Diane Ablonczy

[Post-Secondary Education, November 16th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, Reform has advocated an advanced education voucher system to shift federal transfers for post-secondary education into the hands of those most concerned about educational requirements, the students themselves. This would make educational institutions more responsive to students' needs.

Will the government consider providing Canadians with the choices that such a voucher system would provide?

[Post-Secondary Education, November 16th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, last month in the House the Minister for Human Resources Development said he supports a system of broader, wider grants for students to use as a way of replacing federal transfers to provinces for post-secondary education.

Will the government adopt yet another Reform Party proposal, namely the advanced education voucher system which would transfer greater control from bureaucrats to individual students?

[Recall Act, October 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I hope that the government will engage in debate on this issue as time goes on.

In the birthplace of democracy in Athens, the accountability of elected officials was through a process of recall which was by way of ostracizing wayward politicians. Wayward politicians were ostracized and not allowed to participate in public life and they were also sometimes exiled from the country.

I think a lot of Canadians would feel that we should go right back to original democratic principles sometimes.

Also recall has been a facet of the Swiss system since before its formal adoption in the 19th century. In the 19th century recall was by another name.

It was known as the imperative mandate. It is a device whereby elected officials can be subjected at any time to the review of the people who put them in office and I would suggest that this makes eminent sense in light of what democracy really is.

I remind Canadians again that democracy is rule by the people. We are simply the representatives of the people here in this Chamber. We are here because they have chosen us, given us the honour and the responsibility to represent their concerns, their wishes and their interests and carry them out on their behalf.

A lot of times Canadians feel that once elected, representatives simply disconnect from the people who put them in place, pay the bills and whose future is affected by their decisions.

I would also point out that recall is truly democratic because citizens can only recall their own representative, not someone else's. It is the people who put a representative in place, who have the wisdom to elect that representative in the first place, who should be able to have the say as to whether that representative continues in the position where the electors have put them.

I want to point out to members of this House that every other Canadian is subject to recall. If you are in a job or a position and you do not do it properly you will be booted out. You will be replaced. You will be given a pink slip. Yet somehow 295 Canadians who have a very important job, a very critical job, a job on which hangs the future and the well-being of thousands and thousands of Canadians, feel that somehow they should not be subject to the same type of representation and accountability and recall as every other Canadian. This simply does not make sense and it should be rectified.

People are cynical and disrespectful of politicians because they do not open themselves up to this evaluation. It is an axiom that if you want trust from others you must trust them in response. We hear this all the time when we are counselled about dealing with our children, dealing with staff in management situations and in all facets of human relationships. Mutual trust is so important.

Yet it appears that members of this House are not prepared to entrust their future and evaluation of their performance and of the adequacy of what they are doing to the Canadian public. This does not make sense and we need to re-examine our belief in the common sense of the people who elected us in the first place.

When we asked the Prime Minister of this present government about his support for the concept of recall his response was that Canadians have the ability to recall their representative in an election.

Canadians know well that a general election is not the most effective time for a performance review because that is the time when so many issues are at stake with not only individual representatives but really the party and the leadership. Other kinds of programs and policies are on the table. A performance review is such a very small part of all of the factors that electors have to weigh at the time of an election that it is not fair to say that is the definitive moment when electors should be deciding whether a particular candidate is satisfactory.

MP recall, I believe, would dramatically change the sensitivity of MPs to issues by shifting the balance from parties to people and that is where it really belongs. If a backbench MP could say to the government whip and to the front benches "I am sorry, I would like to support this measure. I know you are telling me to but if I do I am going to get turfed out back home because this is simply not supported by the people I represent", think of how much healthier it would be and how much more meaningful real legislation would be if it had to have the real support of the people we speak for and vote for.

That would be one of the healthiest changes we could bring to do something to really address the issues of the country in a meaningful way, in a way that meets with the approval of the people we represent.

There are so many reasons why we need to have the courage and the faith in the Canadian public to bring forward these direct democracy measures that I urge this House to reconsider, especially members on the other side, their resistance to moving in this direction and to support my colleague's bill on recall of representatives.

[Recall Act, October 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to stand in support of my colleague's bill today.

I want to say that I am very dismayed that none of the government members opposite has the courage to stand and talk about the concept of recall in this House.

As my colleague from Simcoe Centre has already stated, this is a measure that has very high support among the Canadian electorate. In other words, Canadians want us to be subject to recall. The members of this government will not even talk about it and that is a shame and not in the interests of Canadians.

