Malcolm Allen

[Child Care, March 13th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, thousands of workers are finding themselves unemployed or facing unemployment and the cold response from the government to the needs of Canadian families will unfortunately be felt largely by the most vulnerable, our children.

It is time that the Conservative government stopped peddling the $100 a month child care benefit as a national universal child care program.

By driving almost half a million Ontarians into poverty, the recession demands a sense of urgency from the government, if not a moral imperative to help those who cannot support themselves and their children.

Families need child care services. People cannot work or retrain for new jobs without them. Families living on low incomes spend every extra penny they receive just to survive. This includes the $100 a month child care benefit that most often goes toward putting food on the table to feed their family.

Unlike the Conservative government, New Democrats will not turn our backs on the children of Canada. We will continue to fight to enact our early learning and child care act and establish the first truly universal child care and early learning program in Canada.

New Democrats gave us medicare. New Democrats will give us early child care.

[Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 11th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, although my hon. colleagues does not live near a lake or a river in London, nor does she have a shipyard in her riding, shipyards and shipbuilding are high tech operations. Looking at a bridge on a new ship today one would think one was in the Apollo spacecraft that went to the moon. That is how advanced they have become. It is not an old wheelhouse with a big wheel that someone has to turn four times to make the ship move. It is so advanced and high tech.

Does my colleague from London—Fanshawe see opportunities for other businesses and industries in her riding of London to outfit those ships? It is similar to the auto industry. There is an assembly plant, but feeder plants are needed to feed the materials which eventually will make up the ship. A shipyard is a place of assembly. Does the member see opportunities in a place like London to help build ships?

[Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 11th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, we have heard a number of comments over the last little while and I thank my colleagues for that. We have now heard from our colleague from the east coast, our colleague from the west coast, and I myself earlier who lives in the central part of this country, about shipbuilding. All of us engage with our communities and our residences around shipbuilding.

I have a question for my hon. colleague from St. John's East. What sort of impact do we see happening, especially in a place like Marystown?

I had the good pleasure to visit the yard in Marystown the last time I was in Newfoundland. I congratulate my colleague for his representation here and on the beauty of Newfoundland. What does it mean to Marystown and those workers in that community if this shipbuilding industry is carved out from EFTA? What will it mean for them, for those workers, for the community and for Newfoundland in general?

[Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 11th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague from Acadie—Bathurst for the question and the comments. There is no question that if the government really cared about workers it would invest in them. What flabbergasts me is that the shipyard workers and the shipyard owners themselves, the Irving family of shipyards, is telling the government to invest in the yards.

I can understand the Conservatives looking at Mr. Risser, who represents the CAW marine unit, and saying, “No, I do not think so; you are a trade union.” But the shipyard owners, the business conglomerate of the east coast of this country that owns the shipyards, are saying to the government, “Carve it out.” We need to carve it out.

Not only do the Conservatives, as my colleague has said, have disdain for the workers in those yards, they seem to have disdain for the shipyard owners. That astounds me, because ultimately this is an easy investment. We need those supply vessels. We need those Coast Guard vessels. We need them now. In fact, some would say we needed them a year or two ago.

Minister Flaherty says he wants to put money out there. Write the cheque.

[Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 11th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, there is no question that, as I have heard over the years from young people not just in my own riding but throughout the Niagara region, what is lacking is apprenticeship programs. There are programs in the colleges where students get a minimal amount of training, but ultimately what they need to have—and the terminology might be somewhat archaic—is a master-indentured worker program where, as an apprentice, they would work for a master tradesman or tradeswoman.

They need to actually have a place to do that, because they cannot serve an apprenticeship without a place to be. One of those places would be in a shipyard. There is an immense amount of trades programs inside shipyards, whether it be in the welding area, whether it be in the steel fabricating area or the rigging area, or whether it be as an electrician. The number of skills is unparalleled in most other industries.

In fact, the shipyard workers will say quite openly that nearly all the workers who actually work inside a yard are from apprenticable programs and skilled workers. It seems to me that the easiest thing to do is simply invest in it. We would generate not only jobs for today, but jobs for tomorrow, because those apprentices will be taken up in the system and we will be retraining the youth for those jobs of tomorrow with skills that can be taken elsewhere, can be taken into the fabrication of towers for wind turbines in the green economy, can be taken all the way across in varying degrees.

[Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, March 11th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I will begin by quoting a couple of witnesses who came before the committee because they were referenced here when I was in the House today. I, like the hon. member, was at the committee when they were there.

In reply to a question about his belief as to whether this was a sellout of the shipbuilding industry and should it be a carve out, one witness, Mr. Andrew McArthur, said:

If it's not a sellout, it's getting close to it. It certainly doesn't enhance the survivability of the industry. It jeopardizes it. It would be pretty hard to say it's an absolute sellout, although it's getting close.

That was said by an industry representative who talks about his multiple years in the industry. In fact, the gentleman has had experience on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, originally being from my homeland of Scotland and knowinf the shipbuilding industry there as well. He goes on to say:

It's not only EFTA that concerns us. The ground rules may be set.

I repeat that, through EFTA, the ground rules could be set because we are negotiating with Singapore and South Korea. Once we set those ground rules, if we get the same with all these other countries, the industry could be in very tough conditions and could only survive on government contracts.

This side of the House and the other side of the House know what happened to those government contracts. I believe there was a sense that there would be two new supply ships built for the Canadian navy. I could ask my hon. colleague from Sackville—Eastern Shore, if he were here, if he had seen those two supply ships in Halifax lately and I think the response would probably be no, since they have not been built. Part of the reason that they were not built was that the government said the bid was too expensive. That is from our yards. Of course the bid may have, in the government's estimation, been too expensive but it is because the shipyards are not producing at maximum level. By their own records, they are producing at about one-third capacity, which means they need to retrofit the yard to do a vessel of that size and they need to find workers. That multiplies the effect of what the cost will be when we bid the job because we will need to find those workers and, indeed, enhance the yard so that it can produce the product.

All those things contribute to the cost and the fact that the cost was so high. One could argue whether the cost was really that high when Canadian taxpayer money would be building Canadian ships, Canadian sailors would be on those ships and those ships would be made by Canadian workers in Canada who would be paying Canadian taxes to the Canadian government. The government would then be able to circulate that money back into the economy through other measures and other programs. More important, inside the community where those Canadian workers live, they would now be putting money back into the economy because they would be earning a wage and not be collecting employment insurance, which comes out of the fund and which could be used for other folks.

The multiplier effect is enormous. When we look at the cost of something and think that it is a little bit higher, a little bit higher than whose, begs the question. Is it Korea? Was that the government's intention? If Canadian yards are too expensive, it will send those Canadian vessels for the navy to Korea. Is part of the master plan to get EFTA in place and then simply negotiate the next shipbuilding contract with Korea? We will see what the industry and the workers representatives have told us at committee that the industry cannot survive.

Let us take a step back and see what is inside those yards. The people who work in those yards have very specific skills. Most of those skills are only adaptable to the yards that build those vessels. This is a highly-skilled workforce and building vessels is fairly labour intensive. An investment in a yard today produces jobs today as well, and, from those jobs, we produce apprenticeships, which is retraining.

I know the government is fond of talking about its action plan, about money for retraining and about money for jobs. This is the opportunity to take that rhetoric and simply write a cheque. The government should procure those vessels from Canadian yards, put those workers back to work and allow them to take on apprentices. Today the average age of a yardworker across the country is 53.

Albeit for someone such as me, who is just a little north of 53 years of age, to say that is getting on, by the same token, it does not take that much longer before those workers will retire. Without replacing those workers through an apprenticeship program, we will see the demise of the yard, because the labour component will disappear across this country. That would be a shame not only for those communities and those workers but for this country, which has the largest coastline in the world.

We really are a maritime nation, albeit some of us do not want to believe that from time to time. My own riding of Welland, of course, is named after the Welland Canal, bordered by two lakes and a river. It is split in half by the Welland Canal. It is hard for us to understand that we are a maritime nation when we live in the centre of Ontario, but indeed we are surrounded by water.

In my riding, from time to time we can actually watch the ships go across the bridge. It is really a tunnel for us but a bridge for the boats. For those who have never had the experience of heading down that tunnel and seeing a boat go across the top, it is the strangest feeling when it is experienced for the very first time.

To lose that ability to build those vessels in this country would be tantamount to criminal negligence.

