John Rafferty

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague is absolutely right. We should be talking about coming together, not moving further apart. I think we have achieved that and are achieving that as time goes on.

It is heading into the weekend. We all know this will come to a resolution eventually.

One of the amendments is to ensure we do not have this inequality in the pay. We should take that clause out of the legislation. Canada Post had a last offer. We should go with that offer and move ahead.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, as I said at the beginning of my speech, this is not a strike; it is a lockout. It could very easily be ended by simply taking the locks off the door and getting everybody back to work.

In fact, she will remember that CUPW said that it did not have a problem, that it would keep working with the existing collective agreement, while it continued to negotiate. That would have been fine, too. It does not have to be this way.

My final point is we have proposed amendments to this, which we think will help to solve the deadlock we are in right now. Perhaps if another member from the Conservative Party has an opportunity to ask me a question, I would like to know why the Conservatives have not accepted those.

[Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act, June 24th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak on this today.

As you know, Mr. Speaker, and as my colleagues in the House know, especially my friend from Peterborough, I like to think the glass is half full. He knows that is true.

I just want to point out to everybody in the House that over the past 18 hours or so the government is no longer referring to this as a strike. It is now referring to it as a lockout. That is a very positive step forward, for that is exactly what it is.

Speaking of that, I had an email from someone who publishes a weekly paper in my riding. He asked why, if the government was going to lock people out, it did not give notice to people like him. That is a very good question. We have had that question in the House a number of times. Why all of a sudden did things get stuck at the post office? Things were not going anywhere. People were upset. It was a hardship for many, including this small business owner in the west end of my riding.

Why did the government not give notice, for example? That is in the spirit of compromise. That is in the spirit of saying that the government may have to do something, so we had better sit at the table and work things out.

Why did the government not do that? I do not know. I told the fellow who owns that weekly paper that I would ask that question today. Perhaps in the question period we will have a chance to do that.

The government's insistence on locking out Canada Post employees and sending them back to work is not just an attack on collective bargaining rights. It is also an attack on young workers and an attack on the retirement security of all Canadians.

I want to talk about what the bill says about imposing new hourly pay guidelines on the workers at Canada Post. It is significantly below Canada Post's last offer, which makes no sense at all. In fact, over the four years of this contract, $35 million will be taken out of the pockets of Canada Post workers and their families. That is important: it is workers and their families. That is $35 million that will not be taxed. That is $35 million that will not be spent in the local economy.

What this boils down to is fairness. That is what we are really talking about today and tomorrow. We talk about the younger workers coming into Canada Post and not getting the same deal, getting partial deals of what the older workers get.

We do not have a two-tier system of rent in this country. We do not have a two-tier system of mortgages. We do not have a two-tier system of going to the grocery store and buying groceries. We do not have a two-tier system of filling up our gas tanks. It is outrageous to say that young workers in our country should be paid less than their older counterparts. It is outrageous. They are doing the same work.

I want to say something about pensions, an important element of this, and about the pension changes that the government is trying to impose on workers at Canada Post. In the last legislative session, pensions and retirement security came to the fore in just about every discussion. Bill C-501, my bill, came to Parliament, was voted on a couple of times, and was passed those times. I know that there is a will on that side of this place to ensure that Canadians have the retirement security they need.

In fact, before the last election, the government was actually warming toward increasing CPP and making CPP better. Then the Minister of Finance said it would hurt the economy. He forgot that we were talking about phasing it in over seven years. We were not talking about some big shock.

The Minister of Finance has also suggested that increasing CPP is administratively difficult. The president and CEO of the CPP investment board, David Denison, has made it clear that there is no administrative impediment to enhancing CPP. In fact it is quite the contrary. He says private plans will cost significantly more for the same benefit.

In 2007 Canadian RRSP holders paid private fund managers $25 billion in fees, fees that we do not have with CPP. CPP is simply the lowest-cost option. If that were enhanced, the kinds of negotiations that go on at Canada Post on retirement security would be made easier and clearer and we could plan for the retirement security of those beginning work in their twenties.

A phased-in CPP is an increase from $960 a month to $1,868 a month over the next seven years. What would that mean to the average earner? For people who make $30,000 a year, every week over the next seven years they would pay $2.27 out of their salary to ensure their CPP doubled. It simply makes sense.

We have heard some stories from business owners and other people. Let me talk about Canadians who are hurting, and I am not going to put any blame here. I will read a couple of passages from emails I have received from northwestern Ontario.

This is from a postal worker and her husband. She says:

Our sick leave provisions are such that a fulltime employee earns 10 hours per month of sick leave credits. This sick leave accumulates until you retire. At that time, any sick leave you have not used is gone. WE ARE NOT PAID OUT!!!

That seems to be a misconception of many people. Their sick leave provisions in their contracts are protecting them in case of long-term disability. She goes on to say:

Well, last August, my husband...was diagnosed with cancer and shortly went off work on sick leave. Fortunately, he had almost a year of sick leave credits. As such, he has been able to still provide for us by receiving a regular pay check. His drug benefits were still active as well. This has been a great comfort for him as he has gone through months of treatments and surgery and made this situation much more tolerable. He could just concentrate on healing. He was hoping to be able to return to work by the end of the year and work a few more years. We still have a mortgage and bills like everyone else. We put three kids through University...

