Charlie Angus

[National Defence, February 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. Minister of National Defence has become Canada's number one cheerleader for participation in star wars. He talks about our international reputation, our international commitments and our international obligations.

I would like him to tell that to the people of the James Bay coast who have been waiting for Canada to live up to its obligation to clean up the contamination his department left behind in the abandoned radar bases in northern Canada.

For 40 years the people of Peawanuk First Nation have been living with exposures to PCBs and chemical contamination. Nobody told them of the risk when DND walked away from those people.

We talk about deadbeat dads. DND is a deadbeat ministry. I am calling on the minister not to be a walkaway Joe. He has the fundamental, moral and fiduciary obligation to clean up the contaminated hunting grounds of the Peawanuk and Mushkegowuk Cree.

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to the hon. member's comments and I am still trying to find my way through the buzz words.

The issue here is not trade. The issue here is assuring Canadians that the government has a bottom line when it comes to fundamental issues, and that this is not a race to the bottom. Helping Canadian companies overseas is not the issue and is not what we are talking about here.

When a company is good in business it brands itself. That is a fundamental in business. We just need to look at Burger King. When it was a small company it came up with the phrase “Home of the Whopper”. I know a lot of people think that is the phrase of the Liberal Party, but it is actually the trademark of Burger King.

When we had the Canadian lapel pins that were branded “made in China”, the Liberals were perfectly proud of that until somebody found out and it then became a sense of embarrassment.

I would like to ask the hon. member a simple question which we asked earlier in the House but did not get any answer to. Air Canada, which is a symbol of this country, is a private company that has survived on millions of dollars worth of grants. It has just shut down jobs in Canada for maintenance and mechanical work and has shipped those jobs down south to El Salvador. From my history lessons in school, El Salvador was the land of death squads where Jesuits were murdered at the university. It has an horrific human rights record.

If we are willing to brand ourselves and be proud of our trade, how would the hon. members feel about Air Canada having a slogan stating “Air Canada, maintained and brought to you by the sweat shops of El Salvador?” Is that what we are talking about?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

The hon. member said they did not know that would happen. I was under the impression that the Liberals were very aware that it happened. A number of Liberals have talked to me about the fact that they have been outsourcing numerous symbols of Canada because they can do it cheaper. This brings me to the fundamental question I would like to ask.

Earlier this fall, we asked the government for assurances that when it allowed the sale of Noranda and Falconbridge to go ahead to the Chinese government, it would have a plan to ensure that certain fundamental benchmarks were addressed in terms of human rights and that certain fundamental benchmarks were in place to protect the copper mining communities, of which my region is one. Across Canada we have communities that are dependent on these resources. We could not get a straight answer from the government.

It is becoming very clear to me now that if we divide human rights into one department and trade into another department, it becomes very impossible for us to get a straight answer from the government. It makes it easier for the government to continue to say that it loves human rights, children, little dogs and ice cream, but it cannot do anything about it.

Does the hon. member think this is a lack of coherence or is it part of a much larger industrial strategy being pursued by the government, which is to take as many Canadian jobs as it can and outsource them to El Salvador, China,or wherever it can find the bottom of the barrel?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to be seen as taking exception to my hon. colleague, but I have to raise a question about his belief that the bill signifies a lack of coherence in government policy. I would suggest that it shows an extreme sense of coherence. The one thing I have seen from the government is it knows exactly where it is going in terms of international trade. It knows exactly where it is going with human rights.

Just last week we realized that with the Canadian flag. It is the symbol in which the government wraps itself every time members of the honourable opposition, mostly from the west, stand up to question the corruption. We understand now that the government sees the flag as though it were a symbol from the wallymart. If it can do it cheaper anywhere else, if it can bring in the cheapest deal, that is good for its so-called consumers.

[Public Works and Government Services, February 3rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday I asked this government to explain to us why it is flying the lapel flag of convenience over the House of Commons and I did not get a very clear answer.

This morning I spoke with Canadian firms that have lost contracts for making Canadian military regalia and jewellery to firms in China, and these Canadian firms tell us that they cannot compete under the procurement policies of this government.

Our Prime Minister is the man who pioneered the flag of convenience that resulted in Canadian sailors being fired from Canadian ships on the high seas. My question is simple. I would like to ask the Prime Minister, has he ever met a maple leaf that he did not think he could replace?

[Supply, February 3rd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I know that there is a big push within our agriculture department to start looking at genetically modified crops. Maybe we could discuss genetically modified members of Parliament as perhaps a way of putting a little bit of passion into this.

I thank the member for mentioning passion. We are talking about lives here. We are literally talking in some cases about life and death, but we are talking about a way of life. We have three and four generation farms that are going under.

