Joe Comartin

[Income Tax Act, October 9th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I wish to thank my colleague from Windsor West for his questions. I will try to deal with them as efficiently as I can.

The vote on Bill C-325 last night was a tragedy from the perspective that it lost by only three votes. It was 99 to 96. We were recommending income tax deductions for emergency workers and people who provide emergency services to protect us from fires. Most of them come from rural areas. The government opposed it. Overall there were a number, and I will give them credit for it, of members from the government side who voted in favour. It brought us really close but did not quite get us over.

It is a pittance compared to what we are talking about in Bill C-48. Our estimate is that probably over the first five years of these incentives it will be at least a billion and probably closer to a billion and a half dollars. In terms of those emergency workers, I do not know if we would have got up to a few million in terms of the break we were trying to give them and in effect saying to them that as a government, as a Parliament, as their elected leadership in the country, we prize what they were doing for us. The message they got yesterday was obviously that we do not.

We are going to hear if the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance says that he cannot afford the money that has been promised to the provinces for health care when he makes his financial statement in November.

We look at that and see that we cannot find that $2 billion, but we can find this for a very profitable industry. We then say to the minister that this industry is a polluter and that it should be paying its share. It should not be getting tax breaks. On the other hand, the government will say it cannot find money for health and will stick it to the provinces. They will have to find ways to deal with all the health problems that have been specifically created as the result of the burning of fossil fuels. It is terrible policy making on the part of the government.

As for the consumers getting the money, it is obvious they will not. There have been any number of other times when these tax breaks have been given and incentives provided, but did we see a reduction to our cost at the gas pump or the cost of home heating fuel? The obvious answer was, no. We did not get any of those breaks. The government stayed with the companies with their high-paid executives and money going to the shareholders.

On Kyoto and the marketing issue, I am really happy to hear that question because I have not had the opportunity to raise it in the House. We had the Kyoto announcement of spending about a billion dollars at a press conference attended by the Prime Minister, the Minister of Industry and the Minister of the Environment.

We have this retrofit program. The government has set aside $75 million. Everybody in the country who knows anything about it has told the government it is nowhere near enough. It also set aside $45 million to educate Canadians. That is an insult to Canadians.

Canadians led the fight dragging and kicking the government behind it to finally ratify Kyoto. We had people in the country in the ratio of 65% to 75% saying they were convinced that we had to ratify Kyoto and they finally got the government to do it. Now, is the government going to tell them what they have to do to implement around retrofit programs in their own homes and conservation? They do not need the education.

This is going to be another one of those boondoggles. It is going to be money going to the friends of the government to run absolutely useless education programs, promotional programs for conservation and doing retrofitting. It is not necessary. The dollars that need to be spent on that are probably a small percentage of the $45 million that has been set aside.

[Income Tax Act, October 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, as I prepared some notes for my talk today, I could not help but feel like I was sort of in a surreal situation.

We have this bill before us which will give further tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry, the mining industry, the concern there being, particularly from my perspective, the coal mining industry. It would reduce the tax level and give a tax credit over a period of years. We have to juxtapose the bill before us for third reading today with what is going on in this country and in the world.

I come from an area of the country where we have major health problems, a great deal of which are directly related to the burning of fossil fuel, whether it be exhaust from cars or the coal-fired plants in Ontario and, more specifically, in the midwest of the United States that ends up being dumped into my area.

We also have to put it into the perspective of the Kyoto agreement, which the Canadian people finally pressured the government into ratifying at the end of last year, and, in the context of that, the overall natural environment of the country. We know from lots of studies, but most recently just in this last week from the Conference Board of Canada, how badly we stack up compared to other countries around the globe.

The Conference Board of Canada did an assessment of the 24 leading industrial countries in the world. Where do we stand on carbon dioxide, the direct result of the burning of fossil fuel? We stand 24th out of 24. We are dead last. We are also near the end in a whole bunch of other greenhouse gases. We are in the 21, 22 and 23 range in each one of those areas.

What we hear of course, and I think we heard it from one or two speakers on the government side, is that we have to keep doing this to keep the economy going. The Conference Board of Canada is not exactly a flaming environmentalist organization, but it makes the point, and I quote from the report that was issued this past week:

Environmental progress need not come at the expense of economic gains, as many believe....

The board goes on to say in a summary:

Many of the countries that lead the environment list also make the top 12 in the economy category.

