Malcolm Allen

[Canadian Wheat Board, November 16th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, there is another about-face between a minister and the Prime Minister.

Wheat farmers saw it last spring when the Minister of Agriculture told them that he would not dismantle the Wheat Board without a vote by prairie farmers. Six months later, there was no vote.

Now the government wants dairy and poultry farmers to just “trust it”.

Farming families are asking for a simple answer to a simple question: Is the government dismantling supply management, yes or no?

[International Trade, November 15th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, prairie farmers trusted the government when it promised it would not dismantle the Wheat Board without a democratic vote of farmers. The Conservatives have turned their backs on prairie farmers and denied them the right to vote.

Now the government is asking dairy and poultry farmers to put all their eggs in the Conservatives' basket and just trust them in trade negotiations.

How can farmers possibly trust the government to stand up for supply management after it sold out prairie farmers?

[Keeping Canada's Economy and Jobs Growing Act, November 15th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is absolutely right. There is nothing in this bill that addresses that issue.

That income gap is growing. By all measures every major economist not only in this country but worldwide has said the same thing. When Warren Buffett says that the gap is way too large and it is time for rich folks to pay some more, that is an indicator that the rich folks have too much. When a rich person says he has too much, people should believe him.

It is now time for those who have more to look at those who have less, not through charity, not by handing out charitable vouchers to folks, but by making sure that they get a fair piece of the economy, making sure that they get what they are entitled to through their hard work. Of course, they must go back to work first. That is the piece that must happen.

That is why we look to the government and ask: Where is the jobs plan? Why is the government not creating jobs for our folks, the young and the not so young? In my riding the vast majority of folks who are unemployed look like me. They are my age. They had jobs at one point in time, but now they do not, because of the trade agreements the government and the previous government put together that let all those jobs disappear.

My region, Welland, used to be the fourth highest paying region in the country, but it is not any more.

[Keeping Canada's Economy and Jobs Growing Act, November 15th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, it is absolutely true. As someone who spent five years as a municipal councillor, I know exactly what the member is talking about when it comes to the gas tax. I was on council the first time the gas tax money came down. Yes, it was decent money, but even in small communities it was not meeting the infrastructure needs. What greater way to invest in our infrastructure than to continue to do it now.

Let me quote Sherry Cooper . I do not think Sherry Cooper is a New Democrat. I will have to check with our party to make sure that she does not hold a card, but there is a leadership race on, and maybe she signed up for one. Sherry Cooper said:

The misplaced belief that the road to economic prosperity is paved by near-term fiscal tightening, as espoused by our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron last week, shows we have learned nothing from Herbert Hoover’s response to the Great Depression.

If we invest in communities today, we will do two things. We will set communities up on a future path for prosperity, and we will put people who are not working back to work. What a grand notion that would be. We would increase employment levels and make our communities a better place through infrastructure. The bridges and tunnels in Montreal would be safe. Going into the future, communities could build on that prosperity and help young folks get a job.

What an amazing and novel idea that would be. Maybe the government should take that up.

[Keeping Canada's Economy and Jobs Growing Act, November 15th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague from Elmwood—Transcona. His predecessor, Mr. Jim Maloway, was my seatmate at the far end of the House. He was elected again as an MLA in the New Democratic government in Manitoba. I congratulate Mr. Maloway on that. I do miss him as a seatmate, but nonetheless he is back in the Manitoba legislature and we are happy for him.

My colleague from Elmwood—Transcona said something and I had to write it down because I was slightly taken aback. In referring to the Conservative government, he said, “We put all Canadians first”. I would challenge my friend from Elmwood—Transcona on that one.

Regarding the tax credits laid out by the Conservatives, for all the things for children which they talked about, one might say it is admirable and that we want young people to get into the arts, sports and different clubs and to find a way to help parents make that happen financially. However, the difficulty is that it is supposed to help all Canadian families according to what my friend said. The reality, of course, is that this is not true. A tax credit cannot help all Canadian families because people who live in poverty do not pay tax. They cannot get the tax credit if they do not pay tax.

