Libby Davies

[Solicitation Laws, February 7th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I do agree with the amendment.

[Specific Claims Resolution Act, February 7th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg North Centre has done an outstanding job in bringing a sense of understanding of what the fundamental flaws are in the bill.

Today the minister of aboriginal affairs talked about consultation and defended government practices. He said that the government was involved in negotiations and consultations with first nations. Yet, as the member has pointed out, the bill itself is a total contradiction of the very principles the government has claimed to be put forward.

Could the hon. member outline some of the opposition that has come forward from the aboriginal community to the bill and look at it in the context of the other bills that come forward and that go completely in the opposite direction to where the government claims it wants to be?

[Petitions, February 7th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House to present a petition signed by a number of people in Vancouver, Victoria and the lower mainland, who are concerned that the rural route mail couriers earn less than minimum wage and have working conditions that are reminiscent of another era. They are not allowed to bargain collectively and this basic denial of rights is really unfair and discriminates against rural workers.

The petition calls upon Parliament to repeal section 13(5) of Canada Post Corporation Act to allow rural route mail carriers to collectively bargain and have fair rights.

[Privilege, February 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I want to say that we in the NDP concur with the comments that have been made by the hon. member from the Conservative Party. I have checked with our health critic. He did not receive the full package of information.

I would make this point. It is not as though that information is not available. Clearly on the top of the document there were contained some clippings; it made reference to an additional package of information that was available to some members, government members presumably, in limited distribution and was not made available to all members of the House, particularly the health critics.

Believe me, it is hard enough to do our jobs as critics around here, to stay on top of what is going on and to be aware of the news that is emerging. To know that information has been assembled but simply is not being distributed and is being withheld from certain members of the House really does infringe upon the right of members in the House to be able to do their work in a proper, equitable and fair way. I would urge you to consider the arguments that the member has made.

[Iraq, February 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, if there is a principled position, we have yet to hear it.

Canadians do not want this war. The world does not want this war. Will the government say nothing to stop George Bush from beating the drums of war without proof, without listening and refusing to rule out the possible use of nuclear weapons? Even U.S. senators are sounding the alarm bells.

If the Liberals will not tell Bush he is wrong on the war, will they at least say he is wrong to refuse to rule out the use of nuclear weapons? Will the government at least go that far and say that?

[Iraq, February 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday George Bush said the “game is over”. War in Iraq is not a game. Hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk, and Canada has no position.

What about the so-called proof as presented by Colin Powell, proof the Alliance wants to go to war over? The Liberals have yet to disagree.

Is the Prime Minister aware of reports that the U.K. intelligence dossier, praised by Powell, is copied from three articles, including a graduate student's? This is the evidence? Surely we are not going to go to war over this.

[Supply, February 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to watch the high energy and the passion with which this debate is taking place over procedure and the back and forth as the government and the opposition try to outmanoeuvre each other as usual.

Surely both parties are missing the point here, which is that Canadians expect us to have a debate and a vote. There are 301 members of Parliament who are here in this place to conduct a democratic exercise, and to have that democratic exercise and a vote before a decision is made.

That is what I would like to put to the government House leader. Why is the government so afraid of having this vote take place before that decision is made? We have heard about hypothetical situations. There is a precedent in the House of Commons, Kosovo for example, where debate and a vote took place before there was a decision made. Why can that not happen today? I ask the hon. member that question because that is really the crux of the matter here.

[Privilege, February 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would also like to say a few words on this question of privilege. I was in the House when the minister made his statement a couple of days ago. We have just heard from the government House leader that he believes the minister was very forthright with transparency in the documents he tabled.

I was also at the briefing session where we heard from the two consultants. I would like to be very clear. I was not aware another document was available. Although some of the numbers were referred to, clearly in the statement the minister made in the House there was no suggestion that a risk analysis document was also available.

On that basis there has been a lack of clarity about whether there really was transparency and whether the minister was clear about all the documents that he was tabling.

I was at the briefing and it was not clear another document was in existence, even though the consultants did make some reference to the numbers, which I now understand are contained in that document.

I would like to suggest, Mr. Speaker, that if this was put forward in a forthright manner, there was certainly a lack of clarity by the minister about the fact that other documents were in existence and were not clearly tabled in the House when he made his statement and told members of the House that it was on the basis of transparency and him tabling the documents.

[Antipoverty Act, February 4th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, I congratulate my hon. colleague from the Bloc, the member for Hochelaga—Maisonneuve, for introducing Bill C-228. It is a fine and excellent bill and something that is long overdue. It is an important piece of legislation and I am very glad we are debating it today.

We need an anti-poverty law. We need something to spell out clearly that targets need to be established to eliminate poverty. We need legislation reviewed through a poverty lens.

I strongly support the idea of adding social condition to the prohibited grounds of the Canadian Human Rights Act. In fact when I first came to Ottawa as an elected member, I too had a motion on social condition. If the member remembers, there was also a motion from the Senate that came forward but unfortunately it was defeated. I too had a motion to set targets to eliminate poverty.

I was surprised to hear the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice say that the government has broken the vicious cycle of poverty. If that is the case, I wonder why we are here today debating this bill.

If the truth be known, the gap between the rich and the poor in our country has actually increased. The number of people who are struggling below the poverty line is increasing as evidenced by a recent report from the Caledon Institute.

