Guy Caron

[Petitions, May 7th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I too am presenting a petition signed by hundreds of Canadian men and women to eliminate the GST on menstrual hygiene products, a tax that places an unfair burden on women.

[Alberta Election, May 6th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, what is clear is that Canadians are ready for change and for a leadership based on principles.

Yesterday Albertans voted for a government that will promote economic growth and prosperity for all Albertans. They voted in favour of a diversified economy that will create good jobs. Albertans also voted to put an end to the roller coaster boom and bust cycle.

Will the Conservatives now work with the provinces to take a responsible and, especially, sustainable approach to economic growth?

[Taxation, May 6th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the middle class is losing ground. However, it is the same old story with the other parties.

The Conservatives are going to waste billions of dollars on income splitting, which will only benefit 15% of Canadians. The Liberal tax plan will also cost billions of dollars and will give nothing to two-thirds of Canadians.

Will the government abandon its budget, which only benefits the wealthiest, and introduce a real plan for the middle class?

[Labour Law, May 5th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, if there is one thing Canadians will not tolerate, it is hypocrisy. That is why they were so surprised to see the member for Beauséjour attacking the rights of NDP employees in the media in the same week that the Liberal leader was trying to court the labour movement.

It seems as though the Liberals have realized that they cannot have it both ways. Either they protect workers' rights, through good times and bad, regardless of what the polls say, or they make empty speeches and change their tune when it suits them.

The Liberals have clearly made their choice. To quote Jerry Dias, the president of Unifor, the Liberal House leader's criticisms leave the impression that “workers' rights can be disregarded in the cause of cheap political theatre”.

We in the NDP made our choice a long time ago. We have always defended workers' rights, through good times and bad.

[Manufacturing Industry, May 4th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, the middle class is losing ground under the Conservatives.

Quebec's manufacturing sector has lost more than 100,000 jobs since the Conservatives came to power. In January and February, manufacturing output stagnated.

However, regardless the economic performance of this or any other industry, the directors of these companies will continue to benefit from a lovely little tax loophole worth about $700 million thanks to their stock options.

Are the Conservatives going to help the middle class and stop giving gifts to their friends?

[Pipeline Safety Act, April 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, in my capacity as the critic for natural resources, I am pleased to rise in the House at third reading to debate Bill C-46.

This bill moved to report stage very quickly, because clearly, the parties did not really have a chance to properly present their case, especially the independent members in the House.

At the Standing Committee on Natural Resources, the Conservatives imposed a motion similar to the ones it imposed on all committees, since it has a majority on all committees of the House of Commons, whereby, and I am paraphrasing, when the committee clerk receives an order of reference from the House in relation to a bill, the clerk must write to each member who is not a member of a caucus represented on the committee to invite the member to send a letter to the chair of the committee, in both official languages, stating any proposed amendments to the bill subject to the order of reference. During the clause-by-clause, the chair of the committee will allow a member who proposed an amendment to make brief comments in support of it, although the member cannot join in the debate or vote.

That is how the committees always operate, and the Standing Committee on Natural Resources is no exception.

We essentially believe that these manoeuvres violate the rights of independent parliamentarians or members who belong to a parliamentary group and who are nonetheless elected just like any other member.

The big book of procedure tells us that it is the House, and only the House, that designates members and associate members of these committees as well as the members that represent the House on joint committees.

The Chair has already established that that is a fundamental right of the House. As for the committees, they have no power in that regard, especially since the rules specifically state that an MP who is not a committee member may not vote or move motions.

Report stage was usually the opportunity for these members to have their amendments heard, to debate them and to participate in the vote. Instead, practically everything is now managed, debated and voted in committee, sometimes even in camera.

This is a very important change in the functioning of the House and it greatly affects the rights of members and their ability to properly carry out their duties of representing their constituents and holding the government to account.

However, despite everything, I must highlight the work done by my colleague, the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands, who had two amendments passed despite this unfair and undemocratic government tactic.

Bill C-46 establishes a liability regime for federally regulated pipelines in Canada, and although this regime leaves many questions unanswered, the existing legislation does not provide for much of a regime.

