Charlie Angus

[Liberal Leadership Campaign, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, we are learning today from the media that the ballots are being counted again from super weekend in Quebec. Let us see how super it was.

In the last convention the Liberal Party claimed 500,000 members. Now the party is claiming 200,000 members. The fascinating thing is when we look at the details in that story that only 10% of Liberals in Quebec even bothered to come out and support. When the Liberals are talking about a mandate of 30% for one frontrunner, 20% for another and 17% for the third, are we not talking about 3% of Quebec Liberals and 2% and 1.7%?

I ask myself why? It is because that party remains habituated to ethical lowballing. One leadership candidate is parachuting jobs into the public sector. There are two--count them, two--leadership candidates who are signing up the dead. And don't get me started on kiddygate.

What I would like to say is that the nation is watching and what are they seeing? They are seeing the ethical floaters in the Liberal toilet that just will not go down no matter how much they claim to flush.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the consultation process was very clear. This is a government that said to the United States, “Look, we want a quick and dirty deal. What do we have to do?” and the United States said, “Here, sign this”. That was the end of consultation.

We asked the industry, where were they? They were not at the table. We have talked to representatives of industry. Representatives of industry have phoned us. We have met with them. They said again and again, “We went to this government and we said this deal is a bad deal”.

They were all over the media saying that this was a bad deal. Not only has the deal not improved since industry first spoke up, but the deal has become worse in the meantime. There was no consultation because the government was not interested in the long term interests of the resource sector.

The government will give $1.5 billion a year in subsidies to the Alberta oil and gas industry, but we have had community after community right across this country go down. They were begging for loan guarantees and support to see them through. They were starved of support. There are communities like Ignace, Red Rock, Kenora, Opasatika, Béarn and Malartic that have gone down, and the government has sat back and watched them go down.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for pointing this out. It is a very interesting question because we were looking at the final stages, the final two legal hurdles. We have won in every court dispute. We have the legal precedents behind us.

Our Prime Minister said we were looking at seven more years of litigation. That is not true. With the Tembec case, we were subject to one final appeal. In the extraordinary challenge committee judgment that would have come out in August, we would have been in a position where we would be winning the final last two non-appealable judgments. They were going in our favour. That is why industries are still not signing on because they are being asked to give up those legal precedents.

The question is, why not wait? Why not allow our industry to secure those legal judgments? I would submit to the House that what we are seeing here is once again an exercise by a government that is more interested in cheap slogans and photo ops. It is preparing to bring the House down perhaps this spring than actually securing the long term interests of our industry and our resource dependent communities.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to represent the New Democratic Party and the people of Timmins—James Bay who are very dependent on forestry products and the forestry industry for the economic viability of our region. I am pleased to be speaking on their behalf on this bill.

The House of Commons is somewhat like a surreal theatre because we have on any given day, on any given number of bills, 300 people in the House, half of whom act like Chicken Little, that the sky is falling, and the other half who say life has never been better.

Then, of course, we accuse each other of all sorts of calamity, and perfidious behaviour, that if the bill is allowed to go through it will undermine the very future fabric of our country.

With that being said, there are occasions when a bill is brought before the House that does have profound implications, it must be challenged. In terms of this bill and what it is proposing to do, it has sold out the rights of our resource industry. On top of that, the predatory nature that the government is imposing toward our softwood producers who are not knuckling down, and the pressure that the House is being asked to bring to bear upon our own industry is certainly one of the more egregious examples I would think in our nation's history of a government acting against the interests of its own people.

Being from a Scottish background I would think of what my grandmother would say now. She would talk about Such A Parcel Of Rogues In A Nation:

What force or guile could not subdue,
Thro' many warlike ages,
Is wrought now by a coward few,
For hireling traitor's wages.
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

There is a fundamental difference between the parcel of rogues who sold out Scotland and the parcel of rogues that are selling out our resource industry right now. At least the chieftains who sold out their own people in Scotland got some money for it.

We are being asked in Parliament to pay money, so that we can sell ourselves out. I think that is an unprecedented situation. We are seeing that the communities I represent no longer matter to the government. They are being written off the political and economic map of Canada, communities such as Smooth Rock Falls; Kenogami; New Liskeard, where they have lost jobs; Red Rock; and Ignace.

They are being told to fend for themselves because when industry came back to the government after the deal was presented, it said the deal was bad and that it could not go forward with it.

What did the government tell our own industry? It said, too bad, sign it because the government would sign it regardless. When the industry did not buckle down, the government came forward with a number of clauses that I will get to in a moment where we are actually going after the economic viability of any company that has the guts to stand up to this venal sellout of our resource industry.

