Denise Savoie

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, if I could ask for your indulgence, when I started my comments, I forgot to mention that I would be splitting my time with the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan.

On my colleague's question, it was clear at the time that all parliamentarians in western countries, in western democracies, faced a very difficult situation. It also seems that we have, in history, faced this kind of situation before and we continually repeat some of the mistakes that were made.

We live in a country for whom the rule of law is one of the most important pieces and fundamental principles of our country. There is no question that it was a difficult situation, but the reaction went beyond the bounds of what was necessary at the time.

[Anti-terrorism Act, February 12th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this motion to extend investigative hearings and preventive arrest under the sunset clause introduced in 2002.

I was not here at the time, but after listening to the little bit of debate held on the matter, these measures seem to me to be the product of an overreaction, which occurred in a moment of panic following the events of September 11, 2001.

It is the responsibility of parliamentarians to do everything in their power to protect Canadians, taking whatever effective measures are needed to do so.

Today, we must first ask ourselves if these measures are effective or necessary. It seems increasingly clear to me that they are neither effective nor necessary, nor even desirable. This bill does nothing to combat terrorism.

It must be fought in a different way. It has been suggested that it could be more useful to fight with coordinated intelligence services. Evidence has demonstrated it just was not present. One of the things we saw clearly at the time, for example, in the Air-India investigation was that our investigative and intelligence services were not only not coordinated, but they were working at cross purposes with each other.

We learned many things through this process that, among other things, coordinated services and intelligence services were necessary on the ground along with combined appropriate police work.

This kind of terrorist action must be fought internationally and nationally. Internationally, I might say, by charting a path for peace. Pre-emptive actions, such as these measures provide, are not only disruptive, but they have been shown, as in the case of the pre-emptive strikes in Iraq, to be unsuccessful in calming or mitigating terrorism. They have only served to inflame it.

Have these measures been effective or even necessary? We found out that they have not been successfully used. One attempt was made, but was unsuccessful and only served to further draw out a legal process. That, perhaps, is indicative of the lack of need.

As leading peace advocate Ursula Franklin has described, such measures are maybe effective, but effective to create a climate of fear, and that is surely not the basis on which our country is founded. We should be looking instead at terrorism from a wider perspective and reassess how it is that we can best protect our citizens without ceding ground to terrorists.

It has been suggested by some of my colleagues that better coordinated intelligence services, as I have already mentioned, would be the first step where we need to put more resources. We have also learned that what we really need is more people on the ground, on the street, doing traditional intelligence gathering. That may be something that we should be looking at instead of invoking these extraordinary measures that strike at the very core of our rights and freedoms in Canada.

It has been shown by a minority report at the time of the discussion that this legislation is perhaps not only not effective, but not necessary, that according to section 495 of the Criminal Code, peace officers may arrest without warrant a person who, on reasonable grounds, they believe is about to commit an indictable offence. The arrested person must then be brought before a judge, who may impose the same conditions as those imposable under the Anti-terrorism Act. Judges may even refuse bail if they believe that the person's release might jeopardize public safety.

We have clear indications that we have presently, within the Criminal Code provisions, effective actions in the case of suspected plots. I just want to continue from the minority report. It states that if police officers believe that a person is about to commit an act of terrorism, then they have knowledge of the plot, obviously.

They probably know, based on wiretap or other surveillance information, that an indictable offence is about to be committed. Therefore, they have proof of a plot or attempt, and need only lay a charge in order to arrest the person in question. It would therefore seem that the kinds of measures that are being asked for, one of which is an extension, are not necessary.

Considering the infringement on our rights and freedoms, I believe that there must be more than just reasonable grounds. We need to see conditions that do not exist at this time. The measures required today or that the government is asking us to adopt could in no way help to resolve the much more serious problem of terrorism.

It would be better to focus on finding a path towards peace. On an international scale, Canada should take steps in that direction, with its allies, including the United States. Instead of investing heavily in the war industry, as is currently the case, we should instead be thinking of finding ways to work together in order to discover the underlying causes of terrorism.

It seems clear that those who give way to terrorism are those who are also facing an injustice. If Canada were to perhaps look at the commitment that it has not yet fulfilled with respect to foreign aid, that would be one way of addressing some of these issues.

If we really want to give a sense of security to our citizens and to the residents of Canada, then we must do so by applying some of the methods that are already at our disposal according to the Criminal Code, looking beyond the traditional framework, and really considering some of the causes of terrorism and addressing some of the profound causes of injustice.