Even today in the Toronto Star there is an article about 300,000 Canadians, and I believe they are in Ontario, who because they are living on minimum wage and are living way below the poverty line, are struggling to make ends meet. There has not been an increase in the minimum wage in Ontario since 1995. All of these are indications of how difficult it is for millions of Canadians who live below the poverty line.

There has been a lot of work done by a lot of groups to really bring this issue forward. Using Quebec as a model, there has been some excellent work done by a coalition of groups that convinced the national assembly of Quebec to pass a unanimous anti-poverty bill, Bill 112. It is a fine example of what can be done when elected representatives work closely with community representatives to tackle the issue. I wish we could adopt the same kind of thing here.

In the last couple of years we have seen an important court case, the Gosselin case, that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. It challenged the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and put forward the notion that social and economic rights need to be recognized in our country. They are recognized in international law, for example in the international covenant on social, economic and cultural rights to which Canada is a signatory, but unfortunately we are in violation of that covenant. We have even been criticized by the United Nations for the status of aboriginal people in our country, or the state of homelessness.

The Gosselin case, although it was not approved by the Supreme Court, did raise a very important debate in the country and that is we need to be upholding social and economic rights. We need to be upholding these international covenants. I would say the government, far from breaking the vicious cycle of poverty, has contributed to the social and economic environment that is driving more and more people into despair.

I heard the government member speak about the child tax benefit. Let us be realistic about this. Even the child tax benefit is not available to the poorest of the poor, that is, people who live on income assistance. Before the demise of the Canada assistance plan, which was before the Canada health and social transfer, at least there were some principles and rules about social expenditures and social rights. That was abandoned long ago by the Liberal government.

One only has to look at my own province of British Columbia to see what is happening to poor people. There have been massive cuts in disability pensions and services to low income people.

Today I was reading an announcement about women's centres being cut. I had another motion in the House and I know that my colleague has had a bill on the whole question of the sex trade and prostitution as well. There is a correlation here because in my own community in east Vancouver, more and more women out of desperation are going to the streets and living off the avails of the sex trade. They are living so far below the poverty line that they are there out of economic desperation.

I raise this because it seems there is a very strong connection between a federal government that has abandoned this field and the need to have strong anti-poverty measures, setting targets, bringing in social condition as a prohibited grounds for discrimination, the child tax benefit, the lack of a national housing program, not having any rules for the provinces to abide by. All of this is now having an impact. In provinces like B.C., Ontario, Alberta and elsewhere, the available resources for poor people and the income structure have been so fragmented and cut back it is leaving more and more people out in the cold. More and more families and children are struggling to live in an environment where they have no support.

Supposedly we had a goal of eliminating child poverty by the year 2000. It was a unanimous resolution in the House put forward by the former leader of the NDP, Ed Broadbent. It was an honourable goal and resolution. Not only did we fail to meet the target of eliminating child poverty by the year 2000, but the situation has actually deteriorated. I would say it has deteriorated because we have not seen the kind of resources and attention that is needed from the federal government. As a result the provinces have cut back on welfare and have introduced things like workfare programs. As a result we see more and more discrimination against poor people.

For all of those reasons, this bill is very important. We never really debate in the House what is a national disgrace which is poverty in a country as wealthy as Canada. We can set targets to eliminate poverty. The Liberal government is very proud of what it did with the deficit. The finance minister set targets to eliminate the deficit. Why are we not able to do the same thing when it comes to our social deficit? Why are we not able to say that this is a political priority?

I encourage members of the House to consider the bill as a step in the right direction to establish an anti-poverty agenda which I think would have broad support. I congratulate the member and say to him that we in the NDP support the objectives and the measures that are contained in the bill. We are very disappointed that the government has not seen fit to support it. At least it was a place to start. At least it was a place to say that social condition is an important factor in preventing discrimination against poor people. Setting targets is a place to begin.

We will continue to support these kinds of measures. We will continue to advocate for them. We will continue to hold the government to account for its dismal failure and its record of abandoning low income and poor people in this country.

[Gun Control, February 3rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to see the minister so eager today to table his two reports. The proof of his transparency of tabling those reports will come when those reports are examined and further when we actually see a demonstration of the government's action and commitment to clean up the terrible horrific mess that has been created by the management and administration of the gun registry system.

The minister said that the reports he ordered confirm that the necessary systems are in place to ensure the integrity and completeness of necessary financial data. If that is indeed true then clearly these systems failed not only in terms from a management point of view but in terms of accountability to Parliament. That was a clear point made by the Auditor General.

I also noted that the minister talked about improving efficiency and reducing costs. That is a vast understatement to say this is about improving efficiency. This is about a program that has been totally politically mismanaged. It is an issue on which the government has lost so much credibility that now the onus is on it to demonstrate that it can garner public confidence on this issue and not jeopardize the very safety of Canadians that the program purports to uphold.

We will be examining these reports closely and I reiterate the comments of the member for Winnipeg--Transcona who spoke on this issue in December when he pointed out that when the government talks about efficiency this is a code word for some sort of privatization that would take place.

The NDP will fight that vigorously and we will also bring accountability and ensure that these reports hold the government to account, that there is transparency, and that Canadians can have confidence in the program that is meant to uphold their safety.