Gilles Duceppe

[Trade, February 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, it is possible to encourage local purchasing and still comply with WTO and NAFTA rules. Such a policy would mean that certain equipment would be purchased locally for security reasons, for example.

At a time when we are in the midst of an economic crisis and many industries are struggling, why does the government not adopt a buy local policy that complies with WTO and NAFTA rules?

[Trade, February 2nd, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the recovery plan unveiled by the U.S. President, Barack Obama, contains a protectionist clause that would violate WTO and NAFTA rules and threaten 2,000 jobs in Quebec. The Prime Minister promised to raise this issue with his American counterpart when he visits on February 19. But it is quite possible that this plan will already have been adopted by the U.S. senate when the two leaders meet.

Will the Prime Minister promise to call President Obama as soon as possible and ask him to change that clause, in order to prevent a prolonged legal battle like the one over softwood lumber?

[Securities, January 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, that is pure hypocrisy, because at the same time, the Prime Minister is telling us that every company has the right to join the Canada-wide securities commission and avoid regulation by Quebec. In other words, the Prime Minister is making sure that the Commission des valeurs mobilières du Québec will die a slow death. His Minister of National Revenue has implied as much.

Will the Prime Minister admit that he is putting all the conditions in place to kill the Commission des valeurs mobilières du Québec and concentrate financial power in Toronto?

[Securities, January 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister neglected to mention that his budget had been condemned by a number of groups in Quebec and that the creation of a Canada-wide securities commission had been unanimously criticized throughout Quebec. Even the OECD said that the current system, with securities commissions in each province, was one of the best in the world. But the Prime Minister will not be moved.

Will he admit that what he is really trying to do by going ahead with his proposed Canada-wide securities commission is to concentrate everything in Toronto?

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, what surprises me about what he is saying is that, of all the groups he mentioned, some of them did support the budget, but they all denounced the cap on equalization in the same press release. He should have read to the end of the press release, instead of stopping after the first three lines. There is unanimous agreement about equalization and about the securities commissions.

Furthermore, what he forgot to say is that the Prime Minister wrote to the Premier of Quebec in 2007, telling him that the formula could henceforth be used to calculate the sums that would be paid in equalization. Yet by capping it, Quebec loses $1 billion this year and up to $2 billion in 2010. What this Prime Minister did was break his promise and go back on his word.

And while he claims that all the groups he mentioned and everyone else in Quebec support them, we just have to look at the results of the last election. Quebeckers decided that a Prime Minister who spent his time following in Mr. Bush's footsteps was not someone who represented their values and interests. I have often denounced the fact that this Prime Minister imitated Mr. Bush. I have one piece of advice for him: he should now follow in Mr. Bush's footsteps.

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased the member has asked me such a clear, precise question.

I would like to use an example. He talked about employment insurance. Eliminating the two week waiting period would have cost some $1.2 billion. The Conservatives preferred to maintain tax havens, which cost $1.5 billion a year. This shows where they stand. They allow people to take money out of the country, which does not help our domestic economy, even though, by eliminating the two week waiting period, they would be allowing people who have lost their jobs to put money back into our economy.

People who lose their jobs do not use their employment insurance cheques to buy shares or invest in tax havens; rather, they use them to feed their families, pay the mortgage, pay their loans, buy clothes and so on.

This is the decision facing all hon. members here today. Members who make this decision will be able to look their constituents in the eye and tell them that they defended the interests of Quebeckers, of all Canadians for that matter, rather than the interests of large corporations, especially the oil and gas companies.

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I heard my Liberal colleagues asking a lot of questions during question period and even my colleague noting in her initial remarks that I pointed out significant flaws in this budget. I believe she shares my opinion in this regard. She is indicating that she does.

She had other proposals. We are proposing an amendment to the amendment, based on the unanimous motion of the Quebec National Assembly, represented by Premier Charest himself, which contends that reductions in income tax favour the well off, as my colleague's party leader has said, and which opposes pay equity being negotiable. She is in agreement on all these points. I do not see why she cannot support our amendment to the amendment, keep what she considers good in the budget and improve it with the good things from the coalition, since that party indicated its willingness to do so immediately.

The opportunity is there, but they are not going to take it. They prefer to support those across the way, whom they are criticizing. They must show some consistency, sometime. I encourage her to act accordingly and take a stand.

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

I humbly accept this most relevant of remarks.