The NDP proposed some 20 amendments at report stage, many of which were virtually the same as those proposed by my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands. That is why I am pleased that these requests were heard. We must understand that she was not able to propose her amendments at report stage. She was asked to present her amendments in committee, which is what generally happens. She came to do so and she got just one minute for each of her amendments.

This is a systematic problem at committee stage. Committees should be a place for debate, so that we can identify the strengths and, especially, the flaws of each bill. However, this Conservative government's method is something completely new to Parliament, and it is undermining our ability to properly debate bills.

In the case of the amendments that passed, the government tried to make first nations members believe that the addition of a definition about them to the bill was a show of good faith and openness on its part.

Like other levels of government, aboriginal governing bodies will be able to sue companies connected to pipelines for recovery of reasonable costs incurred in managing a spill on their land.

I think this is a major collective victory. It shows not only that aboriginals are full-fledged nations, but also that there is a will to treat them as such. As I said, the parties were on the same wavelength and proposed many similar amendments that targeted the same flaws in Bill C-46.

In short, Bill C-46 is a first step toward integrating a real polluter-pays principle into federal pipeline regulations.

However, entrenching that in law is not the end of it. We also have to make sure that the provisions of the law respect its principles.

The NDP voted in favour of the principle underlying Bill C-46 because that step forward was better than the status quo.

I must nevertheless point out that at least one witness gave very engaging testimony during the committee's study of Bill C-46. Ian Miron of Ecojustice described this bill as a step forward, just as we have done. He also said that it was more of a “polluter might pay” principle than a polluter pays principle. The reason is that Bill C-46 is highly discretionary. It makes a number of tools available to the National Energy Board and the government, but they have complete discretion when it comes to using those tools. The lack of absolute regulations, if I can put it that way, means that this legislation does not fully respect the polluter pays principle. It means that the principle will apply if the National Energy Board and the government want it to.

These regulations and this liability regime will now be governed by the National Energy Board, which has an especially important role to play given that Canadians' trust and their sense of safety with respect to infrastructure and the regulations in place will depend on how well the board fulfills its mandate.

The report published in 2013 following a comprehensive study by the Standing Senate Committee on Energy, the Environment and Natural Resources clearly states that those two concepts go hand in hand:

If an accident occurs, there must be trust that the “polluter pays” principle, a principle applied to all modes of transport, is backed by concrete action. Social license is earned when citizens have trust in emergency and spill response capabilities, based on clear plans for well-organized recovery and rehabilitation of the environment, as well as a means for compensating for damages.

Even the president and CEO of the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association at the time, Brenda Kenny, suggested in the study that, “it is not enough in today’s climate to obtain a regulatory license or permit in order to proceed with energy projects”.

This illustrates how important it is for businesses and the industry to have public confidence. This was corroborated by the testimony in committee of a representative of Canada's Building Trades Unions, who said he agrees with the polluter pays principle, which indicates to us that the unions and workers truly understand that environmental protection and robust protection, prevention and accountability standards are ironically the things that are going to help them keep their jobs.

For a culture of safety to take hold, there needs to be interaction between common values and beliefs on one hand, and the structures and oversight mechanisms of an organization on the other hand, with the aim of producing standards of behaviour. Unfortunately, we are way off the mark. With its bills and regulations, the government has done nothing but cause the public to lose confidence not only in the industry, but also in the key regulators. If the oil companies want public approval for the pipelines, then Canadians need assurance that these projects are sustainable and that approval processes are open, rigorous and fair. That is clearly still not the case, and this bill will not change much, unfortunately.

In fact, only 27% of Canadians believe that the Government of Canada can respond effectively to an oil spill at sea, and only 32% share the same view for spills on land. The English Bay oil spill in Vancouver in early April should serve as an example of the government's readiness to respond. Civil society groups and environmentalists have been saying for years that Canada is not prepared for a major oil spill. The 2010 Kalamazoo spill in Michigan was a turning point for the oil sector. New standards were established and discoveries were made about how oil from the oil sands behaves, which requires new standards for research, prevention and response.