We need to understand what the industry is saying to us. I would think my hon. colleagues on the other side of the House, who tend to be friends of that group, would understand that, and if they do not, certainly the Liberals would, because the Liberals were on this file before the Conservative government was.

What the industry has said from day one is that they need a viable industry in this country to build ships, and we need to help them establish that. They are willing to do their part. In fact, the industry and the workers in the marine units have done that. What they are saying to the government is, “Allow us to do what other nations around this world are doing, just like the Jones Act did for the U.S. Let us carve out shipbuilding. Let us have the same opportunities that Americans have and we will be able to compete.”

Not only that, but we would have the sense of security in this country that we are actually going to build naval vessels in Canada for Canadian sailors. It seems to me that is the very least we owe the women and men in our armed services, to understand that when they get on that vessel, it is Canadians who have produced it for them, it is Canadian quality that went into it, and it is Canadian security that provided it for them.

Not only that, but Canadian taxpayers are looking to us to spend their money wisely. They entrust us with their money and they expect us to spend it wisely. I have said this in my other career as a municipal councillor: There is no wiser decision we can make as people entrusted with their money than to spend it on them, to invest it in Canadians, who give it to us. Unwaveringly they say, “Here it is,” and they provide it to us.

It seems to me that what we really need to do is have a carve-out. We look at the tariff program and say we can build it over a number of years. The industry is saying that will not let it survive. The Norwegian industry, which is the one that really we are going to compete with here, is an industry that spent the last 20 years being subsidized by the Norwegian government, so indeed it could end up going to the marketplace. Why is it that we cannot do the same thing?

We are not asking for any more than that. Carve it out. Carve it out so that we have an opportunity to do the same things the Norwegians have done. It seems the fairest thing to do. If the Norwegians thought it was good enough for Norwegian citizens, the least the Canadian government can do is say it is good enough for Canadians.

Why should we be second-class world citizens when it comes to looking after ourselves? Why would we want to put an industry and our workers in jeopardy when indeed we do not have to do that?

We have this opportunity here, and I would look to my colleagues on this side of the House, especially the Liberals, and say to them that they should rethink their position on the carve-out. They should rethink the perspective of what they are doing, which is selling out shipyard workers from coast to coast to coast in this country and decimating an industry that has been here for hundreds of years.

The first folks got here by ship. Whether they happened to be the aboriginal nations or not, one can talk about a land bridge, but a lot of folks actually sailed to this country. To think that somehow we do not have that industry anymore, it make one want to weep, to be honest, especially someone such as myself who came here as a new Canadian with my parents.

My father came here to build ships. As a legacy to my father, because he has passed on now, the least I can do is stand in this House and say that I stood for shipbuilding in this country. That is what brought my family to this place and I will not let him down.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I would concur with that and use the word “umbrage”, because I think that is absolutely true. As I said earlier, the reason that people collect employment insurance is because they were working. They were not lying around somewhere looking for someone to send a cheque. That is not how they qualify. They have a long history of work and show that initiative, that energy, that sense of wanting to support their families and build their communities and this country.

For the minister to suggest that EI is lucrative, let me remind hon. members that claimants get 55¢ on the dollar. Imagine tomorrow if we had to take 55¢ on the dollar of our wage and live on it. I would suggest that members should go to see their banker if they have a mortgage. They had better see the credit union if they have a car loan, because they will need to renegotiate it. They will not be able to survive on 55¢ on the dollar, never mind getting food on the table, never mind making sure their children could play sports or participate in artistic or cultural endeavours.

We would not have that money any more. That discretionary income would dry up immediately if we were making 55¢ on the dollar. That 55¢ on the dollar is the basic minimum to get by. That is why the bill talks about at least a minimum of 60% and bringing a lot more folks onto the system to ensure they actually can survive through what looks like a terrible, terrible time in their lives.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I agree in the sense that, to reduce the EI premium and suggest it is a stimulus, tell that to the unemployed. Of course, I forgot; they do not pay employment insurance premiums.

We cannot stimulate an economy on the backs of the unemployed by suggesting they get a break on premiums when in fact they are no longer paying them. They have actually lost those.

As to the statistics the member quotes, I believe it is a $1.64 stimulus when it comes to EI. So my colleague is correct that it is above $1.60.