The government’s budget will therefore further exacerbate social inequalities. Finally, the Conservatives are continuing their attack on the rights of women by making pay equity negotiable. That is ideology over rights. No member of this House who does not share the outdated, bankrupt Conservative ideology can possibly vote for this budget, or allow it to pass, without betraying his or her convictions. Voting for this budget, or allowing it to pass, means voting against social justice. The Bloc Québécois, loyal to its convictions, will vote against this budget without a moment’s hesitation.

One of the great challenges facing us in the 21st century, as well as one of the great opportunities, is how to harmonize the economy with the environment. Quebeckers know very well that it is in our vital strategic interest to reduce our dependence on oil, first, in order to help fight climate change and second, because it is in our economic interest. Now that the U.S. administration has announced that it intends to join the countries fighting against climate change, Canada is isolated, the only country in the Western world still in the same camp as Saudi Arabia. In this regard, as in so many others, the Conservative budget is going against the flow, trying to take us backwards instead helping us move ahead into the future. Not only are the Conservatives giving the oil companies hundreds of millions of dollars but they are also ending the wind energy program.

The automobile industry will receive $2.7 billion in federal government assistance without any fuel consumption requirements being imposed. Here, too, Canada is falling behind and is starting to become the laughingstock of the Western world. Voting for this budget or allowing it to pass means voting against the economy of the future: the green economy.

The Bloc Québécois, ever faithful to the interests and values of Quebec, will vote against this budget without a second’s hesitation.

I will soon be introducing an amendment to the amendment. It basically repeats the motion passed unanimously in the National Assembly, along with a few other elements. When the time comes to vote on it, all the members from Quebec will face a very clear choice: a choice for or against Quebec. All Quebec members who vote against this amendment to the amendment and in favour of the Conservative budget will be choosing Canada over Quebec.

This budget sounds the ultimate death-knell of the Conservative Party’s so-called open federalism toward Quebec. If the Liberals vote in favour of this budget, as they apparently will, they will show that the Liberal Party of Canada has returned to its tradition of turning its back on Quebec at the first opportunity.

The new leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, who declared on March 30, 2006, that Quebec “has the right to be master of its own house”, now seems to have decided to act exactly like his predecessors and to set aside his recent and fleeting convictions. I urge Quebeckers to take note of what happens in the next few hours in Ottawa. I invite them to think about the fact that no matter which party is in power in Ottawa, Liberal or Conservative, the interests and values of Canada always take precedence over the interests and values of Quebec. As it was in the past, is now and ever will be. The only party that puts Quebec first in this house is the Bloc Québécois.

It is not a coincidence that all elected Bloc members truly believe that the only valid future for Quebec is full political freedom—Quebec sovereignty.

I move, seconded by the member for Saint-Maurice—Champlain, that the amendment be amended by deleting all the words after the words “on condition that the Government” and substituting the following:

maintain the right of women to settle pay equity issues in court, and abandon its preference for tax cuts for the well off, instead redistributing this revenue to the neediest members of our society, particularly by responding to the unanimous demands of the National Assembly of Quebec as formulated in the motion adopted on January 15, 2009, to assist workers, communities and businesses hit by the economic slowdown, support at-risk sectors, particularly manufacturing and forestry, in the same way as the automobile industry, and enhance the employment insurance program by making the eligibility criteria more flexible, and on condition that it maintain the equalization program in its current form and relinquish the idea of setting up a pan-Canadian securities commission.

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, confronted with a serious global economic crisis, the people are right to be concerned and they have turned to Ottawa, hoping that the federal government would do the responsible thing and help them.

Quebec's government and National Assembly also expected the federal government to help rather than make matters worse. This crisis requires extraordinary government expenditures and could have been an opportunity to build a future with a combined focus on social justice, the environment and the economy. With this Conservative budget, the government has dashed all hopes. It is hostile to Quebec, does not provide people with appropriate and sufficient help and lacks vision for the future. In fact, one need only scratch the surface to catch a potent whiff of the Conservative government's partisanship and ideology in this budget.

I want to tell all members of this House this: a vote for this budget is a vote against Quebec, against social justice, against an economy for the future. There is no way the Bloc Québécois would ever vote for this budget, which goes against everything we believe in.

This budget is totally unacceptable to Quebec and to people who, in times of economic crisis, are entitled to expect appropriate and sufficient help from the federal government. In anticipation of the budget, Quebec made its needs clear, and its National Assembly even unanimously passed a motion. The Bloc Québécois did the responsible thing, putting forward as early as last November a realistic and detailed plan backed up by figures, a plan that reflected the broad consensus in Quebec on a number of issues.