The problem is that instead of working with the utmost transparency, the board encourages corporations to be secretive. According to the 2013 Senate report:

By regulation, every pipeline company is required to submit Emergency Response Plans (ERPs) on a facility-by-facility basis and the ERPs must be approved by the NEB. These plans require companies to assess the risk of a spill and outline the details of a response. They must be up-to-date with corresponding emergency manuals and must be reviewed regularly. On June 26, 2013, the federal government announced that it would require ERPs to be more accessible to the...

[Taxation, April 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, according to Quebec's finance minister, Quebec will lose at least $65 million a year because of the increase in the TFSA limit. The minister was clear about this Conservative measure: “I would not have done that.”

Does the minister realize that his measure will benefit the wealthy and hurt Quebec? Will he help the middle class and withdraw this measure that helps only the wealthiest Canadians?

[Committees of the House, April 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Vancouver Kingsway for that very important question.

Affordable housing is definitely one of the biggest losers in this budget. Many organizations have condemned the lack of adequate funding. None of the recommendations coming out of the pre-budget consultations really address this issue in any meaningful way, despite the fact that we heard witnesses talk about the importance of investing in housing and express disappointment in the federal government's lack of interest in this issue.

Also, in our supplementary report, we specifically talked about how the government should take immediate action to address the affordable housing crisis facing Canadian municipalities by renewing social housing agreements and working to develop and implement a national housing strategy as proposed by Bill C-400.

Unfortunately, the government did not pay attention to that recommendation, which is a real shame because the affordable housing crisis is affecting the whole country and is not getting any real attention from the federal government.

[Committees of the House, April 30th, 2015]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by answering the question about the balanced budget.

Indeed, a large part of the balanced budget this government brags about so much comes from sources that were not recommended in pre-budget consultations.

The first source is the EI surplus, which was about $1.8 billion. Since the surplus announced by the government is just $1.4 billion, it had to take the $1.8 billion from the EI surplus and add it to the consolidated revenue fund, even though the Finance Minister's predecessor, Jim Flaherty, had said that the government would never use the EI surplus to finance a balanced budget.

The second source is the contingency fund—not just this year's fund, which went from $3 billion to $1 billion, but the fund for the next two years as well. This measure was not recommended in the pre-budget consultations either. No one made that suggestion.

The third source is the early sale of GM shares, worth $3.1 billion. You have to add the $2 billion to this $3.1 billion. I said “early sale” because the government lost a lot of money on these GM shares. If it had waited just one more week to sell them, it would have made $100 million more.

At the end of the day, we are talking about nearly $7 billion taken from these three sources to achieve this balanced budget.

[Committees of the House, April 30th, 2015]

moved:

That the Eighth Report of the Standing Committee on Finance, presented on Wednesday, December 10, 2014, be concurred in.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by saying that I will be sharing my time with the excellent member for Welland.

I would like to talk about the prebudget consultations, since that is the subject of the report. I am in a good mood this morning, because yesterday we learned that the Rimouski Oceanic will be taking part in the Memorial Cup as the champions of the Quebec major junior hockey league. This will be their fourth time participating in 20 years, which is remarkable.

My good mood is a little tempered, however, by the content of the prebudget consultations. This is in no way a criticism of the chair of the Standing Committee on Finance, the member for Edmonton—Leduc, for he is doing an excellent job. I think all the parties in the House and all members of the finance committee recognize what a great job he is doing.

Although there are some interesting points in the prebudget consultation report, there are also some really troubling elements. We have no problem with some of the points, and we have supported them. Some of them even appear in budget 2015. Others, however, do pose a problem.

Until January, I was a member of the Standing Committee on Finance and had been for three years. Usually, the recommendations were a fairly accurate—though not perfect, by any means—reflection of the testimony we heard. However, the recommendations in this report, which was tabled in December 2014, make it more of a pre-election document for the existing government. Most if not all of the recommendations are from the Conservative side. Not a single NDP or Liberal amendment was accepted.

Annual prebudget consultations are an opportunity to hear from witnesses from many parts of Canadian society. Whether they are from the business sector, unions or civil society, their concerns deserve to be heard and properly reflected in the prebudget consultation report.