Really the purpose of a recall mechanism is that Canadian democracy would benefit from the increased accountability of elected officials. Once again this week we have seen how very unaccountable elected representatives really are.

This government talks so loudly about integrity in government and how it was going to put a watchdog in place that would be accountable to Parliament. What has it done to provide for accountability of elected officials? What it has done is appoint a lapdog that is answerable only to the Prime Minister and is now being used as kind of a Delphic oracle when the Prime Minister needs some words of wisdom from a deep source to justify his actions.

Canadians are not satisfied with the level of accountability that their elected officials have. It needs to be corrected.

This idea of holding elected representatives accountable by some recall mechanism is certainly not something that has just been dreamed up by a few strange people in this country. The whole concept originated in ancient Athens which was the birthplace of democracy.

[Crtc, October 28th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister has told the House that when the Minister of Canadian Heritage wrote the letter we have been talking about he was just acting as an MP. Then he said that the minister made a mistake.

Since he cannot have it both ways, acting reasonably and properly as an MP and making a mistake, I would like the Prime Minister to tell the House which interpretation of the minister's conduct is the correct one.

[Supply, October 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I urge hon. members opposite to look at proposals, ideas and suggestions without labelling people or attacking people who make them and suggesting that somehow proposals are invalid because of where they are coming from.

It is not helpful to the debate. It does not help us work together as parliamentarians to solve the very real difficulties in the country. I suggest that we need to spend less time on attacking each other and more time on attacking the difficulties that face our country and coming up with concrete and positive solutions together.

[Supply, October 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, it always makes me a little concerned when I hear members say things like "you people". It is so easy to hang facile labels on people, to somehow suggest there is something not quite acceptable about a group. That is called bigotry and it is called labelling.

[Supply, October 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to respond to those terrible distortions of what is happening with the Reform Party.

I am amused and in disbelief that member of government, a parliamentary secretary, would ask: "Where's the beef?". The government has had no beef for one full year after working away. It has no beef at all in its social program reform. It has no beef at all in a plan to balance the budget or even get it down to its feeble target of 3 per cent of GDP. I would have thought the parliamentary secretary would be standing up telling Canadian people where their beef is, not demanding that a third party supply him with the beef.

If the member wants to see some beef, perhaps he should look at the plans put forward by the Reform Party and tabled in the House. For the benefit of the government perhaps he should get a report on the consultations of our party with his finance minister to try to give him a bit of hand holding in coming up with a sensible plan to do what he is supposed to do. Those concrete proposals were put forward by a brand new third party of 52 green, untried MPs, and the government still says: "You tell us what to do".

This party is going to have a plan ready to give the Canadian people and to run the country in the proper way after the next election.

The member talked about town hall meetings. It is interesting to note that just last evening the Liberal Party imitated Reform's electronic town hall by trying to get out and consult with the people. We have led the way in public consultation and in innovative ways to get the true input of Canadian people. We are delighted the government is catching on that this needs to be done, but I certainly think it is inappropriate for the member opposite to suggest that somehow our electronic consultations are not working when his party is aping them or imitating them. That does not quite make sense to me.

I might add the consultations that have been done with the Canadian public have given valuable input not only to our party but to the governing party. I hope he is paying attention to what is being said in those consultations.

[Supply, October 25th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, for those Canadians who are watching this debate on television I would like to read again the motion that has been put forward today to the House for debate by the Reform Party:

That this House requests the government to table a clear detailed plan to show how and when it intends to balance the budget including a clear statement of its vision of the role of the government in the economy in order for the people of Canada to debate the plan and vision.

There are a few things we need to point out about this process that Reform's motion suggests and proposes. One is about this whole question of public debate and consultation.

I have been rather amused to hear the government keep playing the violin about consultation, talking to the people, wanting Canadians to draw up a blueprint for reform of social programs, which is the area I am involved in the most, but not having anything to debate.

If we have a debate there is a proposal, a question, some sort of statement and people take the pro and the con and they debate it. How can we debate a nothing? There is no debate.

This government has made a fetish out of debating and consultations and put no meat on the table, put no clear proposals on the table, no question to be debated. It is just: "What would you do about social program reform? What would you do about budgets?". People are going to come from all over the map on that type of question.

