Charlie Angus

[Canada Elections Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to invite the government House leader to come with me to the northern part of my riding where I do regular clinics and fill out applications for birth certificates, social insurance numbers, and health cards for first nation communities in Kashechewan, Atawapaskat, Moose Factory, Moosonee and Ogoki.

I am amazed at the number of people in these communities who do not have access to the kind of identification we are talking about. They have been simply left off the political map of Canada. These are the isolated first nation communities of course with the lowest levels of voting.

When we are talking about ensuring that people are able to exercise their democratic franchise, the member opposite is accusing us of supporting electoral fraud. I certainly take exception to that because I have people in my region who are trying to vote, who do not have addresses because they are not listed on band addresses, whose children have not had birth certificates, and whose government officials do not come up and fill out the most basic forms that every other Canadian takes for granted.

We have some serious problems with this bill because we want to ensure that these people are not disenfranchised. I would be more than happy to invite the hon. government House leader to come with me and fill out some of these forms and he could see some of the problems we are up against. The issue, for example, of the latest census on the James Bay coast was abysmal. It was done poorly. We are dealing time and time again with people who are simply not in the records of this country.

[Petitions, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very honoured to rise in the House and present a petition signed by people from all across this good country, including such famous Canadian centres as Wadena, Saskatchewan; Minnedosa, Manitoba; Trois-Rivières, Quebec; the wonderful community of Iroquois Falls, Ontario, which happens to be in my riding; Bridgewater, Nova Scotia; Holy Cross, Nova Scotia; and Harris, Saskatchewan.

The petitioners are concerned about the decline in support for museum funding across this country. In fact, with the cuts that were visited upon our nation's museums, every small town in this country has felt the terrible blow laid to them by the Conservative government.

The petitioners ask us as members of Parliament to rise to the occasion to recognize the value of museums, to recognize the value of heritage and culture, things the government seems to have missed out on. I am not editorializing here but this seems to be the message I am getting from these petitioners. They call upon us to work together to restore the museums assistance funding and recognize the value of our Canadian museums.

[Broadcasting Act, January 30th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to rise today and speak to Bill C-327.

I have to make an admission to the people of Canada that I am a huge fan of action films. In fact, my whole family are fans. On Friday nights, we like nothing better for the world to be hanging in balance while the good guy has to run out and save the planet with two minutes to spare while the planes are flying. I think one of the reasons these films are successful is that they are entertaining and people can tell the difference between the reality of violence and the action film genre, so I have to put that on the record.

However, I am interested in this bill because I believe that there is a difference between seeing the fantasy world of cops and robbers and action hero stuff that we are used to, the sort of comic book entertainment, and the good guy always wins in the end element of film and television. There is a fundamental shift that I am starting to see in terms of three areas.

First, is the increasing level of abusive, degrading and humiliating television that has become a standard staple.

Second, is the relentlessness of the imagery. As we know, our young people are not just watching it on television, they are on the Internet, and there is a relentlessness that is hammered home time and time again.

I think of the third issue, and I find this from my role formerly as a school board trustee. When we talk about empowerment and choice, we are assuming that we are talking about 1950s-style families. I can tell members, as a school board trustee, many of the kids in my community are at home alone when they come home from school because their mom, a single mother, is working or their father is out working. Who are they home with? They are home with the electronic child molester. That is who they are home with.

If we watch the programming that was put in the afternoon slot in the last number of years, we have Maury Povich and Springer. This is absolutely abusive and degrading television. I am concerned that when young people come into class, they do not have the faculties to separate this.

So, what we do have? We have a policy of zero tolerance in our schools. I have seen many kids act out stuff in the schoolyard without even having a sense of what they are doing, and then of course we have to bring in the police to deal with it. I am not talking so much about physical violence being acted out, but some of the abusive stuff that they see on television. So, there is an element there that we can talk about empowering our young people, but if they are home alone, they do not have that choice.

I think this debate today is actually very appropriate, given the very disturbing national conversation that is going on. All around us, Canadians are talking about the Pickton trial.

There is a really interesting debate if we listen to the talk shows. What people are saying is, “I don't want to hear it. I don't want these greasy fingerprints left on my imagination. Have the trial, please, but spare us the grizzly gore”.