What did we get out of this deal? We are giving $1 billion to our competitors, $500 million that will be used against us in the competing communities and against the coalitions that have been actively pursuing these wasteful legal actions against us. There is not a cent being put into any forestry community in the country suffering from job losses as a result of this battle.

Instead of the 10% softwood deal, we are being asked by Parliament to impose a 15% tariff on our own producers in order to win peace with the Americans.

Instead of fair trade and open trade, we are now being given a crippled market, a market with a narrow window for our own producers to work within. If the market goes south at any point, more restrictive tariffs will be imposed.

What kind of investments are softwood producers going to be willing to make in Canada because they cannot ramp up the market? It will become a static market. There will be no incentive for a company to invest in Canada under this deal.

In fact, we are seeing that the companies that are investing, that have plants in Canada, are investing south of the border. I could name numerous Canadian companies that are already setting up down in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina because it is a better climate for them down there. Perhaps they will be making use of the $500 million that was taken out of Canadian companies and sent down to our Canadian operations in the U.S.

What kind of peace did we get out of this deal? Would we have sold a billion dollars of our producers' money to get a seven year deal of peace? Perhaps. For five years? It would have been iffy. For three years? We have a bare 18 months, and the escape clause for the Americans is that they can terminate it anytime they feel that we are not playing by the rules, and guess what? Within the last week, we have the U.S. lumber interests already saying that they are gearing up to come after us with full guns blazing. No wonder they are getting ready to gear up. They have $500 million of our money to come back after us once this deal is signed.

Those are the well known facts, but less well known. This is what needs to be heard outside this House and it needs to be heard in every resource community across this country, particularly the clauses the government is bringing to attack our own industry, and to feed on our own industry. The political version of the pine beetle is what we see with this Conservative Party.

Clause 10 will call on Parliament to impose a 15% tax on our own producers who are using fair and open trade. We will be imposing a tax on them.

Clause 18 is the real kicker clause. The government is going to impose a special tax on companies that do not knuckle under and give up their legal rights. I ask this House, has there ever been another case where a government has imposed a tariff on its own producers to punish them for not bending down and kissing the ring of the trade minister on this deal? Now we are looking at tariffs upward of 37% being applied against our own companies in order to force agreement on this bill.

Clause 48 would require a six year burden of record-keeping for these companies. This is another administrative burden that the government is imposing on our own producers.

Clause 77 states that the government does not even need a warrant to enter the premises of our softwood producers.

Clause 89 gives a blank cheque to the minister to demand payment from these companies at any time. I need to put this in perspective because our producers are suffering from a major financial crisis at this moment. The government knows this. The government knows that many of the stalwarts of the softwood industry are on very weak financial legs.

What chance would any of these companies, that are wishing to maintain their legal rights, have of going to the bank to renegotiate overextended loans when the government is asking this House to impose measures that will demand money from those producers? We are applying a 37% tariff against our own companies. We can go in and check their books. The government can audit them, can go after them, and can take money from them.

What producers will be able to secure financing from the banks through this period? Yet, that being said, they still have not buckled under to this deal, have they? We still know that industries are saying that even if they are on their last legs, this deal is a bad deal because it is a bad deal for the long term viability for the resource industry of Canada.

The other aspect of this deal in terms of a venal sellout of our national interests is that we are allowing the U.S. lumber coalitions to set and to have a say on our own domestic provincial policies in terms of forestry management.

Once again I return to the notion of the rogues that sold out this nation. At this point I really feel it is incumbent upon me to speak to our friends from the Bloc Québécois. Here is a party that stood up in this House and opposed a national plan for pesticides because it would interfere with the rights of Quebec. Here is a party that opposed a national child care plan because it did not want any intervention at all in the rights of Quebec. Here is a party, when we had our debate on an Alzheimer's national strategy, that said it would not support to any degree a national Alzheimer's strategy because it interferes with the rights of Quebec.

Yet, this is a party that stands up in this House with its kissing cousins, the Conservatives, and says that it will allow the United States government to set forestry policy in Quebec. It will allow the Conservative Government of Canada to come into Quebec to check and ensure that its producers are complying.

That is the level of interference that the Bloc Québécois members are sitting back and allowing. It is fascinating. It is unprecedented that they, along with the government, are selling out the long term interests of our resource sector and our provinces' ability to set resource policy in this country.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I was waiting for a big wind-up and I am somewhat underwhelmed by the response.