[Canada Post-Secondary Education Act, February 5th, 2007]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-398, An Act to establish criteria and conditions in respect of funding for post-secondary education programs in order to ensure the quality, accessibility, public administration and accountability of those programs.

Mr. Speaker, this act would guarantee stable core funding for post-secondary education and enshrine the principles of accessibility, affordability and quality for Canadian students in a public not for profit education system.

The PSE act would also provide for the Canada social transfer to be split, creating a dedicated post-secondary education transfer. This action would ensure that funding is more transparent and that federal and provincial governments are more accountable.

The Canadian Council on Learning's December report stated that Canada lacked a national strategy to coordinate quality post-secondary education and that we will be left behind if we do not develop a national focus on post-secondary education. This legislation is the first step to achieve this.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, clearly, our party supports proper identification. The issue about proper identification was not raised by my party. The issue we raised had to do with the voucher required and the changes therein. Some of the problems that he raised could very clearly be addressed with universal enumeration.

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-31, An Act to amend the Canada Elections Act and the Public Service Employment Act. This bill flows from a committee report that sought to address certain concerns about the election process. In my opinion, everyone on both sides of the House wants an election process that is as impeccable as possible. However, careful attention must be paid to the negative effects certain sections of this bill may have. My colleagues who were members of the committee attempted to mitigate these effects by proposing certain amendments.

We should also remember that Canada does not have to make any drastic changes. I believe that Canada's Chief Electoral Officer stated that the integrity of our electoral system is intact and that there were, at the very most, only two or three cases of fraud in the last elections.

I would like to talk about certain sections of the legislation that we are discussing. First, some of them could deprive the most vulnerable of their right to vote. Second, they would allow political parties to assume the right to receive personal information, such as the date of birth of Canadians. I will start with this last point.

As I mentioned, the intent behind taking all possible measures to reduce the possibility of fraud is excellent. However, providing all political parties with personal information, such as birth dates, is symptomatic of a big brother state.

What in the world could justify giving political parties this information, aside from allowing MPs to make a birthday call for crass political reasons or to better target voters? This is not about reducing fraud. It is simply about targeting voters to get personal information to improve political parties' messaging. The Conservative Party, for example, is already spending fortunes to find out what would make voters less likely to vote for the Liberal Party rather than focusing on the issues. We are now developing personality attacks in Canada. I think Canadians will be very irritated when they find out that political parties can now have that kind of personal information.

It seems to me that political parties already have enough information, if we judge from the kinds of political ads that are presently being aired. Why make political opportunism more rampant than it is right now in Canada? I ask my colleagues to be attentive to this tool that Liberals and Conservatives are proposing and want to create through this law. The tool will shape the use, as noted scientist Ursula Franklin says. If we do not foresee the impacts of the changes that we are proposing through this law, we will not make a good decision.

Talking about good public policy, I would like to go back to the question of the new requirements for one piece of government issued photo ID showing a name and address, and two pieces of ID authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer showing the name and address of the voter, or the requirement to take an oath, or to be vouched for by another elector.

On the surface, this might seem fairly benign or innocuous, but in reality it seems that this bill could result in thousands of individuals who lack proper identification due to poverty or disability, or who have no stable address, not being able to exercise their right to vote because of the identification requirements of this bill. People who are homeless or temporarily housed often do not have identification that reflects their addresses or their stay in a shelter. During the last election I spoke with some homeless people on the street and that was in fact their case. They could go to a homeless shelter where the staff there could vouch for many of them, but this possibility would be removed for them. It would further disenfranchise those people.

My colleague from Ottawa Centre put forward recommendations at committee that would have addressed these concerns. These included the use of a statutory declaration as an alternate means of identification for an elector to prove his or her identity. I believe we also proposed an amendment to allow for a representative of a recognized agency, such as happens now, to be authorized to vouch for the agency's clientele as authorized by the local returning officer. These amendments were defeated by members of the other parties.

We should talk about one of the real problems that has occurred, and that is with respect to enumeration. I know personally that my daughter-in-law, who lived with me six years ago and has voted since then in a number of elections, still receives her voter slip at my address. There has been a real problem in performing proper enumeration in Canada and this should be corrected. That would be a way of reducing the possibility of fraud. This bill just does not do it.

The bill does require other amendments, for example, the proposed amendments to the PSE Act that are, more or less, buried in the bill. Those amendments could, potentially, have a significant impact on employment patterns in the federal public service where, clearly, the Conservative government is talking about more flexible employment and more flexibility in departmental hiring. We have a concern about what that might mean.