What strikes me about this conversation, because I have been listening to the people phoning in, is that people do not want to be desensitized. They do not want to accept a point where they no longer even shrug when they hear these kinds of details. It is a very horrific conversation that we have to have. I was thinking in terms of the Bernardo trial and how I still feel such rage over what I heard about that. We are being asked as a society to cross a terrible Rubicon of the imagination whereby something that once was just a realm of Hollywood is something we have to accept as a reality. As I was thinking of this conversation, I was watching television with my daughter. It was interesting that I saw within a space of one hour two ads for serial killer torture shows that had very gruesome, very graphic and very stylized forms of the torture.

Can our children tell the difference between the allegations at the Pickton farm and these things on television? Of course they can. Just as they can tell the difference when they are playing video games that seem to me to be so much similar to the Dawson shooting. But at a certain point, there is a level of desensitization, and that desensitization has a very profound impact for cultural development.

Ronald Cohen, the chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, says very clearly, “In addition, there is no gratuitous or glamorized violence on television at any time of the day or night. Period”.

I was watching 24 with my daughters the other night. They are big fans of Jack Bauer. I am a big fan of Jack Bauer, the actor playing him being the grandson of Tommy Douglas, the great Canadian socialist. Jack Bauer is always there to save the world.

However, there is an interesting debate that has come up about 24 because of the way that people are now beginning to accept the notion that torture is perfectly okay. Jack Bauer can never save the planet unless he tortures somebody. He is very effective in torturing people and because Jack tortures people things work.

I was speaking to an educator who had been talking to a young person about notions of right and wrong and limits of right and wrong. The issue of torture came up. The student said, “Torture is perfectly okay. That's what you do if you're a police officer. That is perfectly acceptable behaviour.” The educator asked, “Why would you think that torture was normal?” The child said, “Jack Bauer has to do it.”

Think of the profound shift that has taken place in the last 10 years. Ten years ago, what was torture? In our imagination that was what thugs did in a Latin American prison. That is what petty gang lords did. However, a conversation now where we have stylized violence, and it is very over the top, it becomes acceptable. Therefore, we become desensitized to it.

Another point Mr. Cohen makes in terms of the reason we do not need standards, that we do not need to impose them here, and he is talking about protecting children. He says, “There can be no themes that threaten a child's sense of security.”

I was watching Fear Factor in my hotel room the other night. Since you might not believe, Mr. Speaker, how outrageous it is I will read the plot description that I picked up off the Internet. This was a plot with families, so it was mothers, fathers and their children on this show. This is a quote from the show. The children will be locked in a box of Madagascar hissing cockroaches that would be poured all over the children. Then the parents would have to use their mouths to transfer roaches from the box to a counterbalance. The pair would then have to get the keys so that the child could find a way to escape from this box where the child was screaming and covered with cockroaches.

The message I infer from this is that child abuse is okay if it is done on prime time, if it is done for entertainment purposes, and it is very clear that it is done for greed because do you know what happens, Mr. Speaker, if the mother manages to pick enough of these Madagascar hissing cockroaches off her screaming child and frees them from this locked box? She will win a 2004 Mazda6 Sport Wagon. I find this absolutely abominable.

I would like to think that industry would self-regulate, but I think what we are seeing now in terms of abuse on television is that it is self-regulating itself down to the bottom and we should not go along with this. I think at a certain point we have to say as a society that this degradation has to stop. The idea of abusing and humiliating people as a form of cheap entertainment is not acceptable. We do not accept it when our children act it out in the schoolyard. We should not have to accept it as a regular form of entertainment.

Again, I would like to point out that people can say, “Turn it off”, but I know of so many children who are at home alone. They are not reading, they are watching and this is what they are watching.

This leads me to another point that I think has to be made. It is a more subtle point. It is the notion of the breakdown of the self, the self-identity and the self-awareness from watching abusive television again and again by young people. I read a book earlier last year entitled A Is for Ox: the Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in An Electronic Age by Barry Sanders. He made some amazing correlations that what we are seeing in terms of a culture where children are raised strictly on television is the breakdown of literacy, not simply that they cannot read but literate conversation, the sense of self, has disappeared in so many young children. They do not have that construct.

He said that there are profound implications for society when we have children who are raised like this because as they have no sense of self they have no sense of the other. He is definitely making a very clear equation in his work between this rise of cultural illiteracy and a culture of violence, and a casual acceptance of violence.