The Prime Minister was aware of all that. This means that he knowingly ignored Quebec's demands. Instead of helping Quebec, the federal government decided to deprive it of significant assistance to weather the crisis. The Conservative leader has chosen only to meet the demands from Ontario in particular. For example, his government is providing more than $4 billion in stimulus that will primarily benefit Ontario. The automotive industry, which is largely concentrated in Ontario, will receive $2.7 billion. Southern Ontario will receive $1 billion. But Quebec's forestry and manufacturing sectors will only get a few million.

The government is offering $350 million to Atomic Energy of Canada, to the nuclear sector, once again Ontario-based. The Prime Minister again comes along with his community adjustment fund, a program strongly criticized in Quebec, which offers more money per capita to Alberta than to Quebec. This plan, based on last year's model, offers far more per job lost in Alberta than in Quebec, even though the manufacturing and forestry crisis has hit hardest in Quebec. While thousands of jobs have been lost in Quebec, a goodly number of the workers will still not have access to the employment insurance program, and older workers are still marginalized.

We would have at least expected the Conservative government to respect its past commitments. But no, it goes even further by depriving Quebec of financial means. Capping equalization will mean a considerable loss to Quebec. We are talking funds for health, education, family policy. This decision will therefore have unfortunate consequences for the entire population of Quebec. Then the Conservative government adds on a gift to Ontario, which will mean an additional $250,000 loss to Quebec as far as equalization is concerned, by conferring special status on Hydro One.

By unilaterally modifying equalization and by increasing the fiscal imbalance, the Conservative government is breaking its past promises, just as it did by reiterating its desire to trample over Quebec's areas of jurisdiction in connection with securities regulation, loans to municipalities and funding to colleges and universities, and other infrastructure expenditures, thereby going over the head of the Government of Quebec.

Then we have the refusal to eliminate cuts to culture, a very important sector of the Quebec economy, and the refusal to eliminate the cuts inflicted on economic development organizations.

This budget runs totally counter to the spirit and the letter of the Kyoto protocol, and thus also to the economic interests of Quebec and of the environment. This budget sounds the death knell as far as the Conservative government's so-called federalism of openness is concerned.

I call upon hon. members in the other opposition parties to think things through well before voting in favour of this budget, or letting it get through one way or another, because letting it get through is tantamount to abandoning Quebec, and there will be a political price to pay for such an attitude. The Bloc Québécois, faithful as it is to the interests of Quebec, will vote against this budget without a moment's hesitation.

This budget again bears the mark of a conservative ideology that is bankrupt everywhere in the world. It is hard to imagine what would have happened with a majority Conservative government in a position to impose untrammelled its last-century ideology.

But we must not be fooled by the gloss on this budget. The tax cuts, which are presented as targeted measures to help the most vulnerable and the middle class, actually have the reverse effect. The most vulnerable people in society do not pay tax. The tax cuts are not targeted. For example, a family with two children and an income of $150,000 will get more than a family earning $40,000. These tax cuts help neither people who lose their jobs nor companies that do not turn a profit. By the Conservatives' own admission, in opting for corporate tax cuts, they chose the measure that would stimulate the economy the least. That is what I call putting ideology before the economy.

The government had the means to help the most vulnerable members of society by funding construction of new social housing. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation has an $8 billion surplus. The government should be using that money to help people. Instead, everyone but aboriginal people, seniors and the disabled is being left high and dry.

For seniors who have been unjustly deprived of the guaranteed income supplement, the budget offers no justice and no remedy. Yet if anyone can be considered vulnerable, it is seniors who are living in poverty and are entitled to the guaranteed income supplement. Aside from social housing, there is nothing for these poor people in the budget.

We all know that more than half of women who lose their jobs do not have access to employment insurance, even though they pay into the plan. They will still not have access to employment insurance, and this is a serious injustice.

Meanwhile, the rich and large corporations that shelter their money in tax havens can continue to do so with impunity. The big oil companies that have been hosing us for so long will continue to enjoy generous tax breaks. The Conservative government sweetened the pot by providing hundreds of millions of dollars for carbon capture projects that will benefit no one but the oil companies. The major banks, which have been hugely propped up by the Conservative government, have no real obligations in return. And in return for the billions of dollars they will receive, the big three auto manufacturers do not even have to promise not to outsource to Asia or elsewhere.

The Harper government's budget will therefore create even greater social inequalities.

[The Budget, January 28th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, in this budget, the automotive sector, in large part concentrated in Ontario, will be receiving $2.7 billion, while the Quebec manufacturing and forestry industries will receive but a few million. The same goes for the community adjustment fund: Alberta will get more per capita than Quebec, yet Quebec is the heaviest hit by the forestry crisis.

Will the Prime Minister admit that his budget does everything but meet the priorities of Quebec?