Every major economist in this country has said paying employment insurance benefits to those who are laid off is the quickest stimulus package we can get out the door, because we do not have to create another system. We do not have to have another layer built up. We actually have the program in place today, the rules in place today, and folks understand what those are and they can apply. That unto itself makes it so simplistic. All we have to do is change the regulations in the sense that, if we simply said in this House we would change the regulations and did it quickly, the two weeks would be gone and folks would be benefiting immediately. They would get paid and we would not have folks facing foreclosure and losing their homes. We would not have folks lined up at food banks. We would not have folks worried about being on social assistance.

In my region, we would not be worried about 70% of young people under the age of 25 leaving the region because they have lost hope of getting employment in the region in which they live.

[Business of Supply, March 5th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Vancouver Kingsway.

Let me thank the hon. member for Niagara West—Glanbrook for his comments earlier. My party on this side of the House and I agree with one of the comments he made during his speech. We want to see those folks who are unemployed today back at work. I think we are unequivocal about that as New Democrats. We are interested in making sure that people who are unemployed are able to return to work at the earliest opportunity to support their families. That is what we ultimately want to see. So I join with my colleague for Niagara West—Glanbrook when I say, yes, indeed, we want to see them go back to work.

However, let me make comments around this about his colleague who had made suggestions about the variability of the employment insurance program in the sense that, as unemployment goes up, the benefits go up, and one gets a longer period of benefits but not actually more money. One would hope that would be the truth. One would hate to think one gets less benefits in an area of extremely high unemployment.

That is not how the system used to work. Years ago, the system was level across the country, for all intents and purposes. When a worker got laid off and had paid into the insurance program, that worker was entitled to collect from that insurance program, because it was an insurance program.

To extrapolate to the end of the logic of that hon. member's suggestion, it would seem that if someone paid his or her car insurance at one end of the country where there were fewer traffic accidents, that person would get less money for the car in the case of a car crash than someone at the other end of the country where there were more accidents, who would get more money. That is not why we pay insurance.

I think the government has lost track of what this program truly is. It is an employment insurance program. It is not a tax paid to the government through income taxes. It is a tax, or at least an insurance premium, paid by employers and employees to insure employees against being unemployed. So one would suggest that the nature of the name is to say employees should get their benefits when indeed they become unemployed.

This is not new. The changes to employment insurance have been happening for over 10 years. In fact, they go back about 15 years. With those changes we saw an absolute treasure trove of money accumulated under both governments to the tune of almost $54 billion. Some would say $57 billion, but when we start talking about billions of dollars, whether it is $54 billion or $57 billion, it is a lot of money.

The people who did not see that money were the unemployed. There was no increase in benefits until the year before last. There was no increase in the number of weeks. In fact, we saw a decrease in the number of weeks over those years. Very few programs were introduced during that period as pilot programs.

One of the few introduced was in regard to maternity benefits, when we finally extended those to 50 weeks. It is a good program indeed, but far short of what it should be and what it is around this world in developed countries.

What we saw was the hoarding of money, taken by the Liberal and Conservative governments and put into general revenue, and then spent. The whole idea of collecting that money was to wait for the time it was needed, which is now. Of course, now that it is needed, the cupboard is bare and we cannot do things such as make sure that there are more people qualifying for employment insurance at this moment in time when they are in desperate need of it.

Those are the forgotten ones in the unemployment rate because they do not come up as a statistic. However, as my hon. colleague said earlier, if one goes to the social assistance offices in the major cities and small towns throughout this country, they can tell you the statistics, because when people fails to qualify for employment insurance benefits, they end up on social assistance somewhere in this country.

According to all experts, when one ends up in that system, it is the hardest place to remove oneself from. Why would we not have developed a system? Indeed, we have a system. Why not apply the system to ensure that those folks do not end up in that trap from which they may never return? It seems to me that since we collected their money to make sure they were being protected, the least we should have done for them was to protect them. However, that seems not to have been the case over the last number of years.

Let me draw some attention to a few things that I do not think I have heard here today, and perhaps not even earlier in some of the debates on employment insurance.

