into the final moments of death at a level of intimacy and concern we never would have felt possible.

I spent much of the last three weeks with my father at the palliative care centre in Scarborough General Hospital. I want to say on the record that the palliative care that exists in this country is second to none. Two years ago I spent time with my brother-in-law as he lay dying at Perram House in Toronto. The experience I had there had a profound impact on me and my whole family and our understanding of this.

The question before us today is what we should be doing as a society. It is an issue that cuts to the very essence of this House of Commons. We need to bring forth the option of saying we have to maintain the ability of Canada's health care system to manage pain for people in palliative care so that they can go through that final journey.

It is possible to do it without taking the option of saying we have to go the assisted suicide route. I understand why people might believe that is an option, but I do not believe it is the option we should be taking as a society. To take that position and for us to vote on this in the House of Commons means more than making a statement. We have to provide the resources necessary so that our medical systems and our families have the support they need. Otherwise we will be leaving the sick, the suffering and the dying in a situation in which they should not be left.

It is possible to have good pain management. It is possible to treat people with dignity right through the final moments. However, that has to be a decision we make as a society and a commitment we make to each other that we will be there as a society, we will be there with the medical system, we will be there as family and we will be there as a community.

This debate has reminded us of the need to make that commitment. I hope this House of Commons will make that commitment when the time comes to vote.

[Petitions, April 14th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am bringing forward the concerns of hundreds of residents of Timmins—James Bay from Peawanuck, Moosonee and down through Timmins, who are very concerned that the federal government rubber-stamped the sale of the key base metal industries in our country, Falconbridge and Inco, to the corporate raiders Xstrata and Vale without any oversight.

What we are seeing in Sudbury right now is brutal: nine months into a lockout strike, where they are trying to turn our workforce into third-world Brazilian-style workers. In Timmins, we are seeing the shutdown of Ontario's only copper refining capacities. Xstrata will probably start to move toward refining in China.

People are asking for action because they saw the government's response to the crisis in the auto sector when the government said that this was the public good. However, when it comes to the future of Canada's base metal mines and the future of northern Ontario, we see a government that is more than willing to let foreign capitalist interests dictate the future of our communities.

The petitioners are asking for the government to come clean with the Canadian people, open up section 36 of the Investment Canada Act and show us the secret deals that were signed with Xstrata and Vale.

[Committees of the House, April 13th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The iPod levy was not in Bill C-61, so again I think she is mistaking it. She needs to explain what the complaints were because it was not in the bill.