Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise today to oppose the main motion at report stage of Bill C-43, which purports to be a budget implementation bill, but we know that it is anything but.
As is the habit of my colleagues across the way since they have been in government, they bring forward omnibus bills. Buried in those bills are usually totally unrelated matters, unrelated pieces of legislation. Later on, if we oppose a few of those measures, we end up having to vote against the whole piece of legislation. Then the Conservatives get to stand up and say “Gotcha.” Well, “gotcha” does not work in this case.
Since being elected with a majority, the Conservatives have moved 2,190 pages of omnibus bills. In all that time, they have accepted one amendment from the opposition, which by the way was a very technical tax amendment to Bill C-31, in 2014, put forward by the NDP.
Among all those pages, 2,190 pages, are buried changes to the temporary foreign worker program and EI access. Just name it; it is all in there. There are also many changes to environmental issues, to airports, and all kinds of things I could list for hours, but I do not have the time.
What it points to is a government that absolutely has very little respect for parliamentary democracy. If it did, it would bring in pieces of legislation it was proud of. It would put them here, and it would let us debate them. Not only that, but once the government brings in omnibus bills, what does it do? It moves time allocation and does all kinds of other things to end debate.
We are not the only ones saying that. Conservative commentator Andrew Coyne, in the National Post, on April 30, 2012, wrote, on omnibus budget bills:
Not only does this make a mockery of the confidence convention — shielding bills that would otherwise be defeatable within a money bill, which is not — it makes it impossible to know what Parliament really intended by any of it. We’ve no idea whether MPs supported or opposed any particular bill in the bunch, only that they voted for the legislation that contained them. There is no common thread that runs between them, no overarching principle; they represent not a single act of policy, but a sort of compulsory buffet....
...there is something quite alarming about Parliament being obliged to rubber-stamp the government’s whole legislative agenda at one go.
That is where disrespect for our parliamentary democracy comes in.
I want to remind us all that in 1995, the Prime Minister, when he was in opposition, had this to say:
....in the interest of democracy I ask: How can members represent their constituents on these various areas when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns?
We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse?
I am standing here asking myself and my colleagues across the way that same question: How can we represent our constituents and fully debate and then vote on disparate matters, instead of being forced to vote on these huge omnibus bills?
Buried in this bill is the temporary foreign worker program, which is broken. I think everyone has admitted to that. Instead of fixing it piecemeal, when the government is caught, usually by the media or the opposition, what it does is tweak it a little bit more. There is another tweak in this bill. It talks about enforcement. First of all, it is a shocker that enforcement was not in place. Second, what will this enforcement look like? We are being told it is going to be mainly administrative, on paper.
I have little confidence that the government will be able to deliver what is promised in this bill, because at the same time that it has made cuts to Service Canada, there is more work being assigned in that area. Where are the resources?
It is easy to stand here and speak against what we do not like, but let me tell members what I would like to have seen in this budget bill.
I would like to have seen a pan-Canadian child care program that would ensure families had access to regulated, quality child care spaces for less than $15 a day. That is the kind of vision people are looking for from their government, because from coast to coast to coast we are hearing from families who are struggling to find child care spaces, and those who can find them discover that the costs are a burden. Some costs are as high as $2,000 a month. For most families, that is just not doable. That is the kind of program I would liked to have seen in the budget, instead of all these announcements about providing an extra $60 a month. An extra $60 a month does not even buy a day's worth of child care, nor does it help to create additional child care spaces, so there once again we have smoke and mirrors from my colleagues across the way.
I would also like to have seen a real plan in this budget to address the very high youth unemployment. I am sure members have heard from young people who have finished university, have left after high school, or have gone into other kinds of post-secondary education that they cannot find jobs once they graduate, yet some of the jobs that they could get into are being filled by temporary foreign workers. It should be a major concern to every parliamentarian when the youth unemployment rate in some of our cities is at double digits and in the high teens. That is a major concern, and I do not see an action plan or a commitment in this budget to address that issue head-on and in a serious way.
We have recently heard that young people who want to get a job after graduating and who have a huge student debt should find volunteer work and work for nothing. Not everyone can do that. That is one of the other areas I hoped we would see our government address, but once again it receives a failing grade. In this legislation it has failed to crack down on the abuse of unpaid internships to ensure that young people are paid for the work that they perform.
We all know the difference between volunteering and unpaid internships. We are talking here about unpaid internships. There may be the distant hope of a job, yet some young people are working full time without any pay. At another time in our history, we had words for that kind of labour. We should really be addressing that situation, because young people are facing major challenges.
The other provision I would have liked to have seen in this legislation is a relaxation around some of the barriers that the government has put forward to restrict access to employment insurance by the unemployed. People pay into it, and they need to access it when they are unemployed. However, we now see that the access rate has gone down incredibly for many of the unemployed in Canada. Many of them feel duped by their government, and there is nothing in this legislation to say that future Conservative or Liberal governments would not take money out of that fund that workers and employers have paid for and use it for other nefarious activities that they want to conduct.
I would say that this budget fails Canadians.