How does the government intend to help those families get their children into the arts and sports and join clubs and participate with other children, as this bill purports to do, when those families who can least afford to have their children join in the first place get the proverbial goose egg, nada, nothing, zero, not a penny, no financial help whatsoever? They will not receive one solitary red cent. Why? Because it is a tax credit. Tax credits are for people who have a certain amount of taxable income and remit taxes to the government and they get some form of credit back. It is elementary. Who does that credit really help? It helps people in the top income brackets, the folks who can actually afford to pay for all the things their young children may want to do.

As a parent of kids who are not so young now, when they were young my wife and I wanted them to participate in various activities. We had two well-paying jobs. I worked in the manufacturing sector and my spouse worked in the health care field. We were fortunate to be able to afford to have our three kids in the programs that they wanted to join. We had well-paying, full-time jobs, both of which were unionized. We had good pay, good benefits and good pensions. That is the type of workforce we want to create. That is the type of workforce that could benefit from tax credits, if that is the direction in which the government wants to go. It is not for those that are underemployed or unemployed, or for those who are in dire need, in fact in poverty, who still have children who will not be able to participate.

We have heard numbers being bandied back and forth. We have heard about the 600,000 net new jobs. There is an old saying which I will not repeat here because the language might be unparliamentary. It is about figures and figurers. We will leave aside as to who figures and who is the figurer trying to figure out what the figures are.

The bottom line is the real number. In July 2008 there were 17,084,200 people employed in the labour force in this country. In July 2011, a mere few months ago, there were 17,344,200 people employed in the labour force. I will be the figurer on this one. I think I can do the arithmetic; it does not seem too complicated. That is actually an increase of 260,000 jobs.

I am not sure where the government gets the figure of some 600,000 net new jobs. Net of course is the difference between what one had and what one has now, as most folks would see it. What we have is less than half that amount. If that be the case, who am I to quibble with Statistics Canada? I know the government did when it wanted to get rid of the long form census but that is a debate for another day.

Nonetheless, we can clearly see that the number of jobs purported to be created is significantly lower than what the government purports it to be.

My riding of Welland is a glorious place. I invite my colleagues to visit Welland. It is a wonderful place to be, but it suffers a huge amount of unemployment, because the manufacturing sector that was not supported by the government simply took off. It went to Mexico, Illinois, and Indiana. It packed up and went to China.

We watched Henniges Automotive dry up last month and send 300 workers and their families in Welland to the unemployment line. What is their future under the Conservative government? Less than 40% of Ontarians who are unemployed actually qualify for EI. That is the future for those folks who have been in and out of work over the last year and a half because of the downturn in that sector. The sector did not dry up. Henniges makes rubber mouldings for automobiles. It is headed to the United States. It is going to a state where it will get tax advantages because the government pours money into new firms and expands existing ones.

It is not a question of a business going out of business. It is a question of a company leaving this country and leaving our folks high and dry. We have seen this throughout Welland's history, especially in the last number of years. John Deere did exactly the same thing and the government washed its hands of the situation and said that is the way it goes. That is not good enough and it should not be the way it goes for Canadians.

I would like to pick up on the remarks of my colleague from Burnaby—Douglas. I am a little bit older than he is and when I was in high school, in grade nine, teachers talked about how we had to diversify the economy. At the time we were good at digging stuff out of the ground and cutting logs. We are still good at it today. In fact the mining sector is seen as one of the best in the world, which is a good thing. Except when I was in high school the idea was to take that stuff we dug out of the ground or the raw logs we cut down and do something with them. Manufacturing is what it is called. Manufacturing seems to be an ugly word these days. We seem not to want to manufacture; we let others do it because they are good at it somewhere else.

We have gone back 40 years. It is 40 years since I have been in high school. We have gone back four decades, back to the same old, same old, when clearly what economists and teachers in my high school and other schools were saying to young people like me as we looked forward to potential jobs, was to diversify the economy, make manufacturing jobs. It would give us an opportunity to work in good-paying full-time jobs with pensions and benefits, unionized jobs if that is the case. The economy would grow and so would our country. Lo and behold, what did we have during the 1970s? Someone who was my age at the time and lived in the heartland of this country, Ontario, could literally walk up the street and get a job the next day after quitting a job the day before.