What it is saying is that there are countries around the globe, in that 24 grouping of the top industrialized countries, that have a high performing economy, that do well for their people, that have high incomes and a corporate world that does well, and at the same time protect their environment. We do not have to play one off against the other. With good economic policy, with progressive, forward looking economic policy we can accomplish both. We can take care of our natural environment. We can take care of the physical health of our population, and at the same time run a vibrant, strong, healthy economy. The two are not mutually exclusive at all. That is the Conference Board of Canada talking.

Back to the context. We have Bill C-48 which would give more breaks to the fossil fuel industry, and we have it in that context of just how poorly we are doing as an industrialized country around the globe.

Let us look at the specifics of what we are doing. This week the Green Budget Coalition came forward and made a presentation, as it has every year for the last seven or eight years, to the finance committee and, in fact, indirectly to the finance department, on how we green our economy and, more specifically, how we green our budgetary process.

I will quote some of the statistics in its brief that it left with the committee where it talks about fossil fuels and takes a slice of the history. The brief states:

Cumulative direct Government of Canada spending on fossil fuels between 1970 and 1999 totalled $40.4 billion. In addition, $2.8 billion in federal loans to fossil fuel industries have been written off since 1970, over and above direct spending.

We are at $43.2 billion over the last 29 years and that has continued for the last four years, bringing us forward to the kind of incentives we are now increasing to that industry.

The brief juxtaposes it again to put it in some kind of context. It states:

For the period 1987 to 1998, total government support for energy investments totalled $4.3 billion for non-renewable energy and only $118 million for renewable energy.

That is a travesty when one looks at those results that we see all the time, the reason we needed to ratify Kyoto and the numbers that we see from the Conference Board of Canada.

I will repeat that: $4.3 billion over that 11 year period from 1987 to 1998 for non-renewable energy, all of it going to the fossil fuel industry and the nuclear industry, and only $118 million for renewable energy. Whether it be wind, solar, current, wave or even hydroelectric, it was only $118 million, which is just a little over $10 million a year. In the same period of time billions and billions went to the non-renewable energy sector.

In the brief there is a whole policy on to how to deal with budgetary matters, how to green the budget and how to green the economy from a tax, tax incentive, subsidy based, taking all those into account.

In spite of the previous reports the coalition has filed with that committee and with the finance department, as we heard from the parliamentary secretary today, I do not think he even understood the work it has done. I think that is a fair categorization of the response I received from him at that time.

Let us put into perspective how the fossil fuel industry has performed. It was interesting to listen to my colleague from the Conservative Party. I have no apologies to give as a member of the NDP on protecting jobs. Let us look at this industry. Since 1990 this industry has terminated the employment of some 80,000 people.

I know some members will jump up and say that we are just worried about union jobs. Very few of those were union jobs. The vast majority, about 60,000 or three-quarters of them, were as a result of the shutdowns of small companies, retailers in the oil and gas industry. The industry just put them out of work and took them over itself.

Those were small employers with five, ten or twenty employees, either full time or part time. Industry just wiped out 60,000 jobs in that sector, but what is being done? The government is continuing with a government policy to subsidize that industry.

Let us take a look at the consequences of these measures of reducing the effective tax rate from 28% to 21% and giving that 10% tax credit. Just three of the big oil companies, not all of them, but Petro-Canada, Shell and Esso, have already forecast that they will save $250 million a year. That is how much of a tax break the government is giving these companies. Over the five year period, it will be some $1.25 billion. That is how much the savings will be just for those companies.

These companies are already making profits. If we look at their profit for this year we will see that these companies are making profits. One company's profit is $100 million. One is up to $200 million. In fact, in some cases those are quarterly profits. We will see much higher ones over the course of this year, especially when we add on this subsidy.

What does all this get us? As consumers, have we seen rates go down at the gas pumps? It is almost a joke to raise the question given what has transpired through the summer and the early fall. We have seen the price of fuel go up dramatically at the pumps. For those who are on fixed incomes, the price of home fuel in particular has gone up by a tragically high amount.

We do not see those benefits passed on to the consumer. Do consumers benefit from these tax breaks? No. Does the environment benefit? Obviously not, given what is happening, nor does human health in this country. Are we somehow giving an advantage to the renewable energy sector? Again the answer is no.

Bill C-48 is being shoved through the House with the government and the official opposition supporting it in the face of that reality I have just detailed.

I will cover one more point which I heard again from the government side as some justification for this: that we have to be internationally competitive. Let us look at the result. Let us look at the effect of these tax breaks for this industry. In regard to our closest competitor, the United States of America, specifically the state of Texas, and the effective current rate of tax for the fossil fuel industry, right now our tax rates have us about 5% below the state of Texas. That is right now, before Bill C-48 is passed.