When I sit in at agriculture hearings and talk to the CAIS staff and, in fact, when I talk to any of the staff from agriculture, I have a sense that everything is okay in Ottawa. I get the feeling that among our farmers who live on Parliament Hill, or among our cash croppers in the Wellington Building things are okay. Even where the minister has the main agriculture office on Carling Avenue, among all the dairy producers who live there, things are okay. We have a few problems and we are tinkering.

However, it is a completely different reality in the communities. Northern Ontario has the same problem as does western Canada. Our families are going under and they are crying out. Some of them do not want to even talk about it any more. They are so filled with despair.

In fact, I phoned one of my ranchers at home, someone I talk with all the time, to get a sense of what is happening now. I said that I was going into a debate. His wife said to me that he is not going to phone back. He is tired of all this. This gentleman is a third generation rancher. She said that he is not going to phone me back because nothing ever changes. It has all been said again and again.

I feel like a fool phoning and saying, “Hey, what's new with the farmers going under?” I know the situation was the same three months ago. It was the same six months ago. It was the same a year ago. We knew what the problem was and nothing has been done to fix it.

Therefore, could there be a little bit of passion about this? We need passion or we should just be saying that the government will cut the farmers off and forget rural Canada all together.

[Supply, February 3rd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I welcome the suggestions in the discussion. I am very pleased to know that there is a horizontal plan for rural Canada, but the horizontal plan I have seen has been one that is laid out on the kitchen table with all the relatives going by apologizing for not having come to see the corpse before he died. That seems to be the situation with our horizontal plan for rural Canada.

In fact, over Christmas I met with a lot of beef producers back home, and let me tell members, they do not even want to talk about it anymore. There is despair. It is a fundamental despair.

We are talking about the money that has been put in. We talked about the big announcements that were made this September in terms of money that was going to be put immediately into the hands of the farmers. There must be some pretty wealthy farmers out there, because all the farmers I know never saw any of that money.

Then we talk about how we are going to revitalize the rural economy of Canada and we talk about slaughter capacity. Every time we talk about the increasing numbers it seems to me they are coming from two or three giant packers who continue to grow and expand their control over the beef economy of Canada. Meanwhile, there is not a single dollar, not a single one, going toward actually putting concrete into the ground in smaller rural regional plants. There are loan loss guarantees; money is not being put forward. It is money that is in the air but it is not money that is reaching into these communities.

In terms of the CAIS deposit, I think there are a number of problems with it. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, CAIS might have worked. It might have worked in a different set of times and it might have worked if we had had more people actually on the ground to administer it and respond. We have not had responses to problems. What we have had is nobody home; we did not have anybody in Ontario, as far as I could tell, who could even answer farmers' problems. That was our sense. When I had the MPs' hotline for CAIS, there was no one there.

I would throw out this question to the minister. When he is in a bureaucratic situation and suddenly has 13,000 applications and is only set to deal with 5,000 or 6,000, what does he do? He sends out 100% rejections and hopes that maybe 30% or 40% will appeal. That seems to be what has happened with CAIS.

What would the New Democratic Party do? We would have had people on the ground to respond to these issues. Farmers brought forward very serious problems with CAIS and they have not been addressed. They had questions about their inventory, questions about how the government continues to overvalue inventory the farmers cannot get rid of and then uses it against their margins.

We need some very clear long term goals in terms of a program. NISA was not a bad program. CAIS does not do the job for the beef industry. I think the minister's own CAIS staff will support us on that; at the agriculture committee they finally said that CAIS was not designed for an emergency like beef. Then why are they using it?

We are almost two years into this crisis. It is not over yet and we still do not have an action plan for dealing with it.

[Supply, February 3rd, 2005]

Madam Speaker, as always, it is an honour to rise in the House. I am beginning to feel like I am an extra in a movie. The movie is Bill Murray's Groundhog Day . Every time I wake up, I am in the House with the hon. minister across from me, talking about the same issue. Just as in that movie, at the end of the day, nothing has changed.

We have been at this issue for too long. Every day we ask the same questions and every day we get the same answers. Nothing changes except one thing. Every day the government does not act or put a proper plan in place, farmers go under.

I brought forward the case of a farmer and I spoke to the minister and his staff about it. The farmer had 1,000 head of cattle, one of the largest ranch operations in my riding. He had been completely turned down by CAIS. He received a blanket letter thanking him for putting in his money for deposit, for having to borrow the money and for having to pay his accountant, but he did not qualify for CAIS.

I approached the minister on this. He referred me to his staff, for which I thank him. His staff referred me to the CAIS specialist. Just like in the Groundhog Day scenario, day after day I phoned and nothing changed until Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve I was sitting in a banker's office with the rancher, pleading for his farm. The bank was foreclosing on a $70,000 loan on his farm. He was only three months behind, but the bank figured it was time to shut down a million dollar farm operation. I begged that bank to hold off. What could I say? The fact is he never got a CAIS cheque. If he had, he would not have been in that disgraceful situation.