Therefore, I am very pleased that Parliament has taken the measure to debate this issue. In terms of the New Democrats we believe that this is not an issue of censorship. This is an issue of restoring some fairness to the airwaves and saying to families that they do not have to worry that their children are being preyed upon by the electronic child molester if they have to go out to work.

There have to be some standards. If industry is not willing to meet those standards, then we have to have a national conversation and that conversation, I believe, has to include educators and a broad cross-section of our society. Clearly, it is our purview here within the House of Commons to begin that conversation.

[Questions on the Order Paper, January 29th, 2007]

With respect to programs and spending administered by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) within the riding of Timmins—James Bay: (a) what was the amount spent in 2006; (b) what is the projected budget for 2007; (c) how many CHMC-funded housing units for singles and families currently exist; and (d) how many CMHC-funded housing units for singles and families are planned for the remainder of 2006 and 2007?

[Prebudget Consultations, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to my colleague's speech with great interest. It did reveal a bit more of the sort of flat earth economics that is coming forward from the Conservative Party, in particular this notion of a net debt that is being floated, that somehow if we add our assets together, then we do not really have a debt. I do not think the government could tell any Canadian family that if they add up their savings, they do not have to pay off their mortgage.

I would like to follow up on this notion of a net debt and ask why the Conservatives have not added government buildings and national parks to our assets column. In fact, we could add enough assets that we would not have a debt at all and we would not have to worry about it. This seems to be the economic reasoning that I am getting from the Conservative Party, because a debt remains a debt regardless of whether it is paid. It comes to the idea of a vision of how we make a national economy.

What we have had is a debt that has been put into education for years. Students are now coming out of school with debts of $20,000, $30,000 and $40,000. That is a real debt. That is a debt made by government decisions.

We have a debt in the environment as has been pointed out, because we need a commitment.

We have a debt in terms of infrastructure in every municipality across the country where money has not been put in to upkeep and the costs are being downloaded to municipalities. These bills have to be paid at the end of the day.

When we look for a vision of a 21st century economy from the Conservatives, they are creating this notion of a net debt and taking every dollar of surplus to pay off this debt. Meanwhile the other debts that remain outside have not been acted on.

I would like to correct the member's--

[Petitions, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to present a petition in the House containing hundreds of names from the good people of Malagash, Pictou, Wallace, Shelburne and Halifax, Nova Scotia.

They have brought forward a petition concerning museums. They point out that museums generate over $17 billion annually to Canada's gross domestic product; that over 59 million Canadians visit museums every year from coast to coast to coast; that our museums have a positive social and cultural impact on virtually every community in this country; that the museums assistance program is recognized as the most crucial element of the federal support for Canadian museums; that the funding for the museums assistance program today is virtually at the same level as it was in 1972, when I was in grade 4; that the Conservative Party of Canada, which is now leading the minority Parliament in Ottawa, pledged in writing during the most recent election campaign that “generous funding for Canada's museums would be a priority for a Conservative government”; and that on September 25, 2006, the Conservative minority government announced that it cut $4.6 million from the museums assistance program.

Therefore, they are petitioning Parliament to immediately reverse the funding cut that was announced on September 25 and live up to the commitments made by all parties in the last election to increase funding for museums at the next opportunity and to do so as soon as possible.

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, in my region of Timmins—James Bay we do have grain farmers. The grain farmers in Ontario made the decision to go to dual marketing. They made that decision because the tonnages are much smaller and most of the grain farms in southern Ontario are very close to the market. It was a very different set-up.

However, the decision was made by the farmers. It was a very clear decision. We did not have Premier Dalton McGuinty threatening to fire the head of the Ontario wheat board. We did not have him gagging the farmers. We did not have the government holding meetings and kicking people out so that only a certain viewpoint could be heard. The farmers made their own decision.

What I find confusing here is the attitude from the government members that they do not feel they actually could win a fair vote, so they are doing everything they can to put the squeeze on a farmer-run organization. As New Democrats, we have always supported the belief that if farmers want to choose a form of marketing system that works for them, farmers have a right to do that.

I would like to ask my hon. colleague a two-part question. First, why does the government have to resort to such tactics to pull this off?