The question, I find, is absurd. We need to be focusing on the fact that the government came in with the express position of getting a quick and dirty deal that could be signed. When industry saw this deal, and I talked to people in the industry across this country, they said that this is a bad deal. The government said to them, “Well, too bad. We are not going to negotiate anything better”. That is unprecedented.

If I were the assistant to the secretary, I would leave the room in shame as well. It is a shameful deal the Conservatives have pulled on us. It has to be articulated in the House that the Conservatives went back to our own industries and told them, “We will not stand up for you. We will not fight for you. Take this deal or leave it”. When industries still refused, they came back with the 19% tax on our own companies. That is predatory.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I live in the Timiskaming region on the Ontario side and I see the effects of forestry cutbacks, the same as I see in Abitibi-Témiscamingue. What I hear from our producers is that this is a bad deal. This is a deal that has been forced on us by government. If we allow this precedent to go ahead, our forestry industry will be in a much poorer situation two years, three years, five years down the road.

The principle that our provincial forestry policies can be challenged by the United States government is an unacceptable intrusion into the sovereignty of our provinces. We as New Democrats will continue to stand against that.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 3rd, 2006]

With the deal or without the deal.

Instead, do we have a free trade agreement? No. Do we have a fair trade agreement? No. We have a very limited market in which we are now expected to compete. If the market in the U.S. drops to any degree, and with the present housing starts it looks like the market is going down, we will be facing even higher tariffs.

What did we give up for that? We are being asked to give up the legal victories that we built up over the years. The present Prime Minister is not being honest with the Canadian public if he expects us to believe that we would have had seven more years of legal wrangling, that we had to get a deal in place in order to get some peace. The fact is we were within our final two appeals. Once we were at that point, there was no turning back.

Why has the forestry industry not capitulated at this point? The government has had a gun to their heads, yet some of them are still holding out because they know that if they give up on these legal rights that they won in court, then they have nothing.

These are the overall facts of the case, but it is important now to really speak about the new level the government has gone to in terms of its puzzling attitude toward our forestry industry. It is not enough that the Conservatives sat down and signed over everything that we had on our side to get a quick deal. With Conservatives I guess we expect them to do that. We have a long history of Conservatives selling out the national interests, so that would not be a surprise. What is surprising here is that they are acting in a predatory fashion against our own companies. This is unprecedented. Let us look at some of the clauses.

Instead of the 10% softwood duty, we are now being asked as Parliament to impose a 15% duty on our own companies. That is supposed to be a deal. On top of that, we are now looking at a government that is adding an extra punitive charge against companies that are still standing up for their own interests. We are being asked as parliamentarians to go after financially the companies that are not buckling under to the government's deal.

That is an unprecedented situation. I do not think we could see in history any other example of a government coming before Parliament and saying that it wanted to punish, to financially attack, our own industry, and this is after a period of major economic crisis. That we are being asked as parliamentarians to target our own industry is a puzzling betrayal.

Clause 10 imposes the 15% export duty as soon as the deal is signed. That is a double taxation above and beyond the existing anti-dumping countervailing duties.

Clause 18 imposes a special punitive tax that is designed to go after the companies that are standing up. If this special tax is in place, companies will be paying 37%. That is not the U.S. fair lumber lobby wanting to bring this in, it is our own Conservative government to force compliance.

Again we have to put this in perspective. We know of the financial drain that has been put on our industries because of the softwood crisis. What the government is saying is that if those companies stand up to the government, they will be facing financial ruin. Because of the limited margins that are left within our Canadian bank accounts for forestry, we are going to have our own government going after them.

On top of that, clause 48 would require a six year burden of record keeping on these companies.

Clause 77 states that the government does not even need a warrant to enter softwood businesses to ensure that our own companies are complying. We have our own government acting against the interests of our industry.

Clause 89 gives the government the right to demand a blank cheque from any of these companies to pay up immediately. A Canadian forestry company that is trying to stand up for its best interests and has not knuckled under to the government's deal, what kind of success is it going to have when it is renegotiating its loans at the bank, when the banks know that their own Government of Canada can come in, check the books and go after them?

The Conservatives pushed this deal. I can understand that. Some of the Liberal members from northern Ontario are supporting this deal. I cannot understand that, in particular in regions where our industry is facing such a severe crisis. What astounds me is that members of the Bloc Québécois are supporting this deal. That is the party that stood in this House and denied motions to get pesticide bans across Canada because it might interfere with Quebec. That is the party that has undermined child care plans for the rest of Canada because it somehow might interfere with the jurisdiction in Quebec. Yet when we look at a bill that would allow the United States government to set forestry policy within Quebec, that is okay. When we look at a bill that allows the federal government to target Quebec companies and go into their businesses and check on their compliance and charge them if they are not going along, that is perfectly fine for the Bloc.