What we have suggested in this motion today for debate is that the people of Canada be given a plan and a clear vision to debate. The government should come forward and say: "After talking to all of our experts, after examining all of the options, after examining all of the facts and figures and knowing all of the cost benefit of what we might do and what we might not do, we think we should do this. However, because this is a democracy, because we want to truly represent the people who are paying the bills and whose futures are going to be affected by this plan, we are now going to you the people and we are saying this is our best judgment about how we should attack and address this problem. But we want to know whether you are willing to support it, given all the information that we can make available to you and given sufficient time for you to examine our proposal".

That is what consultation is. It is not just: "What do you think?". We definitely need leadership from people in charge, a plan and a proposal and some direction, vision and purpose. We need to get that out for debate.

We do not have that from this government. That is one of the things that is sorely lacking. I am afraid quite frankly that the Canadian public will become very cynical, very disenchanted and very disrespectful of this whole business of consultation. It is going to become a dirty word. What it means is just pooling our ignorance, just "whatever you think". That is not good enough.

Consultation has to be focused on something concrete, something specific and something with some vision and a plan. Therefore I urge this government not to debate the notion of consultation with this kind of open ended, whatever you think, throw it at us. Let us show as parliamentarians and leaders, particularly those members who are representatives of the government party, that there is some leadership, a plan and a focus and that we are going somewhere so that we as Canadians can say: "Yes, we agree. We support that. It makes sense to us", or "No, we would like to see changes". At least we would know what we are talking about.

There has been a lot of talk about balancing the budget. Goodness knows our party has been talking about it for seven long years. They say seven is the perfect number. I hope it is because some time or other you would like to see this vision of a balanced budget coming to fruition.

We have been labelled as hackers and slashers, wanting to gut social programs, and all of the negative things that can be thrown at people who have one very sensible, very common sense proposal, and that is that we live within our means.

Why on earth would representatives, leaders and public officials want to borrow from the future? We do not want to mortgage our country. We do not want to lay the burden of our spending on our children. Why would that be such a difficult concept to accept? We do not know.

Why would it be such a difficult concept for the government to accept? We do know because it is still believed that governments can scoop up our national wealth and reallocate it in a way that is beneficial to Canadians. If the last 30 years have not demonstrated that that is a foolish and fallacious notion, then I do not know what will convince people.

If you had done something for 30 years, if you had scooped up billions and billions and billions of dollars of our national wealth and had it spent by bureaucrats, politicians and social engineers and then seen the mess we are in today, you would have thought that someone would stand up and say: "Gee, maybe this isn't working. Maybe we should do something different".

No, Mr. Speaker. What do we have from this government? Instead, the same old cant about "Well, maybe we just need different programs. Maybe we just need to spend it differently. Maybe we just need to do this or that or the other thing".

Maybe what we should do is run this country like any sensible business or household is run, that is living within its means, and letting people have the freedom to define their own futures, to look after themselves and their families, to help each other and their communities instead of this notion that somehow the state, mother government, the bureaucracy, the central planners, the wise men from the government can do everything.

It is not working and it is time that we acknowledge that. It is time that we started to say that we can do better in this country. We can do better than giving billions and billions of our hard earned dollars to government, politicians, bureaucrats, programs, and social engineering experiments that are simply making the situation worse.

When we talk about balancing budgets we are simply talking about taking the money that we have and using it with some common sense. We are talking about taking the money that we have and using it for what needs to be done, not what governments and bureaucracies and industries of different sorts think should be done with it.

This talk about balancing the budget is going to be just so much talk until something is done. I remember as a brand new, some would say very green, parliamentarian sitting in this chamber in February and listening to the finance minister. One thing that the finance minister said struck me very powerfully.

"We are no longer going to nibble around the edges of our deficit." I thought, wow, this is great. What happened at the end of the day? He cut just over one billion from spending. A lot of people said that was by smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand and kind of mixing and matching the numbers. When you are spending $160 billion and you cut it just over a billion, is that not nibbling around the edges?

Canadians are sick and tired of governments and politicians who say one thing and do another. It is time that this government and this House got a grip on this country, started using some common sense, started using some principled behaviour in the way they manage this country and its wonderful resources, and started balancing their spending.

I urge this House to strongly support our motion today.

[Old Age Security Act, October 20th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, as critic for human resources development I have some statements to make about the bill.

