Charlie Angus

[Sitting Resumed, November 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I have listened all morning to my colleagues from the Liberal Party blowing rhetorical spin bubbles. I have not agreed with very much of it, but I did agree with the hon. member on one point that I thought was actually very profound.

After her attack on the Conservative ideology, with which I completely agree, she said that Canadians deserve a government that will stand up. I think that is a fairly simple statement.

Yesterday we saw a plan that was put forward to dramatically alter the economic capacity of the federal government to provide the kinds of programs that most progressive Canadians would believe in, yet what did we see? We saw a party that took a dive, a party that refused to stand up, a party that sat on its hands and is sending a message to Canadians that its one fundamental interest is saving the political skin of its leader over taking on the wrong-headed, right wing ideology of the Conservatives.

[Sitting Resumed, November 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague's discourse. Whenever she speaks, it is sort of like looking in a political funhouse of mirrors because whatever she says is so distorted when it comes out the other end I am not sure what side is the upside or the downside.

I am certainly pleased to take credit that 19 New Democrats stood up along with millions of Canadians across the country and threw their royal petards out on the street. In the speech we just heard, the sort of shallow revisionism actually speaks to the fact that the Liberals do not get it. They do not believe that average Canadians, who became tired of year after year of empty promises, actually had the right or the nerve to stand up and throw them out of government after what they failed to deliver on. If the member wants to put the hopes and beliefs of the Canadian people who wanted something different than the Liberals on the backs of the NDP caucus, I would certainly be more than willing to assume that.

However, I have to ask her a simple question. Why is she talking about history when we should be talking about today, when we are talking about a budget that will strip the fiscal capacity of the government, of future governments to bring forward any form of plans that they are advocating? The Liberal Party is a party that took a dive. This is the party that members do not have the guts to stand up. Those members would rather sit down because they are more worried about saving their own political skin. If the member believes what she says she believes, why did she not just stand up and vote?

[Sitting Resumed, November 1st, 2007]

It is in the red book.

[Business of Supply, November 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, just the other night, I was reading my favourite piece of environmentally sustainable newsprint, the Liberal red book, because this is the only government document I have ever known that never had to be reprinted a whole bunch of times. The Liberals just changed the cover.

In the 1993 red book, the Liberals promised 150,000 new child care spaces and they never delivered. When those government members were on their death bed and more worried about their own jobs than actually delivering for people, they put all the failed promises into the famous Liberal death bed pinata and smashed the promises of the Liberal red book across Canada. Then they think people are silly and stupid enough to believe they actually delivered when they did not deliver.

However, I am not asking about the past. I am asking about the present. The fact is that the government has announced major changes to the fiscal capacity of the government that will be laid out in the mini-budget over the next five years which will drastically impact the ability to deliver anything like a national child care service, yet the member sat on her hands yesterday. She does not have the courage of her convictions. She did nothing. She sat still.

How is it, first of all, that she can stand in this House and talk about all these wonderful programs that the Liberals would bring in, when they sat back and are allowing this vision of the country that they know will strip the capacity of the federal government?

Second, how can she accept a cheque for not doing any work when Canadians are asking someone to stand up to the Harper government?

[Business of Supply, November 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague's speech because what she is articulating is the growing prosperity gap we are seeing in our country. Working families and particularly working women are falling through the cracks because the programs they need are not in place.

Whenever we raise these issues in the House, I am concerned because there is a credibility gap as much as a prosperity gap. The credibility gap is when politicians say one thing and do another. For example, 25% of the women's programs were cut by the Liberal government in the 1990s and $25 billion was cut in transfer payments to the provinces to help social assistance and health.

Now we are seeing a so-called mini-budget that will have a dramatic impact on the ability, over the next five to ten years, of the federal government to provide services.

At this point, what kind of country and what kind of vision does the member have for Canada? I do not think anybody would credit that people should be paid to sit on their hands when it comes time to stand up for the kind of vision she has for this country. Either the member has a vision like the Conservatives, who are sucking the fiscal capacity out of the federal government's ability to support the kind of programs that she said she supports, or she needs to have the courage of her convictions to stand up and say no, and to stand up to the government. However, sitting on her hands is not--

[Aboriginal Affairs, October 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud tonight to rise with my colleague from Nanaimo—Cowichan to speak to the need for Parliament to adopt the Jordan principle.