This world seems as if it is turned upside down. We are being asked in Parliament to turn against our own industries and our own communities. This is an unacceptable situation. We need to have it on the record that this deal is one of the most venal and pusillanimous arrangements ever brought before Parliament. On behalf of the forestry, softwood, pulp workers in northern Ontario, I will never support a deal as craven as this one.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to be rising today on this bill because it speaks to the economic part of my region of northern Ontario. I will be glad to speak to the subamendment to a bill which in essence, and we need to really put this in context, is probably one of the most venal and pusillanimous pieces of legislation ever brought before the House of Commons because of what is at stake here. We are being asked in Parliament to put a gun to the head of our own industry to support this government's desire to act in a predatory fashion against not just the forestry industry which is a leading industry in this country, but against the communities of our area.

I have spent much of the past few years meeting with the laid off forestry workers in Kapuskasing, Smooth Rock Falls, Opasatika, Béarn, Timiskaming, people who have seen their livelihoods go down the drain because of an ongoing punitive disagreement with our number one trading partner.

Throughout that period when the former Liberal government was in power, we were asking for a commitment that the federal government would be there alongside our industry. We were asking for loan guarantees. We were asking to see them through the final periods of legal decisions that were being brought down because we were in the final stages of those legal decisions. We did not get that support from the former Liberal government.

In fact the message that was delivered was very clear to communities like Smooth Rock Falls, Red Rock and Ignace. The message was, “Your communities are being cut adrift from the social economy of this country. You are on your own. When it comes to standing up for the interests of the resource dependent communities of the north, you are on your own.”

That message was amplified a thousand times when our friend the floor crosser brought with him a quick and dirty deal on softwood. Let us be really clear what is behind the push to get this deal signed now.

We are looking at a government that is interested in a short shelf life so that it can return to the voters with a couple of photo ops and a few boxes ticked off on its list of deliverables. One of those deliverables will be the sellout of our forestry industry.

During a radio debate I had with the health minister, he said, “We managed to get this deal signed in seven months. That is unprecedented”. Certainly, if they roll over and play dead they can sign anything in a short period of time. That is what has happened.

Let us just talk about the overall deal before we get into some of the more disturbing aspects of it.

We have $1 billion of our producers' money that is going to the United States. Of that, nearly half is going to our direct competitors to be used against us and to retool their communities, whereas our communities are being left with nothing. Our present government will give $1.5 billion a year in oil and gas subsidies to the tar sands in Alberta. It has given nothing to our forestry communities and yet we have $500 million being sent to our competitors.

Ask the Canadian companies that are reinvesting where they are reinvesting. They are reinvesting south of the border. We are seeing that with companies from my own riding that were formed in northern Ontario, that received most of their support year after year from northern Ontario are now reinvesting south of the border because that is where the investments will be made.

Parliament is being asked to deliver money to our competitors. What do we get from that? Do we get a seven year deal? No. Do we get a five year deal? No. Do we get a three year deal? No. We get a bare 18 months. And our competitors in the U.S. can take this money and come back after us at any point. They have already declared that they are going to do that. This past week the U.S. lumber lobby said that they are coming after us with all guns blazing. They made that clear.

[Museums, October 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives campaigned on a promise to increase funding for our woefully underfunded museums. They broke that promise, but not only that, the President of the Treasury Board singled out Canadian museums for attack with drastic cuts, saying he was going after programs that were “wasteful, inefficient and completely out of touch with average Canadians”.

I know the heritage minister has been like an absentee landlord when it comes to articulating the value of heritage and culture, but I would like to ask thePresident of the Treasury Board, what is it about our Canadian museums that ticked him off so much that he set after them, saying that they are wasteful and inefficient?

[Points of Order, September 25th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, when the member for Windsor—Tecumseh was trying to ask questions about the safety situation facing our border guards, he was shouted down by the member for Scarborough—Rouge River again and again, to the point where I could not hear the question properly even though I was sitting so close to him.

I feel this is an important issue. It is not just the disrespect to the House or the disrespect to the men and women who are out in the field. This sends the message that there are some people in Parliament who show an absolute contempt for people who put their lives on the line. For those members to stand in the House today and have the nerve to tell us that they respect people who work but call people who stand up for their legal right to refuse unsafe conditions wimps is a disgrace.

I am speaking on a question of privilege because as a member of Parliament I feel ashamed that people like that would even stand in the House and--