When we about CAIS and the deposit, it is important that we put this discussion into a much larger framework. The Conservatives have done us a favour by bringing forward the question on the CAIS deposit. The minister knows well what farmers think of the CAIS deposit. This issue has come up again and again. When we talk to the CAIS officials, they say that yes, they are hearing from farmers, that yes, they are taking farmers' concerns seriously, that yes, they are doing a review and that yes, they are having a review completed. Then we ask the punch-line question, which is when will the review be done, and they say that it will be done in June or July. That is well past the date when farmers have to borrow money to get back into CAIS if they want to keep going. The motion before us is very timely, but it is indicative of the bigger problem.

The CAIS program may or may not have succeeded in normal times, but it has been an absolute failure in the beef economy. There is no disputing that. It has not been disaster relief, but a disaster. Some farmers I know have put in $10,000. Some of them have received cheques for $900, despite the fact that they are almost bankrupt now. They tell me that they probably will have to raise more money to get their CAIS back up. Whatever they have received, the government takes back in the new round of deposits.

It is not just beef. If we look across the agricultural sectors of Canada at grain, our cash crop farmers are going under. This is industry is on the brink. I spoke with a farmer last night. He told me that agriculture in Ontario is now past the point of no return. I think I could fairly say that this is the situation right across Canada. He told me that he did not know how he could ever be viable again as a farmer. He said that if someone gave him $500 for each of his cows, he would be gone from agriculture today and that every farmer on his range road would be gone as well. That is a disgraceful situation.

When we talk about the CAIS deposits, I see that the minister has a difficult position. I do not think it is a matter of him saying to cabinet that we need another $1 billion for our farmers. We need an indication of whether the government and cabinet will say that it is committed to a plan to save rural Canada, not just agriculture, That is what this discussion is about now.

If the government does not have a plan, then be honest about it and say that it has promoted a race to the bottom. If people can buy their food cheaper than a farmer can make it, so be it. I do not think that is just and I do not think that is right, but maybe that is the position of the government. I would rather hear farmers being told to tell their sons and daughters to get out of farming now. Do not lead them along. We need a clear definition. Are we going to put the necessary funds into restoring rural Canada or are we going to let it go down the tubes?

Another farmer I spoke to said, “We are completely on our own. We are competing against everybody in the world and we have no support. We know that the Europeans completely support their farmers. The Americans completely support theirs. We do not have nearly the level of support. We are competitive in good times, but the good times are becoming fewer and fewer”. And that brings us to the CAIS program and the whole margins issue.

The problem with it now, particularly with beef, is that with our farmers having had two disastrous years in a row their margins have been wiped out. Most of them are not going to be able to apply for CAIS in the coming year. Most of them could not get CAIS because they do not have the funds left. So the $10,000 or the $30,000 they had to borrow to get into CAIS, which they cannot get back, could have been the money that would have kept their farms going. That could have been money that they could have used to pay their loans so that the banks would not foreclose on them. Unfortunately, the money is locked up. It has not served its purpose.

I asked the minister the last time we met to take me anywhere in Canada, to take me down any rural road, to take me to any house he wanted and ask me to knock on the door and see if the CAIS program had worked there. We do not have anything yet. I am still knocking on those rural doors, saying, “Tell me I am wrong. Tell me that CAIS works”. I would love to be proven wrong. I would love to sit down here and say, “What a fantastic program. Thank God our government did something for farmers”. But I have not found that yet.

If any of the hon. members across the floor in Quebec have rural roads that they would want me to walk down to knock on doors, I will do it, because CAIS has not worked and it is time we just admitted it. What we have done is that we have gone on week after week, month after month, passing on this charade that somehow this crisis we are in--and it is not just the crisis in beef but the entire crisis in agriculture--is going to pass and everything is going to be bonny and rosy again. We know that is not the case. Because of the debt that has accumulated, particularly in the beef industry in the last two years, those farmers have no ability to get out from under that debt load.

I think we have to look at the pressure that is on agriculture across Canada. In Ontario, with the nutrient farm management programs that have been brought in place, we saw numerous small operations go under. They just cannot continue with the regulations they are facing. I do not say that I am against good, strong, safe regulations for drinking water and meat. That is very important, but I will tell the minister that I have serious concerns about how we are applying these regulations.