The bill is not good in its present form and I would urge my colleagues to consider some of the amendments that have been proposed by my colleagues.

[Canada Elections Act, February 2nd, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly agree with my colleague that proportional representation would provide a better representation of Canadians in the House. Some Canadians are concerned that proportional representation could lead to more fragile governments and minority governments. They see the tenor of debate in the House right now and they get really worried.

It seems to me that we have the worst of both worlds. We have the winner take all system which leads to the kind of confrontational debate that we have seen and a minority Parliament that brings out the worst as people continually arm themselves in the fear of an election.

Could my colleague talk about how proportional representation might lead to a more collaborative approach to governance in Canada?

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to this very important issue, an issue that is crucial to our common future.

We will need to tell our children what we did about this issue while we still have the opportunity. We have seen today how difficult it is to get past this appalling partisan debate, this ping-pong back and forth.

Eminent scientists, like climatologist Dr. Andrew Weaver, have sounded the alarm and have called for immediate action if we are to prevent the feedback loop that is inherent in the climate change process.

Mr. John Robinson from UBC has said that the barriers to moving forward are not technological. He said that the fundamental things we need to do are policy changes that focus on the rules of the game with regulatory mechanisms.

I would like to try to deal with the motion at hand and what can be done to combat climate change. The issue of CEPA as a tool against climate change versus having legislation that would enforce action of the government has been raised several times by members of the Liberal Party. We have heard that CEPA allows government to act, and that is precisely the problem. It only enables government action. To actually get the action, we need to trust the government to act behind closed doors to do something.

I once heard a former environment minister lament that he could not get his cabinet colleagues to act on climate change, as he put it, to act in the public interest. That is what happens if we leave the process behind closed doors. To say that CEPA could be used to tackle climate change is asking Canadians to accept that the fight against climate change happens at the whim of government behind closed doors in cabinet. We need legislation to set concrete objectives on absolute reductions of our greenhouse gas emissions. We need legislatively binding targets.

Instead of talking about who is worse on the environment, let us talk about what needs to happen because, frankly, we have done a poor job. We need to look primarily at how we produce and how we consume energy. We cannot gloss over just intensity based targets or even look, as the Minister of Natural Resources seems to, at ways to clean up the dirty energy. He seems to have boundless enthusiasm for nuclear energy.

We need to look at absolute reductions of our energy production and consumption and we need to decouple economic growth from the consumption of fossil fuels, as both Liberals and Conservative seem reluctant to do in reining in the accelerated exploration of the tar sands. When we do get honest answers about why the Liberals have not acted on climate change in an effective way, they confess that they did not want to hurt the economy.

We need to take a lead on new technologies, look at solutions toward the bioeconomy and look at green technology, green energy. Thanks to the loud voice of Canadians, the government is finally starting to get it. While the government talks about taking action, we have proposed a legislative committee and invited all parties to bring their best solutions to allow us to come away from this Parliament having taken action.

I invite my colleagues to think seriously about what they will tell their children if we miss this opportunity.

[Business of Supply, February 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I feel ashamed sitting here in the House of Commons watching the two old parties playing a game of Ping-Pong over an issue that is crucial to Canada's future. It is like a pantomime between Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

The Liberals had many years after the CEPA was amended to act and did not act. Obviously Canadians and members on this side of the House support the need for action now. We believe the government can and should act now. There is a need for a law that requires the government to act, not just a law, like CEPA, that allows the government to act as we saw by Liberal inaction in the past years in the House.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, February 1st, 2007]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-397, An Act to change the name of the electoral district of Victoria.

Mr. Speaker, Victoria is a wonderful riding with many distinct neighbourhoods, but at the suggestion of constituents, I am proposing this name change. First of all, because of the many neighbourhoods in our community, this name change would reflect the fact that Oak Bay is a full municipality within the riding. It is a simple measure that acknowledges the contribution that this part of my riding has made to the unique quality and character of Victoria.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Income Tax Act, January 31st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak on Bill C-207 put forward by the hon. member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. This bill amends the Income Tax Act for the purpose of giving tax credits to new graduates working in designated regions. It is designed to encourage new graduates from universities, colleges and other institutions to settle in economically depressed areas by offering them a non-refundable tax credit for the first year.

