Charlie Angus

[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?

[Telefilm Canada Act, December 13th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, the Saskatchewan television show the member mentioned is an excellent example of what I have been talking about which is the need to promote art, film and television right across the country.

I have never said that the television and film industries mean the CBC. CBC is one piece of a multidimensional puzzle. That is something we need to move toward on a number of fronts.

As someone who likes Men with Brooms it is too bad the CBC did not come up to, I would like to say the plate, but whatever the term is in curling. I think that does not mitigate the fact that we need to support regional programming. We need to support the people who are innovative and who are doing interesting television because they will be exporting it.

If we have any other programming coming out of rural Canada, it should be marketed around the world because it should be the best.

[Telefilm Canada Act, December 13th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I think that is a very interesting suggestion. I would suggest that there are probably two fundamental differences between Great Britain and us. First and foremost would be the difference in terms of volume of audience. We are in some ways in a very difficult situation in Canada because we have people spread out so far across such a vast territory. We do not have the volume of people living in fairly close areas that the U.K. has.

I would have no problem with foreign television coming in here if it would meet a certain standard or a certain quota in terms of Canadian production. I think that would be very interesting.

However, I would question the hon. member about this, because what we have seen is that people do not seem to want to go out into rural Canada. As a member from a northern rural region, I find it very difficult to imagine that HBO is going to be interested in coming in and serving my market. I think that is a travesty. HBO might want to go in and cherry-pick Toronto because Toronto could look like any American city, and it might want to go to Vancouver or Montreal. But who is going to tell the stories of Saskatchewan? Who is going to tell the stories of Newfoundland?

If there were some way of bringing forward some serious bite in the legislation, it would be interesting. When we changed the CRTC regulations to improve to about 30% Canadian content, to allow more stations to start taking control of the market, that was a trade-off we made as Canadians. If the hon. member thinks the direction should be a 30% basic strictly Canadian content rate for Fox TV, I think that would be very interesting.

[Telefilm Canada Act, December 13th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise today and speak in the House, as it always is.

I will begin by saying that the New Democratic Party supports Bill C-18, the act to amend Telefilm.

We have come a long way since Telefilm was formed in the 1960s. I think there is a recognition out there of the convergence of new media and the need to adapt to respond to new media and to continue in our fundamental obligation as government to work in cultural industries to promote our identity.

These amendments to change the act of course also came from recommendations from the Auditor General. I think they are very well put forward.

The discussion we are having today comes at a time of a fundamental watershed in Canadian cultural identity. We see ourselves as having built a very successful entertainment export industry. In fact, I would say that our number one export in the world is our artists. We have been very successful at that. We have had a somewhat more mixed success in terms of our ability to compete internationally in our film and television, particularly because we are so close to the United States.

I think there has always been a sort of false discussion about bad U.S. content and good Canada content. The fact is that in the United States we have seen the development of massive industries of entertainment. Over the last number of years a vertical integration has happened in these various media outlets from Hollywood and in music and television, such that it is making it incredibly difficult for other voices to be heard regionally across the United States, for example, but right across Canada.

I will give an example that I read about in Benjamin Barber's book Jihad Vs. McWorld . He describes the impact of the global U.S. entertainment culture. He says that this SpongeBob culture we are seeing is of a depth of only about three or four inches, like water, and it runs on a smooth plane, right across the community. If we look across the community we will still see the church steeples, we will still see the municipal buildings and the schools, and we will ask what kind of effect this mass popular culture has.

But what he concludes with is that children can drown in even six inches of water and we are looking at the spread of this thin layer of what we call popular culture coming out of Hollywood and other massive entertainment industries. Thus we have to ask ourselves, “Where is the room for our story?” A fundamental of any country is its ability to tell its own story. And it is not just to entertain, because we have come to see culture as entertainment; culture is how people group together. It is how they understand themselves. It is how they tell their history. It is how they can reflect their politics. It is how they can see where to go forward. We have to view culture as a multi-dimensional aspect of life. It is not simply our legends. It is not simply our songs. It is a whole fabric of the way a community interprets who it is.

In which case, I would bring us to where we are with the Telefilm discussion. Telefilm has been one of Canada's great success stories. We need to find ways to start improving the tools that we Canadians have in our cultural industries. What we are looking at with Telefilm is being able to move into the new mediums that they are already having to deal with, because, again, it is not just film and it is not just television. Our new mediums go from the web to PC games; there is a whole variety. That is where Canadians are moving. We need our institutions to have the tools to do that.

I fully support where we are going in terms of the Telefilm direction. To give an example of what we are looking at, we are talking about $85 million that would be going to film; $95 million to $100 million to television; $8 million to $9 million to sound recordings; and $9 million to new media, which could be websites or video games and other new technologies. On that front, I think we are definitely moving in a very positive direction.

However, I am very concerned that what we are doing is not nearly enough. I would not want to have anyone come out of today's debate thinking that the New Democratic Party thinks we are fully on the right road in terms of where we are going with our television and our film industries, because what we have seen over the last number of years is the continual downsizing of our government's support for these industries.

