Charlie Angus

[International Plowing Match and Rural Expo, October 8th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, last week 85,000 people visited the village of Earlton in the beautiful riding of Timmins—James Bay. They came to celebrate the 2009 International Plowing Match and Rural Expo. People came from France, the United States, all over southern Ontario and Quebec. They were amazed, of course, by the beauty of the land but in particular by the unique spirit of the people.

The event was a celebration of northern culture and identity. Anglophones, Franco-Ontarians, Quebeckers from Abitibi, first nations people from Quebec and Ontario; when we all work together, we are a force to be reckoned with.

I would like to give a big thanks to Darlene Bowen, Norm Koch, Albert Gauthier, Frank and Yolande Rivard, Jules Gravel, John Vanthof and the thousand-plus volunteers who made this the biggest event in the history of the north.

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, that is so unfair.

To respond, we saw a party that was rife with corruption, that for 13 years did nothing to help the first nations communities, stripped EI, stripped the whole plan for a national housing program, and when the Liberals were on their deathbed, they wrapped all these promises into a giant Liberal pinata. They smashed that pinata just before their death, and they threw these promises across Canada and said, “We delivered.” They delivered nothing, and that is why the Canadian people threw them out. Their big problem is that they want to blame us. Canadians were fed up with their sense of entitlement, and the Canadian public threw them out.

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, the Liberal leader said it is like theatre. The member's party is more like a reality TV show these days. There are days I come into the House and feel it has become like a grade nine cafeteria. I have heard Liberals jokingly say, because they are not really serious about it, “Oh, what's the matter? Is the NDP afraid?” Afraid of what?

There is only one thing I am afraid of, and that is going to residents in places like Smooth Rock Falls and Cochrane, where the mills have shut down, and saying that I had the opportunity to help them get that extra amount of EI to get through the winter and not lose their homes and I decided we were not going to help them because the Count from the United States was entitled to take power in Canada and they would have to wait until he gets power. That is the only thing I would be afraid of saying to a constituent.

[Business of Supply, October 1st, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am always proud to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay. When I stand in the chamber I am always reminded, whatever the form of debate, that this is the place where the great moments in Canadian history have happened. With respect to the defining debates of our generation, whether it was the debate on capital punishment, and even the debate on the extension of the mission in Kandahar, this is where we come together to debate. That being said, not all the debates are great. Some of them are rather mundane. Some of them are fractious. Parliament and democracy is a messy business, but this is where we come to discuss the various aspects of bringing this country forward.

I cannot think of a moment in recent political history where we have had a motion brought forth by the Liberal Party, or any party, that is using the pretext of creating a parliamentary crisis to set up a sideshow to divert citizens' attention from the rot and collapse of what is happening within the Liberal Party. The party looks like a deflated balloon. The Liberals are telling us that this is the moment when they will come forward, and they have brought forth nine lousy words: to bring down a government and force an election. There is no vision and no plan whatsoever.

Let us get to the point of what this is about. We can talk about the problems of the Conservative government any day; the New Democrats have done that consistently. We have never had confidence in the government, because when they brought forth motions under the guise of stimulus that stripped environmental protection on riverways, we opposed that. We opposed the Conservatives when they used the economic stimulus to strip the rights of women workers to get pay equity. We opposed them when they tried to use the economic stimulus as a cover to gut Kyoto.

However, our friends in the Liberal Party never used their position in opposition to push back or demand changes, because they have a fundamentally different view on power. We could perhaps call it the hyena rule of politics, where they would lie in the long grass waiting for government to stumble and then come in and pick up the spoils. They did not see their role in opposition as pushing back, of proposing, of demanding, alternatives.

That is what we in the New Democratic Party have done. We have pushed the government. We have opposed it. We have also said to bring forward motions in this minority context so something can happen. If that happened, then we have achieved our role as opposition.

We now have a $1 billion on the table to help the unemployed. Will it help everyone? No. We understand clearly in politics that we move incrementally to bring forward progressive change. However, the Liberals are not concerned about the $1 billion for the unemployed. They have never been interested in that. It has always been about getting back to power.

We are seeing a sideshow today, where the Liberals are trying to divert attention from the media, from the spectacle going on in their riding associations, their nomination battles and their backstabbing. They are trying to precipitate a parliamentary crisis.

That would not be so bad if they were serious. It reminds me of when I was a child and my granny would take us to see the wrestling. All the ten-year-old boys would be up there shouting and threatening to take Killer Kowalski in a fight. All it would take was for the Killer to look up and glare at us and we would all go running to our seats. We know that the Liberal Party is terrified of the polls. The member for York West said that 99% of the Liberals do not want an election. I am looking at their ranks. They do not have 99 members. That means that perhaps even the leader is saying, “yes, yes, yes”, but his knees and legs are saying, “no, no, no”.