Second, if the Conservatives are serious in going after this ideological drive for their concept of an open market, what does that mean for the dairy farmers? They do not have open markets. They have to go through the supply management board. What does it mean for our poultry industry? What does it mean for our egg industry?

Does the member expect that the Conservatives are going to use the same heavy-handed tactics against the supply management system they are currently employing against the Wheat Board?

[Committees of the House, December 12th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to this debate with fascination. The parliamentary secretary talks about intimidation and harassment from our friend over there in Prince Edward Island. I sat on the committee with him and I have to say that he has been relentless in his attack on the Wheat Board. It is not a vision of dual selling. It is an attack on the Wheat Board. It is an attack on a farmer-run operation.

Every time we ask a question, we are being told that because we are from Prince Edward Island or from Ontario that we do not represent all western grain farmers. I have been receiving hundreds of pieces of correspondence from western Canada and I have been phoning people in western Canada.

I would like to read a typical letter from someone in east end Saskatchewan. The letter is addressed to the parliamentary secretary, the member for Cypress Hills—Grasslands. The letter reads:

You claim you are being open and transparent about things, well, hiding behind closed door meetings, with handpicked invited guests, and issuing gag orders to anyone who speaks out against you, is being transparent all-right, anyone can see right through you!

Canada is a democratic country, and sooner or later I will get a chance to vote, be it on the future of the Canadian Wheat Board or the future of the member for Cypress Hills Grasslands, one thing is for sure, I will never support you!

That is just one of the hundreds of letters I have received.

I would like to hear the member's comments on how he interprets the fact that in the latest Wheat Board elections his cabal of enemies against the Wheat Board were soundly trounced. They were soundly defeated because western farmers do not support them and they do not support that member's relentless attacks on the credibility of the Wheat Board and on anyone who defends the notion of the Wheat Board.

[Cochlear Implant Program, December 11th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to Sick Children's Hospital, in particular its cochlear implant program, which is second to none in the world and which has been doing miracles for children across the country.

My oldest daughter has a severe hearing loss. She has fought her whole life just to be able to participate in the most casual of conversations. When she was 17, she came home from school and said, “Dad, I don't want to be deaf any more”. She went online and learned about the cochlear implant program. She contacted the hospital herself. Within three hours of her email being sent, we received a phone call.

From that moment on, Dr. Papsin, Patricia Fuller and Mary-Lynn Feness kicked into action. She was quickly assessed, she received her operation and she went through phenomenal post-op care. That operation has turned her life around.

All too often we hear from the enemies of public health care, but Sick Kids is a symbol for which we need to fight. The cochlear implant program is based on the principle that any child, no matter what the ability of their parents to pay, has the right to the best health care in this world.

I want to thank them very much.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2006, No. 2, December 11th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great fascination to my colleague's support for the budget, particularly in two areas. We follow with great interest the Conservatives' changing position on climate change. First, was that it did not exist, that it was something made up by the eco-freaks. Then we heard the theory that the last round of global warming was caused by dinosaur flatulence. Then they finally admitted there was some global warming, but we were not to worry, that a bus pass would stop the glaciers from melting. I believe that position was brought forward to Nairobi and was laughed out of the joint.

However, I am amazed that the members of the Bloc Québécois are now agreeing that the science of the Conservatives is exact, that thank God they have brought in a bus pass because it is going to stop global warming and go a long way toward achieving our Kyoto targets. The budget has trashed all the Kyoto targets, but the Bloc totally supports it.

The other thing I found interesting was our students getting a tax deduction to buy school books. I do not know what the students in his riding go through in terms of debt, but students in my riding rack up $40,000 worth of debt. They come to southern Ontario from northern Ontario and spend four or five years going to university. Guess what? They fall in love and that gives them $80,000 worth of debt with which to come home. The New Democrats feel we need a policy to lower student debt.

However, I am glad to see the Conservatives have an ally in the Bloc. It believes that getting a $65 break on a text book is all students need. I guess I am somewhat flummoxed that this is the Bloc's position. On top of that, the other reason it supports a budget this bad is it helps microbreweries. I like beer as much as the next man, however, I did not think that was the basis of a national strategy or a budget.

Does my hon. colleague believe the budget really does do anything for Kyoto or is he just trying to prop the government up?