I happen to represent a region where employment is very high and the economy very strong, but it was not always so. Could this kind of measure have helped, I wondered? It was also helpful, in considering this bill, to have the opportunity, last week, to meet 30 or so young people from rural British Columbia. Among them were new graduates as well as soon to be graduates. This fuelled my thought process and led me to the following conclusions.

In my opinion, the NDP could, with some reservation, support this bill in principle because it would level the playing field for rural communities, given that urban centres have a clear advantage over them when it comes to recruiting qualified workers. The bill would benefit low and middle income families in rural communities across Canada and help consolidate the social and economic situation of these communities by addressing depopulation and youth out-migration.

That said, it should be pointed out that this bill is but a tiny step in the right direction. For example, it encourages graduates to find work in economically depressed areas, but does so only for one year, as our colleague said a moment ago. The Quebec program from which this bill draws, if I heard correctly, takes a more gradual approach, providing a maximum credit of $3,000 per year, up to a lifetime maximum of $8,000. It also includes a financial incentive for three years or more. Personally, I am not sure that a one-year financial incentive would be sufficient to achieve the objectives sought by the hon. member.

Our second reservation about the program has to do with the fact that it could prove to be extremely ineffective if it is not rounded out by a comprehensive regional development plan. The proposed tax credit would be granted to recent graduates working in a region that is, pursuant to the terms of the Regional Development Incentives Act:

...determined to require special measures to facilitate economic expansion and social adjustment.

And, more precisely, a region where:

...existing opportunities for productive employment in the region are exceptionally inadequate.

Is it wise to send recent graduates to regions where employment opportunities are exceptionally inadequate, according to the terms in the act? For the people who already live in such areas, we should be finding ways to create more jobs before trying to draw more workers.

Instead or perhaps in addition to this tax credit incentive, it would be wiser to enhance the summer career placement program as opposed to cutting it in half, as the Conservatives are proposing to do. This would have the benefit of increasing employment opportunities in economically depressed regions.

The Conservatives saw some flaws in this program that are real but should have and could have been remedied. Rural and low employment communities as well as non-profit sector employers in urban areas should continue to benefit from this program, especially in light of the enormous student debt that new graduates are facing at the moment.

In the last Parliament an all-party committee in a unanimous report by the human resources committee recommended substantial changes to the funding allocation formula for the summer career placement program which is presently based on the number of students in the riding.

When the 2001 census numbers were factored into the formula, there were significant cuts in several ridings, especially the rural, northern, inner city or smaller ones. The committee recommended that disadvantaged and rural populations be factored into riding allocation formulas. The committee also recommended that students over 30, often single mothers, be eligible. Right now only students 15 to 30 may apply.

The summer career placement program is a very valuable one for numerous non-profit groups who could not otherwise offer competitive wages or afford to hire students at all to do valuable work in the community; as well, for small town rural business people to help students avoid having to go to bigger cities to find work.

The government is saying it will better target the program to at risk youth and to ensure that profitable businesses who can afford to pay higher wages do not get subsidized.

I agree that the program could be better targeted but targeting does not mean cutting. The government could target better at current funding levels and have a far greater impact.

The NDP would propose instead to restore full funding for the summer career placement program and implement the committee's recommendations that I have already mentioned. The NDP would also get to work in tackling the root of the problem and that is unaffordable post-secondary education especially for rural and low income families. If we want to attract graduates to economically depressed areas, ideally they should be from these regions and be coming home to work.

Right now tuition and other education costs have grown out of reach for even middle income families in Canada. That is the problem that we must tackle. Debt burdens are overwhelming for Canadian graduates and just as they begin their careers they are foreclosing their options and their career choices.

The traditional Liberal-Conservative answer has been to make student loans more accessible and therefore dramatically increase student debt in Canada. It has allowed students from rural areas to benefit and to get post-secondary education, but they simply complete their program burdened with unacceptable debt.

As I said, what we would propose is to tackle the root of the problem by making post-secondary education more affordable, by creating a national program of non-repayable grants that would prevent these huge debt levels. We would also propose to overhaul the student loan system which has become very inflexible.

Retargeting to those in greater need is really a piece of the solution that I hope my colleague from the Bloc, who has proposed this bill, would consider as a partial solution to the problem that is faced in certain areas.

The intention behind the bill is commendable. The bill represents the beginnings of a solution to a serious problem in certain regions of Canada. However, I urge the hon. member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord to convince his colleagues from the Bloc and all members of the House to support the NDP's vision for post-secondary education, which proposes a global, comprehensive view, in order to inspire hope in our students and in Canada's rural areas and small communities.