In this case, there are a number of problematic elements. Several recommendations in the report are nothing more than lip service. For example, recommendation 23 says that the federal government should consider new ways to increase support for the Canadian aerospace industry, but does not say how. This recommendation is akin to many of the other 47 recommendations in this report in that it says where the government wants to go but not how to get there.

That is a problem because other recommendations are more than just wishful thinking. They are blatantly a rationale for Conservative policies. In any case, the committee itself was not even able to unanimously agree on those recommendations.

When the government proposes to continue reducing tariffs, for example, it fails to mention that, overall, tariffs have gone up because it eliminated the general preferential tariff.

Prebudget consultations should be an exercise that reflects what was heard in committee, but in this case what we got seemed more like the Conservative government's shopping list to prepare for the next election. We think that is unfortunate because the Standing Committee on Finance should be the place where we can thoroughly examine all the policies that were adopted by the government. That also includes Conservative members.

A committee meeting is the only place where we can call members by name. The reason for that is that, in committee, they are not government members and they do not represent their riding. They are there to use their expertise to advise the government on what direction it should take. That is not what happened in the prebudget consultations. This time, the consultations were much more negative than previous consultations and reports.

We submitted a minority report, which is a supplementary rather than dissenting report. It is supplementary to the 47 recommendations presented by the government. There was consensus on some of those recommendations, but the two opposition parties voted against others.

One problematic issue that the government refused to address, even though it was mentioned a number of times during the consultations, is employment insurance. The report was tabled in December 2014, but at that time, we were already worried about the government using the employment insurance fund to balance its budget since we have seen that happen before. That concern is included in the NDP's supplementary report. We had no idea what the budget was going to look like, but we were worried about that happening because of what we had been hearing. This is what we wrote in our supplementary report:

The Conservatives are banking on surpluses in the EI Account in order to fund their return to budget balance—at the same time that they continue to restrict access through the implementation of their regressive EI reforms.

By “regressive reforms” we specifically mean all the measures that were adopted during the major reform of 2012. These measures have made it impossible for many Canadians to get employment insurance even though they contributed to it. Today, less than 38% of Canadians who contribute to employment insurance, who make their contributions expecting that employment insurance will help them, can get it when they lose their job. This does not make sense and, at the end of the day, it is very detrimental to regions like mine, like the Lower St. Lawrence, eastern Quebec, and eastern Canada. The economy in these regions has historically depended on seasonal employment, to a great extent, and still does. I am proud of the efforts my riding and my region have made over the past few years to diversify their economy and ensure that they are not as reliant on seasonal employment as they have been in the past. When we talk about seasonal jobs, we are talking mostly about jobs in the primary sector, the resource sector, the forestry or the fishery. We are also talking about jobs in the service sector, which for obvious reasons are only seasonal jobs, in the tourism industry for example. Going back to natural resources, there are also core industries such as agriculture. A farmer cannot harvest in winter. Maple syrup producers cannot do much of their work in the fall or winter either.

The government has failed to acknowledge this reality that affects several regions. We spoke out against this when the reform was introduced. Year after year, many witnesses have told us that the system is no longer adequate today. The EI fund has a surplus because of the increase in premiums imposed by the Conservatives. The government no longer knows what to do with it. One of the recommendations we received was to increase access to the program. The Conservatives completely ignored the recommendations. Instead they took part of the surplus and decided to give it to small and medium-sized businesses. That measure was passed last year. Small and medium-sized businesses were handed over $550 million of the employment insurance surplus with the hope of creating jobs. However, the House will remember that the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report stated that it would take over half a billion dollars to create 800 jobs, contrary to what the government was saying. Today, we find ourselves in a situation where the surplus in the EI fund, which we would like to be independent, has in large part funded the balanced budget that the federal government is boasting about.

The prebudget consultation report contains several interesting items. The work of the committee chair, the member from Edmonton—Leduc was impeccable. However, I would like to submit to the House the problems that exist in terms of the philosophy of implementing the prebudget consultations. The government is moving steadily away from taking the consultations into account and that remains a serious concern for us.

On that note, I will turn the floor over to the member for Welland, who is certainly going to continue in the same vein.