These industries need our support first of all because we are going up against such powerful and sometimes almost predatory heavyweights. It is almost impossible for a small film or television company to be able to even get the access to compete against the U.S. giants. We need to support our artists.

Second, there is an economic component. We can see that the money that goes into arts and film has created thousands of jobs and has built some fantastic industries right across the country, but these industries are now in crisis and we cannot avoid that fact. We are seeing a major crisis right across the country, from Halifax to Vancouver, in terms of the power that our film and television industries have. We have to make some very clear decisions as a country and as a government about where we are going in terms of our support of our cultural entertainment industries.

There has been a real destabilizing that has gone on in the last 10 years under this Liberal government. There have been major cuts to arts, which have destabilized numerous of our grassroots, the incubators of culture. We are looking now at our upcoming estimates for future cutbacks: cutbacks to Telefilm, cutbacks to the National Film Board and cutbacks to CBC. On the one hand we are saying we support culture, but on the other hand arts groups and film people across the country are saying, “We cannot even make the fundamental decisions in order to make even basic movements forward because we have been so undermined”.

When we talk about telling our story, it is almost like kitschy Canadiana in terms of how we like to talk about ourselves, like the roller piano from the Klondike and the happy lumberjack story. But the fact is that a lot of Canadian stories are not being told because there is not the needed funding in the areas where these stories are coming up.

For example, I bring up what happened to CBC. We saw devastating cuts to our regional programming. As someone who lives in an area of Ontario that is very distinct from southern Ontario and has a population the size of Saskatchewan, let me say that we do not have even a single television transmitter in our area of northern Ontario to speak to any of the issues that come out of CBC. We have no ability to even be heard on the national scale. We do not have the reporters up there to do that.

We are looking at undermining the distinct voices right across the country. We have to engage the government. In fact, the parliamentary secretary to the minister said it was the job of the opposition parties to make the case. It is unfortunate, but I seem to agree that it has become the job of the opposition parties to articulate the need for the government to commit to restoring the money that has been cut out of fundamental areas, such as, for example, the Canada Council, where we are seeing major cuts being planned on top of the cuts that have already been made. These are cuts which will come directly out of artists.

It is all fine and well for our government to say it loves artists. Well, I love little children and I like baseball too, but that is not really relevant to the matter. What is relevant is whether the government will put back the money to support these organizations so they can continue their job.

It is particularly distressing when we have such major industries as film, television and the Canadian book publishing industry now three and a half or maybe four months away from the new fiscal year and looking at zero in front of all their budget lines because they are being told there is no money. Is there no money? Maybe there is money, because the hon. minister loves arts; so maybe there will be money, but maybe there will not be. The months are ticking down to the new fiscal year and nobody is being hired, tours are not being planned, books are not being published and films are not being made.

So we can talk about a housekeeping bill, which this is, but the house is in terrible disrepair. I support the efforts to take the broom to the front door and clean up around the door, but I really think the roof needs fixing, because there is water pouring in on all levels of our house.

I would also like to say that I brought forward an amendment and it was shot down, unfortunately, but I think it is very important to raise in terms of Telefilm. We are talking about our support for the artists and we are talking about how much we value them. Yet when these bills come forward and we are talking about who sits on these boards, who sits on Telefilm, who sits on CBC, who sits on CRTC, we have no ability to guarantee that people who are committed to the arts community, people who are committed to arts and know the grassroots issues, the front line issues, have any representation on these boards.

Maybe the Telefilm bill is a housekeeping bill, but it would have been a nice foundational structural change to this housekeeping bill if we had said that someone from the arts community, someone who is involved in the day to day business of making a living and helping create culture, was sitting on that board, but that was shot down. It disturbs me greatly, because again it undermines, I believe, Canadians' confidence in our cultural institutions if we do not know why people are being appointed to these boards and who is making the decisions about appointing them.

I brought that forward as a potential amendment and it was not supported by any of the other parties. It is unfortunate, but I think it should be put on the record that we need to say that if we are going to support our artists it is more than rhetoric. Once again, we all love our artists, do we not? But until we start making some firm commitments as Canadians, we are going to continue to see an undermining of our export industries. We are going to see a continued loss of the jobs that have previously helped many of our urban areas. And we are going to see a continual erosion of what we like to call our story. I think that would be a national travesty.

I will conclude by saying that the NDP will support this bill going forward, but we believe the government has to do more. This government has to commit to coming up very soon with some honest answers about where it is going in terms of its funding for the arts, for film and for Canada's book industry. It has to let these people know so that they can get down to the business of doing what they do well, which is creating culture, creating jobs and creating export investments for us as a nation.

[Telefilm Canada Act, December 13th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on my colleague's question because I was listening very closely, but I did not hear a straight answer.

We are talking about estimates that show major cuts to Telefilm, to the National Film Board, and to the CBC over the next two or three years. These are the estimates that the people in these organizations must be dealing with for plans. Is the money going to be restored and will it be restored fully? I appreciate the fact that it is the job of the opposition to push the government to do this, but surely if this is a commitment that was laid out in the throne speech, will this money be put back and will it be put back before March 31?