In terms of what we have been talking about, the slaughter capacity, we go over this again and again. I have small abattoirs in my riding that have been trying to help the farmers of Abitibi—Témiscamingue because they are neighbouring communities. They are neighbouring farms, they are relatives of each other and they cannot even slaughter the cows from Abitibi—Témiscamingue. Two abattoirs that I know of are being shut down over this. Who is shutting them down? It is our federal government that is saying they cannot do that, that they cannot help in a time of dire crisis. This is the biggest crisis we have had in the history of Canadian agriculture and we have the CFIA coming into our provincial plants saying, “You cannot help your Quebec neighbours. Let them be on their own”. I think that is a travesty.

When we sit in hearings and talk about how we are going to address this crisis, it seems to me that again it is like Groundhog Day . Day after day we talk with the CFIA officials or day after day we talk with the minister's staff and it never seems to be about the fact that this is a crisis. This is a crisis. People are losing their farms. Rural Canada is going under.

So I will put it to the minister today: let us be honest here. We can talk in this debate about the CAIS deposit, and it is a good debate, but are we willing to do what is necessary? Or are we going to continue on the road of a race to the bottom?

This morning I was reading my papers from home and there was a wonderful letter in the Kirkland Lake newspaper from Tom Petricevic, who wrote a letter to Ontario farmers. He wrote that it was hard for him to believe that the Ontario Federation of Agriculture would expect any help from the government in 2005. He wrote:

Hasn't it dawned on them yet that they have been abandoned by the Government of Canada to the “Global Market”...Unless Canadians elect a government that will reclaim sovereignty, the race to the bottom will go on and we are all out of luck....

We saw the race to the bottom with the fact that we are now sending our own flags overseas to be made, so I suppose we should find it hard to expect the government to stand up and say, “Yes, Canadian farmers have a right to get a fair wage for their animals and for their crops”. We have a right to expect that our government is going to say that rural Canada has a value, that there is an infrastructure in rural Canada that is worth protecting, and that it is not just some widget that we can ship overseas, although I know some in trade probably think that would be a wonderful solution.

There is a value to having a strong rural identity. It is an identity that is articulated in the United States and the United States fights for its farmers. It is an identity that is articulated all over Europe and Europe fights for its farmers. It is an identity that is articulated very clearly in our Province of Quebec and Quebec fights very strongly for its farmers. But our federal government continues on this path of saying, “Let us hope for the best. Let us hope that the border will reopen”.

My biggest fear is that by saying “let us hope for the best, let us hope for the border reopening”, our government will be able to walk away from the fact that we have billions of dollars of debt sitting there in the farm community which the farm community will never be able to pay back. I think that is an unacceptable situation.

Therefore, does the New Democratic Party support the ending of the CAIS deposit immediately? Yes, we do. We support any of the parties that are continuing to fight to make rural Canada viable again, but our party is saying that we need to have a bigger plan. We need to move this beyond just the minister here. I know we have been beating him up all morning; we beat him up about once every two weeks.

But the hon. minister is in an impossible position, because it is no longer just about the agriculture department. We need a clear vision from the Government of Canada that it will take the steps necessary to restore the vitality of rural Canada and that we will stand on the international stage against the WTO if it comes after our farmers or against NAFTA if it comes after our farmers, because other governments do it and ours does not.

The question is whether eliminating this CAIS deposit is going to change the box colours that we are in under the WTO. It does not matter, because for any changes that we make to protect our farmers, the WTO will come after us. We should be expecting that. So be it, but we need to be able to say that we have to do what it takes to restore our rural economy and to support our farmers. If we have to fight on trade issues, then let us fight on them. The WTO uses trade against us time and time again and what we see is continuing damage, particularly in our wheat. We are seeing it in our hogs. We have seen this capricious attack on us over beef. It is time we stood up on this.

[Public Works and Government Services, February 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, parliamentary purchases are not covered under the WTO. They are exempt.

Here is a little bit of a history lesson. The lapel pin was a Canadian invention. It was made for 35 years by Canadian workers until this government came along.

Disney has the Mounties, this government gave the Remembrance Day coin to Tim Hortons, and now it is giving the flag to China.

This government is selling off our cultural heritage like a bunch of roadside hucksters selling off hubcaps and velvet Elvis paintings.

We have Canadian values, and the minister is talking values, so here is my question. What about the values of all the jobs in Rexdale where there have been layoffs so this government can outsource to China?

[Public Works and Government Services, February 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the federal government is distributing millions of maple leaf lapel pins that are stamped “Made in China”. What kind of credibility does our Prime Minister have in talking about Canadian values when he is leading the race to the bottom with our own flag? This is the man who pioneered the flag of convenience on the high seas and now he is pioneering the lapel flag of convenience.

My question is simple. There are 1.6 million flags scheduled to be delivered for March 18. Will they be made by Canadian workers or are they going to be shipped from overseas by sweatshops?