If Bill C-48 passes the industry would effectively be paying 41% in Alaska and 35% in Texas. In Canada we would be down to 30.1% across the country. This is effectively where it will end up.

Therefore, we cannot argue that this is a competitive advantage bill, that this policy somehow will make us more competitive, because we already are in that situation. Right now we are competitive with our major trading partner.

This would not help us with a competitive advantage internationally. It would not help consumers. It would not help the environment or our personal health, and it certainly would not enhance the production of energy from renewable energy sources.

It begs the question, why are we doing this? It was interesting to read the newspaper article by Susan Riley last week in the Ottawa Citizen . The headline was, “While you're not looking, Big Oil is set to get a big tax break”. As opposed to a number, the editorializing in that headline is pretty accurate.

In that article, a couple of members of Parliament are quoted as saying they were under tremendous pressure. One is from the government side and one from the official opposition and they say they have been under tremendous pressure since the year 2000 to get these breaks for the oil and gas industry.

That is really the answer to my question about why we are doing this. We are doing it because the industry asked for it and because, since the second world war, whenever big oil has asked for a break, it got a break.

That has resulted in the situation we have in my home community, where we have high rates of cancer and other high rates of illness and disease directly related to the consumption of fossil fuels. It has resulted in the international need for Kyoto to get those reductions we need in the emissions of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. It has resulted in very high energy costs, whether for home heating fuel or to power our motor vehicles.

It is a policy that has failed from every aspect. What Bill C-48 is doing is perpetuating the economic system that is the underpinning for that industry.

It is time for this government and this House to take seriously our responsibilities under Kyoto and to take seriously what we are hearing from environmentalists and progressive economists about what we can do to reduce those subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, to phase them out. Because we have to do that. We do not have enough oil and gas to continue our consumption beyond somewhere between 2030 and 2050 at the rates at which we are consuming now. We simply cannot do it. The supplies are not there, anywhere in the world. We need to change that policy. We need to phase out that industry.

In order to do that, we must have a comprehensive policy initiative in the tax field. We cannot do this just by signing on to an international protocol like Kyoto. We do have to do that, but then we have to implement. That does not mean just starting a retrofit program, which we need to do in Canada, and not just doing a conservation program, which we also need to do. In addition, what is sorely lacking in the Kyoto plan, and we see that with the bill, is any concept from the government about understanding the need to reform our tax structure. We have to reduce the incentives provided to the fossil fuel industry, on a gradual, phased out basis, and replace them with incentives, tax breaks and subsidies for the renewable energy sector.

[Income Tax Act, October 9th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in the process of developing the provisions of Bill C-48, did the government take into account the impact of the continued burning of fossil fuels, whether it be gas, oil or coal?

More particular, has there been any meaningful consultation by the government with environmental groups that have positioned themselves in a very clear fashion about the continued and now expanded use of incentives for the oil and gas industry and the coal industry?

Finally, in developing Bill C-48 was any consideration given to the facts that have now come out in the Conference Board report of this past weekend. That report states that of the 24 leading industrial countries in the world, Canada produces more carbon dioxide per capita from the burning of fossil fuels? We are the absolute worst country out of those 24 countries.

Have any of those factors been taken into account in coming up with these kind of subsidies for the continued subsidization of the oil and gas industry?

[Public Safety, 2002, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I assume that I have the last few minutes of debate on this bill. I want to concentrate my comments as succinctly as possible on the effect of this bill, specifically on the community that is going to be most targeted.

I listened to a number of the other speakers and some of the information that came out of the committee. Everybody agreed that this bill is about balancing security and safety with civil liberties and civil rights. When doing that balancing act, if we start from an atmosphere of hysteria and fear, we know where we will end up. That is true, whether it was during the second world war when we incarcerated the Japanese Canadians, members of the Italian community, and members of the German community, or whether it was during the October crisis. The reaction in fear to a crisis was nowhere near proportional to the need for the War Measures Act.

We are in the same atmosphere post-September 11. We get this kind of legislation where there is no balance, where civil liberties and civil rights are very clearly a secondary consideration. It is a bill that turns over those rights and the ability to abuse those rights to a very small cadre of people in this country and it does not allow for any meaningful oversight of the role that those individuals would play.

It was very interesting that at the time the War Measures Act was used, we did not have any oversight body. We saw the kind of abuse that went on as a result of using that legislation. It is the reason that we did away with it when calmer times prevailed.