For the benefit of Canadians who are joining the debate by television, I would like to set out the purpose of the bill. It deals with major pieces of legislation involving enormous expenditures by the government. However the bill is not a major initiative. It is a piece of housekeeping and its purpose, according to the summary, is to improve services to clients to allow for more efficient program administration and to increase efficiency between programs in the case of old age security and the Canada pension plan.

It is almost exclusively concerned with amendments to the Old Age Security Act, that is the first 16 pages of the bill; with the CPP act which takes us through the first 30 pages of the bill; with the Children's Special Allowances Act which takes up a couple of pages; and with the Unemployment Insurance Act which takes up another couple of pages. These acts are housekeeping in nature but, as has been stated by my colleague from the Bloc, there are some policy considerations that should be brought out as we debate the piece of legislation.

The government speaker who spoke on the bill in the House this morning played rather heavily on the government's "commitment to seniors". Back in January the government introduced with much fanfare a review of our social security system. I will read from the terms of reference that were put forward to the House respecting that review: "that the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development be directed to consult broadly, to analyse and to make recommendations regarding the modernization and restructuring of Canada's social security system", and this is the operative part, "with particular reference to the needs of families with children, youth and working age adults".

Seniors are quite conspicuous by their absence from this mandate and review of the social security system. At the time the mandate was debated in the House I stood and proposed that it was deficient in that it ignored our social security system as it related to seniors. Seniors are some of the people most impacted by our social systems. OAS, CPP and health care are very much of concern to seniors. Yet their interests were ignored in the terms of reference for the review. Now the government stands and plays the violin about its commitment to seniors. That is a little hypocritical.

The bill does one thing for Canadians. It points out the enormous complexity of the legislation and administration of our social programs. This complexity catches Canadians in many ways and causes their lives to be a nightmare of forms, deadlines, red tape, information exchanges, letters, phone calls and all things that go along with an enormous state bureaucracy that is supposed to look after us but in fact does not do it very well.

After one year in office the Liberal answer to the need to address the substantive dysfunction of a lot of our social programs, and the concern that the services to Canadians are eroding and cannot be sustained, is to bring forth a bit of housekeeping legislation. That is simply not good enough for Canadians. We need to be serious about addressing our social programs.

I will talk about that in a moment but first I will address the concern about confidentiality. Canadians want to see some common sense in this area. For example, if a non-citizen, someone from another country, comes to Canada, decides to stay for reasons we can certainly well understand and makes applications as a refugee, that the individual is on welfare or some other social program cannot be disclosed to Canadians trying to evaluate which people should be allowed to come to our country and be accepted as citizens to help build our nation.

There are many areas where the concern about confidentiality interferes with efficient, effective and common sense administration of our own system. For example, if someone applies for benefits often it cannot be disclosed in other jurisdictions or to administrators of other programs. That is one of the reasons we have abuse, inefficiency and overlap.

We need to be very sensible when we address this area and not go overboard by suggesting that nobody, especially the system that is paying the bills, has a right to know what individual Canadians are receiving in benefits.

The real issue is not that we need a little tinkering with our programs, a little housekeeping legislation from time to time to try to smooth the bureaucratic wheels. As we know these programs are in far deeper trouble than that. What is really needed is a substantial review and reform of our income security programs and our social programs and that is what we are not receiving from the government.

The review taking place presently totally ignores all the programs of most concern to seniors. It totally ignores CPP. It totally ignores old age security. It totally ignores health care. Government says this is coming. Our social system is just that. It is a system. All these programs are interrelated. If changes are made to program a it will impact on programs b , c and d. That is the way it works. To do this piecemeal, to look at one program,

then maybe another and a couple of years down the road we will get around to looking at the rest, is not the way to look in a coherent, effective and clear manner at how social programs should be administered.

A lot of people refer to the old saying: if it ain't broke don't fix it. Why are we looking at social programs? Why has the government brought in the review of social programs in Canada? It is fairly clear to everyone in the House and certainly to most Canadians why it is necessary. Although these programs are barely 30 years old, they are already unsustainable financially. They are not paying their own way. The cost of these programs is growing astronomically year by year and, worst of all, they have been largely financed on the backs of our children.

The bill for much of the spending on these programs which are so nice for us today is being handed to our children tomorrow. We are mortgaging our future so that we can have these programs. How long have we even had them? We have had them for 30 years. For 30 years we have impoverished our country and we are impoverishing our children so that we can have enormous benefits and an enormous bureaucracy to administer them. What have we accomplished? Very little as far as the long term benefit to the country is concerned.