On June 2, 2011, CPC declared that our collective agreement was no longer in force. This resulted in [his] sick leave and benefits being cut off....

Lest people think, from this discussion, that it is small-business owners, seniors and others who are suffering because of this. Many people who work for Canada Post are also suffering. This means that Canadians right across the country are suffering.

Another person writes, “I am 62 years old, a single mother. Nine years ago, I became partially disabled, only working a half shift at Canada Post”. Her son is just coming to the end of university. She is already poor. She is asking why her employer proposes to make her poorer.

Here is one from a woman in my riding. She says, “I'm currently on sick leave after experiencing a heart attack. I also have numerous other related health issues”. All her benefits have been cut off. She continues to say, “After only two days without my insulin, my glucose levels have doubled and I'm experiencing difficulty breathing without my puffers and heart medications”, which she can no longer afford. That is what is happening.

We, on this side of the House, and I am sure many on the other side, believe in free speech, free association and free collective bargaining. This legislation hurts the values that our country stands for and is an attack on the rights of workers and their standard of living. The proper role is for the government to tell its own crown corporation to get back to the bargaining table and negotiate a collective agreement, but first it must unlock the doors.

[Resumption and Continuation of Postal Services Legislation, June 23rd, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the hon. member to this place.

I listened to his comments with great interest. He talked about vulnerable people. He may or may not know that I spent a lot of time in the last session dealing with pensions and trying to ensure that all Canadians received the pensions that were due. One of the big elements that has not been talked about very much in this dispute is pensions, just as it has been in the past couple of years with the recession.

We all know what happened to the Nortel workers. We all know what happened to Buchanan Forest Products workers in my riding. When it went bankrupt, the pension funds were underfunded and a lot of families suffered, and continue to suffer right now.

In large part, the Air Canada incident that has been solved, at least for now, revolved around pensions.

This too is about pensions, but there is a big difference. In this case, for the last dozen or so years, Canada Post Corporation has shown a profit, well over $2 billion in the last 12 years, yet it has left its pension funds underfunded. It did not do it on its own. It is allowed to do that. That is one of the sticking points right now.

I have a very quick question for the member. Does he think it is fair that corporations that are making money, like Canada Post, should be trying to change a pension system that has been agreed to in collective bargaining? Does he think it is fair that it can leave it underfunded for years and years and then cry wolf and say that it does not have enough money for its pensions?

[Business of Supply, June 20th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, there actually are a number of questions in that question.

I agree with my hon. colleague that we have to take a multi-pronged approach to poverty in this country, seniors' poverty in particular. There is one thing that we can immediately do. We talk about doubling CPP over the next 7 to 10 years. We talk about a number of other strategies that would help seniors to ensure that they would have an opportunity to put a little money in their pockets so they can buy a present for their grandchild on his or her birthday. The GIS increase would provide immediate relief for seniors. I know members on the other side of the aisle agree with me.

The government said it would do something in the budget but they are always quarter measures, always tenth measures. They are not the measures that need to be taken. There is no real commitment from the government to ensure that seniors do not live in poverty in this country.

[Business of Supply, June 20th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that comment because it allows me an opportunity to say that in this country we cannot afford to have any senior living in poverty. We cannot afford to have anyone living in poverty in this country.

Government members talk about NDP members not supporting the Conservative agenda. Let me just talk about their collusion with Premier McGuinty in Ontario on the HST. If they want to know why we on this side of the House do not stand up to support them on that it is because they are costing not just every person in Ontario, but particularly seniors who live in poverty in Ontario. The Conservative government is making them poorer. Why would we stand on this side of the House and tell the government that we support what it is doing, that we support it putting seniors right across Canada back into more poverty?

[Business of Supply, June 20th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to stand today to speak about this issue, particularly since seniors in my riding of Thunder Bay—Rainy River are suffering terribly. I am going to relate a couple of stories. I start to tear up when I even think about them, but I will talk about them in a minute.

This issue is not like finding a needle in a haystack. It is as easy as finding hay in a haystack and we can do it. What New Democrats said in their platform they have always stood for, which I will read. It states:

We will increase the annual Guaranteed Income Supplement to a sufficient level in the first budget to lift every senior in Canada out of poverty immediately.

We can do that. Retirement security has always been a priority of the New Democratic Party. It has always been a priority of parties which came before it. In 1927 was the very first pension legislation in this country, brought in by the Independent Labour Party, one of the NDP's forerunners. When New Democrats speak about this motion today, we speak from authority, from history and decades and decades of trying to ensure that seniors do not live in poverty.

What we are faced with now is about 250,000 seniors in this country living in poverty. The debate is not even so much about GIS or CPP as it is about respect and dignity. Those are two things we in the NDP want to talk about today because respect and dignity are what many of our seniors do not have.

I conducted a telephone town hall meeting before the election and there were 8,500 people on the line from my riding. Overwhelmingly, the two things people mentioned in that meeting as being most important were affordability and retirement security. I suspect that is felt right across this country in every riding, rural and urban.