What are we doing now? We are repeating the same mistake. We are putting into place legislation, and this is the end of the pieces of legislation after Bill C-36, that will rebuild that infrastructure which is wide open to abuse. At the same time as we are doing that, we are limiting if not eliminating any oversight by Parliament and realistically by our courts.

This legislation in many respects has been drafted in such broad language that our courts will have a very difficult time using the charter to protect individual citizens. What we have learned post-Bill C-36 is that the Muslim community and people who come from certain areas of the world are going to be most negatively impacted. We are going to see a very real reduction in their rights and with this bill in particular, a reduction in their right to travel. If they travel to the Middle East or into Pakistan, they will now have a profile which makes them suspicious. Their ability to be involved in politics in this country will have a chill on it because they are going to be seen as associating with certain groups.

The reality is that is the consequence of this legislation. We will not be able to claim ignorance because we know from the results of Bill C-36 what the consequences will be.

[Public Safety Act, 2002, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want my colleague from Churchill to comment in regard to the legislation that is being used abusively against the Pakistani community generally, and with the exception of one person who is from India, over the last couple of months. People were under simple suspicion, and even that is probably stretching it, that they may somehow be involved in terrorism.

They were incarcerated and not told what the accusations were against them because there were no accusations in effect. Simply, on the whim of some immigration officials, they were incarcerated. A number of them are still incarcerated.

It has produced a chill because the result of some of those positions taken by some of the officials has been that people have now applied to voluntarily leave the country even though they may have a number of other remedies available to them under our immigration laws and common law that would allow them to stay in the country. But because they have had this mud thrown at them, this smear done on their reputations that they might somehow be associated with terrorism, they have voluntarily offered to leave the country.

I wonder if my colleague could comment if that type of chill that has been created in the field of immigration now. Could it spill over into other areas because of Bill C-17?

[Health, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the commissioner of the environment has just released a report with some very interesting facts on pesticides.

It is government policy to re-evaluate all 405 pesticides on the market, by 2006, although this process has been under way for years and today only six have been re-evaluated. All six now are either restricted in use or banned outright. At this rate, they are going to have to re-evaluate one pesticide every two days to meet the deadline.

Will the Minister of Health guarantee that these re-evaluations will in fact be completed by 2006?

[Committees of the House, October 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my colleague for the excellent speech she gave and the passion that she showed on this issue.

I draw her attention and the attention of the House to an incident along the same lines that happened in Windsor. We had an agency that was funded by Health Canada for preschool children within the aboriginal community. The funding was arbitrarily cut in February or March of this past year. I had the same experience as my colleague from Churchill. In spite of all the representations I and other members of the community made on its behalf--because there were some allegations, not against this particular agency but against the parent agency of some mishandling of funds--the department used that as an excuse.

We had children in the program who were autistic or who suffered from some physical disabilities, all of whom required services that would prepare them for the school system. The program was arbitrarily cut. To this date, despite all those representations from other members of the community, that funding has not been replaced.

Could my colleague comment on whether or not this is an experience she has had elsewhere in the country?

[Energy, September 29th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, as early as tomorrow the cabinet may be asked to make a decision to commit $2.3 billion to the ITER nuclear fusion project, a project that will not create any new energy for at least 30 years. ITER will in fact be a huge net energy user for decades to come.

For the finance minister, why, if the government has billions of taxpayer dollars to spare on a project with no tangible benefits to Canadians, will the minister not scrap the ITER subsidies and redirect the money, which appears to be available, toward cost-effective, clean and safe renewable energy programs?

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the expression of the support the member is giving to the Progressive Conservative Party's motion today, but I am concerned about the tenor that things are going well. I think his point is well taken that we have done better in terms of responding to this crisis than a number of other countries may have, but I am concerned that the tone of his comments and the image he is leaving us are more positive than the reality. I know from his background and expertise that he may be able to help the House with this.

I would ask him specifically about Ontario and about the volume of exports leaving Ontario now compared to what it was before we were faced with this crisis. Could he give us any sense of how far along we are in getting back to where we were before the incident arose?

[Supply, September 23rd, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I was interested in the opening comments of my colleague from Lethbridge about the importance of confidence in our system, our health system, our supervisory system for food in this country. He obviously is expressing support for sending a delegation to Washington to try to open up the markets fully.

Is the member aware of the comments of the premier of Alberta which he made to some American political people and authorities? He said that he would have been just as happy if the farmer who found the cow suffering from mad cow disease had used the methodology of shoot, shovel and shut up. Does the member support the premier in that regard and those comments?

Also, does the member think that would hurt our approach if in fact a delegation went to Washington? What type of reception does he think we would get with that comment from the premier?