Someone needs to stand and say this and do something about it. Canadians are looking to the government for leadership and for a good, common sense grappling with the issues facing us not just today but in the future. We do not see that happening.

We have a government that is continuing to say mortgaging our country to the tune of $100 billion during its term in office is okay. It will celebrate if that is all it does: if it only puts us in the hole by $25 billion a year it has done a great job for us! Canadians will beg to differ and certainly our children will beg to differ.

Seniors are at risk unless something is done. This is why many seniors are dependent upon pension benefits they have counted on to sustain them in their retirement years. It is very clear from anybody looking at these programs that in coming years our seniors will be sadly disappointed.

In just 15 short years we will have 40 per cent more retired Canadians than we have today. That is a huge increase. These Canadians will be looking for old age security payments. They will be looking for Canada pension plan payments. They will be looking to the health care system to make sure that their increased medical needs are covered and looked after.

Yet what is happening? These programs are costing more and more money. They are increasing the debt burden on our country

and are in serious trouble by any standard. Yet there has been no substantial, serious or urgent look at the situation.

If we look at the Canada pension plan into which people like me faithfully and without any free will on the matter paid for so many years of our working lives, we see that the premiums to sustain the program have already had to rise. By the most moderate analysis they will be rising to at least 13 per cent by the time the next generation is paying our pensions. Some analysts suggest that the burden on future workers and taxpayers could be as high as 16 per cent. This off the top payment, even if it were only 10 per cent, will be in addition to the enormous yearly interest that will have to be paid on the money that we borrowed and to the payment for all the other programs we will be using.

Do we seriously think the taxpayer of the future, in addition to paying the interest, paying for all the other programs to sustain society, trying to keep their lives together and building businesses and professional lives are going to pay an additional 10 per cent, 13 per cent or 16 per cent off the top so that you and I, Mr. Speaker, can have the Canada pension plan? That is not going to happen.

The future taxpayer will rise up in revolt and say that we are the guys that got them into the mess and if we think they are going to pay that much money off the top of their earnings in addition to everything else so we can have Canada pension fund benefits, we can think again; it is not going to happen. I can scarcely blame them.

Somebody has to get serious about the situation. Just going along with it and saying "don't worry, be happy; it will all work out" is not good enough.

The future taxpayer will have to pay billions and billions of dollars every year in interest on what we have borrowed. This year, for example, we are having to dig into our pockets for at least $40 billion-and it looks like it will be $44 billion-to pay interest on money the Liberal and Conservative governments have borrowed in the last 25 years. In 25 years they have managed to extract from our economy an obligation for $44 billion, and that is $44 billion that cannot be used for old age security, Canada pension plan, health care and all other programs we desperately need.

That interest obligation is rising. The government is going to think it is doing us all a favour if it only rises by another $5 billion or $6 billion every year due to its feeble stewardship over the next four years of its mandate.

We cannot continue to impoverish our future by not getting a grip on the issue today. We simply have to say we cannot continue to obligate our children to take $40 billion or $50 billion every year out of our economy, out of their hard earned pay, out of our economic activity, because we did not have the courage and the good sense to do what is right: to live within our means and pay our own way.

These programs have to be reorganized so that the people who really need them can count on them in the future. They have to be reorganized so that the state does not continue to have this enormous inefficient and ineffective bureaucratic growth, saying that it is going to look after us when it is abundantly clear that even at great cost, great inefficiency and great numbers of bureaucrats and administrative tribunals, it is simply not working and will not continue to work.

Last of all, we need to ensure these programs will be something we can continue to count on and pay for into the future. That is absolutely essential. It is a cruel deception for the government to tell Canadians it is looking after things, that everything is all right and that it is going to reward seniors who have invested in the country by making sure they get the programs. The government's inaction is virtually ensuring that our seniors will not be getting these programs, even in the foreseeable future as numbers of seniors rise.

I urge the House today not to look just at housekeeping legislation and a few little administrative changes to help a few people caught in the bureaucratic jungle. That is good; that is nice. However the answer is not to tinker with the programs. The answer is to look at the whole system that we have set up, all the structure that is not working after a mere 30 years or sometimes less, and have the courage, the vision and the leadership to get a grip on the situation and turn it around so that all Canadians can feel secure and confident that when they need help it will be there; otherwise the government will keep its hand out of their pockets and its nose out of their business.