Charlie Angus

[Committees of the House, November 27th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great amusement to my hon. colleague, with whom I sat on committee and who I have a great deal of respect for, but the fact is that we have a serious issue to debate today.

I know that the Conservatives have numerous bills on mandatory minimums for furniture theft, bicycle theft and whatever else they can drum up. We also know that the Prime Minister absolutely shamed Canada on the international stage this weekend. He is showing more and more that he is not the leader of a national government but basically a front for big oil, and people are outraged at that.

When we talk about an agenda here, the agenda that we are seeing is of someone who, from the beginning, said that Kyoto was a socialist plot to rob Alberta of its just pillaging of the tar sands.

Regardless of all that, the debate in the House today is an issue that needed to be brought forth. If the member does not like the timing of it, too bad, so sad. This is the work that we do in the House. The question is whether the issues of the CRTC relevant.

The member's own government is the lead nation at the GATS in Geneva to strip all the foreign content rules off Telecom and is now at the receiving end of a plurilateral request to strip all domestic content quotas from the ability of broadcasting to even maintain a cultural policy. That is something the Conservatives are doing internationally in Geneva. Does the member not think that the Canadian public expects that members, whether they are from the NDP, the Bloc, the Liberals or even the Conservative Party, will look at those issues when they come back and ensure we have a say on what is happening with the wholesale sell-off of our cultural landscape by the government?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 22nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great fascination to my colleague's dissertation. He talked about the whole notion of treating young people separately, the historic jurisprudence behind it and how the Conservatives are saying no, they will treat the 12 year olds the same as they treat the 25 year olds.

There is one area where the Conservatives are very clear about treating one group of people very differently and that is the first nations people. I invite any of the get tough on crime people from the Conservatives to come to the James Bay coast or to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory where the police are woefully understaffed, where they are in situations that are just plain dangerous. Not a single officer in any of the non-native forces would ever put himself or herself in the situation the NAPS officers are in on a daily basis.

For example, in the community of Attawapiskat there are 2,000 people with only two police officers on duty. If one officer has to take someone out, that leaves one officer in a community of 2,000. In other communities like Moose Factory, the police station has to shut down at a certain point during the night because the officers are not getting paid for overtime.

The Conservatives believe that these people can be treated differently, that their crimes can be treated differently, that their police officers can be left with no support, no help and that for the victims of real crime, who are mostly our impoverished first nations, it is too bad, so sad. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are running around telling us that we are going to get tough on every little punk who is walking the streets in Ottawa or Toronto.

I would like to ask the member why he thinks that the government shows such casual disregard for the first people of our country and refuses to support the police in those communities with the adequate resources not only to ensure the health and safety of police officers but to ensure that the first nations communities are being kept with the same measure of safety that other Canadians take for granted.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 22nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's speech. I found it very powerful because more and more now we are talking about the criminalization and the demonization of our young people. It is, I think, a profound change in our society.

I was a school trustee. I saw schools putting in CCTV cameras to spy on our young people because they are up to something. I have seen schools where they have taken out the meeting places where young people spend time together because if those young people are spending time together they are causing trouble. There is a sense that young people are a threat to be watched all the time.

Where is the question about how these young people are our citizens? These are the people we adults should be working with instead of just always blaming them, stopping them on the streets and making sure they have no place to hang out. This is what we are seeing and not just with the Conservative Party. That party is a manifestation of a much larger problem.

When Sun Media has a story about a little old lady mugged by a punk, we will notice that there are members in the House who have a spring in their step and a whistle as they sing. It seems to make their day that they can come here and say that they have another example of evil youth. I would like to ask the member what she thinks about this continual demonization of young people.

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, November 22nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to this debate because I think it is very important to have these discussions.

I would like to offer my own interpretation of what we are looking at because for a number of years my wife and I worked with homeless people in downtown Toronto and we would take in people coming from the prison system to live with and to work with on rehabilitation. We found, of course, that the vast majority of criminals were not the evil ones that they are sometimes portrayed as, but are actually mostly the stupid ones. The reasons for which they get involved in crimes are so abominably stupid most of the times that it is surprising they did not get caught before they started.

However, what we found time and again with recidivism were issues of addiction and poverty and that once they fell into that system the abuse and humiliation, which is what they would talk about in prison, damaged them so much that they were coming out much worse than when they went in. It became harder and harder to help someone, especially young offenders who had been in two or three times, because of the abuse they were suffering in prison.

Does the hon. member have any suggestions about this facet of the criminal population, the ones who are first getting in there and how we can actually keep them from ending up as worse citizens at the end of the day?

[Forestry Industry, November 22nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, well, it will be a bitter Christmas for the 400 laid off workers at Norboard and Tembec in Cochrane. It is the same story across northern Ontario. Tembec and Timmins are down. Grant is down. Wawa is down. Dryden is down. Kenora is down.