This is an absurd spectacle, and it has to be framed this way. This party has to grow up and realize that if it is to be a 21st century party involved in participatory democracy, then the members have to start coming forward with some progressive, credible ideas that are based on the principles of parliamentary democracy.

Let us look at this farce that is taking place within the Liberal Party right now. It could be a reality TV show; it could perhaps be a tawdry Graham Greene novel. We have the butler, the would-be contender in Outremont, the butler who worked for the power corporation, the butler who was seen as a threat to the Quebec lieutenant, and the Quebec lieutenant who worked for the Count. But then there was the man in the shadows from Toronto Centre, who is also tied to a power corporation and of course tied to the puppet master, the former prime minister. We have the butler, the Quebec lieutenant, the man in the shadows and the Count.

It reads like some kind of bizarre Graham Greene novel, but what it speaks about is that not one of these players in this Outremont farce ever said that the riding association should be making the decision.

When a party loses power, it has to go back to its grassroots. It has to get revitalized. It has to come back for new ideas. People waited. They waited through five Liberal leaders in five years for these new ideas.

We may say what we want about the former Liberal leader, but he was a man who came to this House and said where he stood. We could disagree with him, but he stood on principles and he did his job. The present Liberal leader has presented us with no vision except that he believes he is fundamentally entitled to power.

We have come to this non-confidence motion: nine measly words. We have waited for this vision. Where is this vision? We have waited for an alternative to the gang of Conservatives, but there is none. There is just a sense of entitlement. They say, “Here is our list. We want power back.” There has been no attempt from this party, at any point, to come forward with a vision other than “trust us”. If there were a vision, we could debate it.

I personally think that the present Liberal leader is profoundly out of touch with average Canadians in his defence of torture, his flag-waving on the Iraq war and the very scurrilous comments he has made in the last few years about Canada's tradition of peacekeeping. He thought we took the easy way out when we were building bridges and schools overseas. That is profoundly out of touch with Canadian values.

I would like the Liberal leader to bring his vision so we could debate it in the House. Perhaps there is another way, but we have seen none of that.

We come back to the motion of today. The government has been on the wrong track for some time. We have tried to push back, but we have had a party in opposition that has sat back and allowed, time after time, the Conservatives to push through key elements of their agenda that progressive Canadians are fundamentally opposed to. We finally now have them at the table saying that they will bring forward some motions. It is not great. It is not the end of the world. It is not going to solve everything, but we finally have them at the table saying they will do something.

The Liberals are saying, “We do not want to talk about that. We want to talk about coming back to power.” We have not seen any credible position or vision from this party. Like the rest of Canadians, we are going to have to sit back and watch Tout le monde en parle to see the next steps in the reality TV show that has become the Liberal Party.

If a leader has a vision, he invigorates his party members and they stand behind him. They do not stab each other in public and try to create regional battles, pitting one city against another. That is not a party that is ready for power.

I would ask my hon. colleagues in the Liberal Party to calm their leader down, to explain that in Canada one has to go with something other than a sense of entitlement. Perhaps we need to say that this party needs to spend a little more time in the political wilderness. It needs to reinvigorate itself a little more, and it needs to spend more time understanding that in the 21st century its grassroots count, new ideas count, that it is not simply a letter of entitlement that allows it to walk in and assume power.

I do not think anybody is in the media gallery today watching this spectacle of the Liberal Party clashing its paper swords. I do not think anybody up front is watching it. They are waiting for us to get back to business, because the business at hand is very serious. We are in the worst economic crisis in a generation. We are on the verge of perhaps the most serious flu pandemic in 20 or 30 years. We are before Copenhagen with a government with no plan to deal with the serious issues of climate change.

Our role as opposition is so important. It is to propose and push the government to action. I would like to see our colleagues in the Liberal Party work with us on how we take the government and make it responsive to the Canadian people. However, there has to be something more to it than suddenly saying to the Canadian people, “We want power. We want it now. We are not going to provide you with any reason of why we want power other than the fact that we are the Liberals.”

That is why they got tossed out in the first place, and that is why their motion is seen as a farce today.

[Heritage, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, with all due respect, that is the government that lost the gold at the mint and then sold off the silver at Rideau Hall.

When the Conservatives had the bright idea, they would not even wait for an appraisal. That is the rub. They were like bumpkins in a pawn shop. Tea cups that were worth $250,000 were sold off for $250.

I would like the minister to tell us what steps the government will take to ensure that our heritage collections are protected under his watch.

[Heritage, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the government was caught hocking rare heirlooms on a website that usually sells broken desks. It turns out that these artifacts did not even belong to Canada.

A mirror that the government pawned off for $200 has cost $23,000 of taxpayers' money to get back. A vase that the government sold for $500 has cost us $50,000.