Today we have young people who are still in school, not necessarily because they want to be there, but because they cannot find a job. They cannot start a career because there are no jobs in which to start careers, because of the limited opportunities over the last five to seven years. Yet the government presents a budget and all of those aspects are absent. All of those pieces that we would want to see and did see in the 1970s when we diversified the economy, when we actually made sure there were businesses where we could get a full-time job with good pay and benefits and pensions. We have eliminated them and now we have temps and people working on contract. We have itinerant workers.

It reminds me of the dirty thirties when men would stand outside the gate and wait for the boss to pick them one at a time and send the rest of them home to come back the next day and try again. That is what we are doing to our young people and it is criminal. We are wasting the potential of young folks who are our future by not making sure that we have the investments set up so they have a sustainable future, good paying full-time jobs with benefits and pensions. That is a crime. That is what is absent in the budget.

I suggest the government put it in the budget to make sure we look after not only those who are at retirement age, but those who are at the beginning stages of their lives, ready to walk into the new economy, so that they can participate in that new economy.

[Ethics, November 4th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, we see corruption at the CRA, a cabinet minister carousing with accused gun smugglers and stonewalling on their G8 slush fund. It has not been a good week for Conservatives. In fact, as one newspaper editorial put it this week, “Is the Prime Minister getting a queasy feeling? He should be. This isn't pretty”. How true.

On Wednesday, the Muskoka minister failed to answer questions at committee and flailed around while he was there. However, he did promise one thing. He promised to send an evaluation of his pork-barrel projects.

Will the minister table those documents today?

[Ethics, November 4th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, when it comes to meeting with shady businessmen, Canadians expect more from cabinet ministers and expect good judgment from all of us in the House today.

However, the Minister of State for Small Business and Tourism was at a meeting with an accused gunrunner and where he saw cash-stuffed envelopes were being passed around.

Will the minister of state stop stonewalling and please tell Canadians what his role was in this fiasco?

[Ending the Long-gun Registry Act, October 27th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I heard the hon. minister across the way talk about the gun registry and that members did one thing or another in the past. The decision I made at second reading was contradictory to the one I made at third reading because the people of Welland decided that was what they wanted me to do. Therefore, the consistency that we have heard talked about that everyone is in agreement is totally false. Folks out there want to hear what the opposition has to say. They are clear with respect to what the government side wants to do, but they deserve to hear from us.

[Business of Supply, October 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right about life, liberty and private property ownership.

Our sense of working together collectively and in harmony and unison for the better good of our communities is something we hold near and dear to our hearts. It is emulated with the folks who are part of the Wheat Board because they can get out.

As the Minister of Agriculture said, farmers can vote with their air seeders and do something else. No one is making them grow wheat. There is no one on the Prairies who said thou shall grow wheat always. No one makes them do that. There is no oppression from the Wheat Board on that aspect. If they all want to grow canola tomorrow, they can do that if they so choose, or they can grow any other pulse crops or anything else they choose to do. There is not that tyranny or oppression that one thinks of when we think of those things as if they must do it.

My colleague asked a fair question about how we should actually govern ourselves when we come together as communities and societies. It seems to me that it is about respecting the wishes of a group that decides on its own for itself. It is not about a decision being imposed by the government because it thinks that is the group deserves.

[Business of Supply, October 25th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, we are not insisting that it continue either. We are saying that farmers should choose whether it exists or not. We are asking the government to let them have a chance to vote. It is not on our insistence that the Canadian Wheat Board stay on for perpetuity. We are asking the government to have an honest question that we can agree upon in the House, allow the farmers to have an honest vote and let them decide. Farmers will decide, not us on this side and not members on that side, but farmers. Canadian wheat producing farmers on the Prairies will make the decision on an honest question.

It is not my party that is saying that the Wheat Board must continue. We are simply saying that farmers should be given the opportunity to make a decision. If it is their choice to continue, then that is fine, but, if it is not, that is also fine.