We had a motion in the House to help the forestry sector and the manufacturing sector at a time of crisis, and what happened? The Liberals allowed that motion to be killed. They sat on their hands.

Now that people back home are finding out, the Liberals are scrambling to come up with excuses. Get this: They claim that if they stood up for the forestry families in northern Ontario, there could have been an election and they would have lost seats. What a pitiful response. They chose saving their own political skins over fighting for the hard-working families in northern Ontario.

If the Liberals are going to take a dive every time there is a vote in the House, they should go home, stop collecting their pay and leave the work of opposing the government to us.

[Questions on the Order Paper, November 22nd, 2007]

With respect to the use of nuclear power and the Alberta oil sands: (a) what is the government’s position on the use of nuclear power to extract oil; (b) what studies and evaluations have been prepared, requested or commissioned by the government; (c) what individuals, department or organization undertook these studies; (d) what is the cost of these studies; (e) what are the findings and recommendations of these studies; (f) what recommendations does the government agree with; (g) what are the dates of publication or submission, and titles of each of these studies; (h) what environmental assessments have been undertaken with respect to the use of nuclear power in the oil sands and what are the findings and recommendations of these studies; (i) what studies have been undertaken concerning the disposal and containment of nuclear waste arising from power plants that are expected to be constructed in the future; (j) what marketing strategies related to the construction of nuclear power plants have been received by the government from oil and gas companies, including but not limited to Royal Dutch Shell PLC and Energy Alberta Corp; (k) what is the earliest date construction of a nuclear power plant could start; (l) what locations are being considered for construction; and (m) what is the estimated cost of construction for any power plants under consideration?

[Petitions, November 14th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to stand in this House as a former asbestos worker and present a petition signed by people from across Canada who are growing increasingly concerned about Canada's shameful record of subsidizing the production of asbestos and the selling of it into the third world where there are of course not nearly the health standards in place to protect workers.

The petitioners call upon the Canadian government to recognize the dangers of asbestos, to be honest and truthful about the threat of asbestos, to recognize that it is the greatest industrial killer the world has every known, and to ban asbestos in all its forms, and institute a just transition program for asbestos workers and the communities they live in, to end all government subsidies of the asbestos industry in Canada and abroad, and to stop blocking international health and safety conventions designed to protect workers from asbestos, in particular, the Rotterdam convention.

[Business of Supply, November 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, last week in the town of Cochrane, Ontario we lost the plant at Norbord, in the previous two weeks we lost Tembec Cochrane, 200 or 300 jobs, so there is a loss of about 500 jobs in a town of 5,000. That is mirrored across northern Ontario with 130 jobs lost at Weyerhaeuser Wawa OSB, jobs lost in Kenora, jobs lost in Thunder Bay, jobs lost in Atikokan. Yet what we have seen from the government is absolute, complete disinterest in the fact that we have an overheated dollar right now and it is winnowing out in a brutal fashion the industrial capacity of rural northern Ontario to be able to compete where our markets are.

I would like to ask my colleague why he thinks the government shows a disinterest that would do Marie Antoinette proud, a disinterest for any region outside the tar sands, for the regions across Canada, whether in northern Quebec or northern Ontario, that are suffering because of misplaced policies by the government which is favouring one region of this country at the direct expense of every other region based in manufacturing and forestry?

[Business of Supply, November 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's dissertation. The only point on which I would disagree with him is when he said that the government did not understand what it was doing. I would suggest that the government understands full well what it is doing.

The government is stripping the fiscal capacity of the federal government to ensure we have a balanced economy across the country. Certain regions will make the kinds of profits that have never even been imagined and other regions will be left to disappear. The upper class, the banks and the big oil companies will profit while the rest of us are left to disappear.

I would suggest that it is not just in Quebec. Across northern Ontario, mill after mill has disappear and the economy of complete towns has been wiped out like an economic neutron bomb.

The government members do nothing but snicker and make snide remarks because they know their plan, if fully implemented, will allow their base, which are the big banks and big oil, to make out of this period with unprecedented profits while the rest of us will be left behind.

I would like to hear my hon. colleague's comments on this perspective.

[Petitions, November 13th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, as a former asbestos worker, I am very proud to rise in the House to present a petition signed by people from across Canada. They are asking that the Canadian government finally come to terms with the fact that asbestos is the biggest single industrial killer the world has known. Canada's reputation as a worldwide leader has been tarnished by our continuing attempt to sell this toxic gas into the third world where, as we well know, there are not the protections necessary. In light of the recent epidemiology studies done in Quebec, it is very clear that asbestos is killing people here in Canada as well. I am tabling this petition on behalf of people from across this country.