There is another group of workers who do not receive the same type of protection as the others. They are called “new entrants” under the regulations. A new entrant is a worker who went to work, albeit maybe a young person, or it may not be a person who is so young, because it may have been someone who entered the workforce for the first time after a long period of doing something else, whatever that happened to be in that person's life. They have to serve almost twice the number of hours as anyone else in the same region—not across the country—to collect employment insurance.

In my case, my wife and I have three lovely children who are young adults today. We have twins. Just imagine if one twin had been working for the last five years and the other twin had not, and they both worked at the same place but one was a new entrant and one was not. If both were to get laid off on the same day, one would get employment insurance and one would not.

One wonders why that sort of system exists today. We cannot imagine doing that in other forms of discrimination against folks, whether it be gender specific, whether it be age specific, yet we do it to those who faithfully paid their premium, but because they are new entrants we disqualify them. That is patently unfair.

When we look at stimulus in the economy, we talk about “shovel ready”. Shovel ready takes a bit of time. Don Drummond, a renowned economist in this country, says, pure and simple, that if we waive the two-week waiting period and pay immediately, that is one of the fastest ways to stimulate this economy.

It seems to me we ought to have done that. It seems to me that is a way to get money into people's pockets who paid for the insurance in the first place and who ultimately say it is their money and deserves to come back to them in a time of need. We ought to carry on with that.

It seems to me that the opportunity was here and was lost in the budget. Now the opportunity has come back to this place, where all of us can say we can correct it. We can take this opportunity to make sure that those who are suffering get the protection they are entitled to, make sure they indeed get the rights and benefits they are entitled to and paid for.

That is all they are asking. They are not asking for anything extra. They are simply saying, “I paid for this. It is my insurance plan. I paid the premium, and now I am laid off. All I am asking from government is, just simply give me my money back. That seems fair, at least until I get back on my feet and get back to work.”

As I said at the beginning, that is really what those who are unemployed want to do. Quite often I have heard the comments from across the way and I read the article that suggested the government does not want to be too lucrative with the system because people will stay on it for a long period of time.

The only reason they are on that system is because they had a job. They may have had many jobs, because lots of hours are needed to actually get on the system in the first place. People have to be working. These are not folks who were not working; they were. Clearly they want to get back to that place, to make sure they are working again. That is what they really need.

Let me talk a little bit about the wait times to get a claim approved. The previous Liberal government introduced, and this government has continued, this whole sense of computerizing the system and making it better. The reverse has happened. It is not just a question of more people applying. It is taking longer to apply for a claim, going back a number of years to when going to a computer was introduced.

What we have seen across this country, and I know in my riding and from my personal experience of being an unemployment insurance representative for many years, is that they have depopulated the offices of HRSDC. What has ultimately happened is that the service that folks really need today is not available to them because there are not enough people. The minister, by her own admission today, is saying her department is going out to bring back the folks who retired.

From my own experience in working with those folks in those offices in the Niagara region, the majority of them retired early because of the workload they had in the first place. So just to get them back to where they were has them overloaded, never mind the number of people who have gone on employment insurance in the last little while or who are applying currently. They do not have anywhere near enough people, even if they brought everyone back who had retired. They will not have enough people in the office.

What they have done is basically put people in front a kiosk and said to them, “Do it yourself with a computer”. If the claimant does not have a computer, the patent answer from the ministry as direction to the front-line workers is to say, “Go to your library, because it is free; you can do it there online”. That is how it works.

I would urge all hon. members' to think long and to look into their hearts, because as the hon. member said, everyone has unemployed people in their ridings. I would urge members to look long and hard at this bill, and hopefully they can support it.

[Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act, February 25th, 2009]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-325, An Act to change the name of the electoral district of Welland.

Mr. Speaker, quite often people will ask what is in a name, and to my constituents, it is everything. At one point in time not that long ago the riding of Welland was known as the riding of Niagara Centre. The component in the Welland riding is actually the city of Welland, but the riding composes the city of Port Colborne, the city of Thorold, parts of the city of St. Catharines and indeed the township of Wainfleet. People of those communities have no real affinity with the city of Welland, so it really is a misnomer to name the riding “Welland“ in the sense of what it really encompasses.

My constituents are saying that Niagara Centre is where they live and Niagara Centre is what they identify with. I would hope to obtain unanimous consent in the House to change the name back to what it was before, Niagara Centre, a name which identifies those people and that constituency.

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