Last year we had the great privilege to travel across the great territories of the Nishnawbe-Aski people to participate in the remembrance of Treaty 9. We took a boat up the Albany River about 100 kilometres to an isolated spot where 100 years before, the commissioners came to sign a treaty with the people of Ogoki Post.

At that meeting, like so many other meetings, we asked this question. What was there to celebrate in a treaty that brought so much misery to these people and where lie after lie was enacted?

During that celebration a man stepped forward. We were in a kind of little wooded area with a campfire. He said that he would like to speak to the dignitaries who were here. He spoke in his native language and a young student came forward to translate. He said, “I apologize. I never learned to speak English”.

He said that when the school commissioners came, they took his sister. His sister never came home and they never heard from her again. She went off to a residential school and nobody ever came back to tell the community what happened to that little girl. He said that when the school commissioners came the next year, his parents hid him in the bush and he never got an education.

I think of the child who is not remembered by anybody in Canada except by the people in her community. Yet there are so many children like her across Canada. They are the tragic stitches in the terrible quilt that was the residential school situation.

We stand up in Parliament and say that we remember. We will have truth and reconciliation and we will have a payout.

However, I hope I am wrong, but I predict that within my lifetime another Parliament will launch an investigation into the widespread negligent abuse of first nation children across the country. This is taking place right now, every day in every community across the country where first nations children live.

Jordan is not an unnamed child. He becomes a symbol of so many children who are lost in foster care, who are not given adequate medical services and who are not given the most basic education support.

In fact, in the Ontario Human Rights Code every child is guaranteed access to special needs programming if they need it. That is unless they are first nations because the federal government pays for that. We work on the principle, with our first nations schools, that in every province they have to meet provincial standards. Of course they should meet provincial standards, but here is the kicker. They get paid according to federal standards and the federal standards are abysmal.

Just two weeks ago we had two teachers in northwestern Ontario in the Nishnawbe-Aski territory on a hunger strike to try to raise attention over the need for special education dollars, but they did not get much attention with all the hullabaloo that goes on in Parliament. Nary a question has been raised about the fact that people are waging hunger strikes to get education dollars.

I would like to focus tonight on giving the people back home an example of how things are done or how things are not done in Indian country. I would like to give the example of Attawapiskat school, and I will describe the school. About 400 students are in that school and it sits on a badly contaminated toxic site of something like 30,000 litres. Year after year the children were getting sick. They finally asked INAC to do an investigation and they found out they were sitting on perhaps the most toxic site in northern Ontario. Did INAC pull the children? Of course not. We needed more studies. Therefore, we had to have study after study.

As a former school board trustee on the Northeast Catholic School Board, if we had any questions of health, the school would be shut down immediately and the students pulled out, but not in Attawapiskat, not until the parents took action and pulled the students out.

That was seven years ago. We have had three Indian Affairs ministers commit to that community that a school would be built, and no school has been built. The kicker again is this community is not asking for a handout.

The community does not want to go with the low standards that INAC has, the crappy standards for building schools that INAC insists on every first nation. It wants a school that meets the proper standards of the province of Ontario. It wants proper class sizes. It wants a school that is big enough to hold the expected 600 students. The community does not want to wait for the federal government. It went to the bank to get its own financing because it actually has an excellent financial track record.

Of course we brought this to Indian Affairs because we thought it was a no-brainer. We thought this was a win-win story. The Minister of Indian Affairs has said that a school is needed there. It is amazing that the community has to go to the bank for its own financing. The only hitch is it needs Indian affairs to sign off on the tuition agreements so that the bank deal can flow. The former Minister of Indian Affairs signed off on that, but nothing happened.

In November 2005 I sat with the Indian affairs minister and we hammered out an agreement with the head of the regional office for Ontario. I actually looked it up in the paper. Chief Mike Carpenter went to the school to tell the students and they were all yelling for joy because they had brought home an agreement to build that school.