In this budget the Conservatives talk about $1.64 a day for seniors. Everyone in the House will remember that the government, along with the governments of Ontario and British Columbia, conspired to charge seniors an average of $3 a day in HST. That is the average seniors pay in HST. They get $1.64 in this budget, which the government says is fabulous, and with the other hand it takes away $3, and probably much more, in HST.

The hon. member who spoke before me talked about apologizing. I think it is the government that should apologize. It is the government that should apologize for $1.64 a day and saying that is enough for seniors, for respect and for dignity. It is not.

The most vulnerable group among seniors is women. Women make up about 70% of poor seniors in this country. The poverty rate for women in this country in 2008 was double that of men. For seniors who live in poverty, almost 100% of their incomes come from the government. Therefore, $1.64 a day makes me sad.

If the government simply looked at it in economic terms and took away the human element of its decisions, lifting every senior out of poverty in this country is good for this country. It is good for the economy. Where do seniors spend their money? They spend their money in the local communities where they live and they just want an opportunity to buy a present for their grandchildren on their birthdays. That is all they want. They spend it right in their own communities. Therefore, $700 million to lift every senior out of poverty is $700 million that goes right back into local economies.

I want to speak very briefly about some of the seniors I have met in my riding. If people need health care in my riding, they have two choices: Those living in the west end of my riding can go to Winnipeg; if they live on the east side, they go to Thunder Bay. I am not sure how every province works, but Ontario has travel grants. However, people have to put the money out first.

To go from Atikokan to Thunder Bay return costs $300. We do not have trains. We have the occasional bus that goes by. It is either in a private car or a taxi. It is $160 for a one-way trip. People have to put that money out first.

I know seniors who do not go to the hospital when they are supposed to, who do not follow up on appointments because they cannot put the money out first. I know seniors who do not take their medications. They do not buy their medications because they cannot. Or, they split them. They take half every day, or use any other strategy they can to try to save money.

Let me give one example of the face of poverty in my riding. In Atikokan not too long ago, I was speaking with a senior, a man probably in his 80s. His wife had passed away. He had raised four children. They were all gone from the community. He came in to see me one day and he said he could not pay his electricity bill. I asked if he had tried some strategies to reduce the use of electricity. He told me that he uses one light bulb and every second day he unplugs the refrigerator.

The HST from the government was the turning point for that man, for his electricity. That is what seniors go through in this country. That is what seniors go through in my riding.

I know, although there may be members of Parliament here who do not agree or do not see this, it happens in every riding.

What are the other impacts in my riding? Speaking about longevity of seniors, we all go to funerals, or read in the paper about seniors dying. We think that they should not have passed away, that it was too early for them to go. For seniors who have to live below the poverty line, we are talking about malnutrition, depression and suicide.

The biggest indicator of seniors' longevity is the number of friends they have. I do not know if people here know that. How many friends a senior has determines how long that senior will live. However, I know seniors and I talk to seniors all the time who do not have many or any friends. That is because they live below the poverty line and they are embarrassed. What could they invite their friends over to their house for? What could they serve them? What could they talk about? So, gradually seniors lose their friends. It is not because their friends do not want to spend time with them, but because they are embarrassed to spend time with their friends. That is sad, because those seniors will have a whole host of health issues and die before their time.

What can we do? What are the choices? If we do not buy one F-35 jet, that would be enough to lift every senior out of poverty for two years. If we ended the corporate giveaways to big oil companies and banks, we would have more than enough money to lift every senior out of poverty in this country forever.

[National Strategy for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Act, June 15th, 2011]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-227, An Act respecting the establishment of a National Strategy for Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

Mr. Speaker, my bill asks the Government of Canada to establish a national strategy for fetal alcohol spectrum disorder that includes: the establishment, in co-operation with the provincial governments, of national standards for the treatment of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and the delivery of related services; and the study, in co-operation with the provincial governments, of the funding arrangements for the care of those with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, including the possibility of transferring federal funds to assist the provincial governments in providing treatment, education, professional training and other required supports for Canadians with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)

[Border Infrastructure Fund, June 15th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, during tourist season in northwestern Ontario, visitors can wait more than three hours to cross the border.

For our communities, tourism is a key part of the economy. Yet, the government diverted $50 million from the border infrastructure fund to beautify communities in the minister's riding, using the fund as a private wish list, while ignoring border regions like northwestern Ontario.

Is the President of the Treasury Board finally ready to apologize?

[The Budget, June 9th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome and congratulate my friend from Mississauga—Streetsville. Mississauga—Streetsville is the land of wide open spaces, rocks, fish and trees, oh, sorry, that is my riding, Thunder Bay—Rainy River.

The hon. member talked about the GIS. If a senior qualifies, it would be about $50 a month. Of course, in Ontario with the HST, which the Conservative government played a very big part in implementing, with the extra taxes now on gasoline, home heating and electricity, that $50 is more than eaten up for seniors.

Everyone in this place agrees that seniors should be able to retire with dignity and respect. How is this budget going to do that?