Would the government simply admit that it does not understand or care about the value of Canada's heritage collections?

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, September 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague. I keep coming back to a fundamental question that I have not heard answered by the Liberals and Conservatives, who are supporting the bill. In the very year when the bill was being negotiated, 28 or 29 union activists were taken out and murdered in Colombia. That is a staggering number.

We are told that there are always problems anywhere. There are not problems like this in many places that we deal with as equal partners. The Conservatives and the Liberals tell us that the crime rate is dropping. We still see an increase in murders. However, overall crime rate is not the issue. The issue is a fundamental lack of human rights respect so that international capital can exploit certain resources.

My colleague mentioned four million displaced persons. We are not talking about a country that is at war, unless we are talking about a country that is at war internally. Of all the questions we have asked, I have never heard one answer from the Conservatives or the Liberals as to what they have done to raise these issues. They talk about side agreements, but what does my hon. colleague think about the difference it would make if the Conservative government said to the government of Colombia that it wanted to know what steps it would take to investigate the murders of union activists by paramilitaries? That would make a real difference for a change rather than simply rubber-stamping an agreement that has no teeth?

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, September 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague because he hit the nail right on the head with this issue. On this bill, the Liberals and the Conservatives are only interested in protecting the ability of capital to move wherever it wants.

However, when we raise the numerous human rights violations, the 28 or 29 workers who have been killed this year alone, not by drug cartels or violence and street gangs, but people who are organizing in their workplace, the response we have received from the Liberals and the Conservatives is that every country has problems, even Canada, but that the best way to help the country is to ignore the problems. Their response seems to be to ignore people who are being killed working in the very plants in which we are looking to invest. They tell us that as long as we allow capital to do whatever it wants without any obligations, somehow conditions will improve in Colombia.

Given the member's experience with the people he has spoken with, why does he think the Liberals and the Conservatives are showing no interest whatsoever in the killings that have taken place this year while this thing was being debated under their watch?

[Employment Insurance Act, September 28th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I listened with interest to what my hon. colleague had to say. I was particularly interested that he referred to some of the Canadian labour leaders who had spoken about the bill.

Many of the people whom I have spoken with in labour have been very clear. They say that what has been proposed goes a certain amount of the way, but it does not obviously address the overarching problems of EI. They understand it and we understand it. I would like to think the government understands it. I guess what does not seem to be understood is the position of the Liberal Party at this point.

We are in an economic crisis and we now have $1 billion on the table that will help some workers but not every worker. However, the role of the opposition is to continue to push the government to improve, to change, to address the shortcomings of the system that we have in this time of crisis.

When I hear the support we are getting from across the country from labour, they are saying that there is a bigger project for labour out there that has to be addressed, but the solution is not taking $1 billion off the table so the Liberal Party can call an election.

What does my hon. colleague of the role of the House of Commons? We do not have to agree with each other. We do not have to like each other. However, Canadians sent us here. Canadians dealt the cards that put all of us in the House and told us to get something done.

Now we see something that can be done. It goes part of the way. It does not go all the way. We hear the Bloc members saying that they do not want to have anything to do with it because it does not give them everything they want in a perfect universe.

However, the Liberal members are saying something more insidious. They are saying that they do not want this on the table because they want the Liberal Party leader to get his chance at running for the leadership of the country. I think it is absolutely bizarre and delusional. I am sort of worried for his mental health if he thinks the cards are in his favour right now.

Would the member tell us why he thinks the Liberal Party members are putting their own personal interest above the interests of hundreds of thousands of Canadian workers who are calling on us to get some action on unemployment?

[Employment Insurance Act, September 28th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I listened with fascination to my colleague's dissertation, and many of her complaints are absolutely fair. Our role as opposition is to show when there are problems with bills. That is what we are here to do.

Clearly, this bill does not go far enough in addressing the outstanding crisis that we are seeing across this country. However, the question is what we do with the bill before us. I see what the Bloc is doing. It is attempting to divert attention by saying that this is an attempt to treat Quebec unfairly.

We know the mendacity of that argument. I am not even going to respond to it. Does it address all the workers? No, it does not, but does it address some workers? Yes, it does. What should the opposition do at that point? We must continue to fight for fair EI.

I will put this question to the member. Is the Bloc Quebecois the trained poodle of the Liberal Party? When the Liberal Party says that it wants an election and that it does not matter that there is $1 billion on the table, does the Bloc run behind it and say, “Me too, me too”?

That is not opposition. Under the Liberals for the last two years, nothing was being put on the table for EI. Now, we have $1 billion. It is certainly not enough. There are other bills that have to be addressed. We have to continue to fight for that.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague a valid question here. Is she running after the Liberal Party leader, or is she going to stay here in the House and make sure that this money gets out to people?