Well, there is no school. We have had two other Indian affairs ministers. Another one signed off on the agreement. The latest we understand is that it is now at the preliminary project approval stage. That means they are nowhere in getting this school built because Indian affairs continues the pattern of systemic negligence toward the most vulnerable, our young. We simply need someone to sign off on this agreement. The banks and the community will do the rest.

Attawapiskat is sitting on what is now one of the richest diamond deposits in the western world. It took four years to get that mine up and running. There was hurdle after hurdle. There was no problem for the federal government and the province to get that diamond mine up and running in the most isolated region in the province of Ontario. We could get the permits. That is good, because in northern Ontario we support mineral development and we hope that this mine will employ first nations people. It can be a positive story.

It is amazing when we juxtapose the phenomenal riches of the Victor diamond mine with the abysmal poverty that is in Attawapiskat.

We have to ask why is it that they could discover diamonds in a place as isolated as the Mushkegowuk Cree territory. Infrastructure was put in place and cost was no object. The federal government and the province was ready to sign whatever had to be signed to get that mine up and running. Meanwhile, the greatest single resource that we have in northern Ontario, our young people, were left sitting on top of a toxic contaminated site. Nobody so far has come forward from the regional office of INAC to sign that agreement, even though we have a commitment from the minister and a commitment from the director general of Ontario.

What we are seeing in Attawapiskat is what we see every single day across first nation territories in Canada. It is a disgrace. Let us just call it for what it is. We need some accountability. We need to set some standards. We need to start making some things happen so that the next generation will not ask how this could have been allowed to happen, how could people have sat back and said, “Who cares”.

[Petitions, October 29th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to stand today in the House to bring forward a petition signed by people from British Columbia, Newfoundland, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Nova Scotia, concerning Canada's shameful record as the number one pedlar of asbestos into the third world.

In light of the shocking article in the Globe and Mail this Saturday by international photographer, Louie Palu, which shows the effects of the Canadian asbestos industry and happens in places like India, it is opportune to bring this before Parliament.

The petitioners call on the government to ban of asbestos in all its forms and institute a just transition program for asbestos workers in those communities affected, end all government subsidies of asbestos, both in Canada and abroad, and stop blocking the international health and safety convention designed to protect workers from asbestos.

As a former asbestos worker, I know the extraordinary length we had to go to protect Canadian workers. Yet workers in the third world have been treated like human trash and we are left with this horrific stain on our reputation.

I am proud to bring this petition forward.

[Student Debt, October 25th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative government is continuing on in the long and dismal Liberal tradition of abandoning Canada's greatest resource, which is our educated young. There was nothing in the throne speech to deal with rising university and college debt, nothing from the massive surplus, and yet university students are facing higher and higher levels of debt, an estimated deficit now that is upward of $20 billion. It is a policy that is shortsighted, both economically and socially.

Let us take the economy in northern Ontario, for example, where our economy is continually being held back by high levels of youth out-migration.

If young people from Timmins, Kirkland Lake or Cochrane goes south to get an education, what chance will they have to come back and be a prime mover in the new economy when they are left with high levels of debt at $40,000 and $50,000? The situation is simply unacceptable.

The NDP is proposing three clear, simple solutions. First, we need to increase the transfer payments to freeze or lower student debt. Second, we need to set up a national needs based grant system. Third, let us deal with the problem of the student loan system.

[Public Works and Government Services, October 24th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this scheme was cooked up by the Liberals and is being carried out by the Conservatives and what we are looking at is an elaborate accounting shell game where they are going to bring in $1.4 billion now and it is going to cost taxpayers $3 billion.

For example, there is the Harry Hays building in Calgary. Right now it costs taxpayers $5 million a year to maintain. Once it is sold it will cost taxpayers $20 million to maintain.

Who is getting ripped off here? It is the Canadian public. Where is the accountability?

[Public Works and Government Services, October 24th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to accountability, the government is going in the wrong direction. It took a court injunction to stop Senator Fortier from selling off two federal buildings in Vancouver.

The unelected and unaccountable minister clearly did not do his homework. He did not consult with the first nations and he did not consult with taxpayers who over the life of this deal will be out $390 million in this lease-fleece scheme giveaway to the private sector.

Now that the unelected senator has had to yank the two Vancouver buildings, will he now do the right thing and stop the sale of the other seven?