Maria Minna

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

And self-righteous, I am sorry, but the facts are these. The NDP had a deal with the Liberals and for the first time in 30 years that party had some real power. The NDP members decided to throw it away because they decided they wanted an election. Why?

On the table were programs that were already in place: child care, Kelowna, and the environment. Those members chose. They wanted an election. Why they did that, I do not know, because they knew that if the Liberals lost the vote the Conservatives would come in. If NDP members believed that the Conservative Party would keep all those programs, they were fooling themselves.

Now, today, those members want another election. The NDP wants elections all the time. If there were an election, I do not think the NDP would form the government. If the NDP does not form the government, that means it is the Liberals or the Conservatives. If the Conservatives come back, all this stuff is off the table again. What does the NDP really want to accomplish with another election, except to continue the existing--

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member can be very smug all she wants. The facts--

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

No, that is not true. The program was cancelled. The money is going down and no new money has been put in.

The hon. member can say it is a diatribe, but at the end of the day the Conservative government has done more destructive things than I have seen in a long time. Quite frankly, I do not think the Conservatives can brag too much.

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

First, Mr. Speaker, I find it extremely disturbing that the gentleman opposite considers women's issues a diatribe. That tells me a great deal about what his party thinks about women.

He bragged that his party did the residential schools settlement. It was all done already by us. All the Conservatives did was write the cheque. Had our government not fallen, it would have been done nonetheless.

The Conservatives eliminated the child care program. How can they talk about having solved child care?

Yes, they are funding some shelters for women on reserves. There are never enough shelters. No question about it, that is great, but they have shut down the voices of women. Women cannot speak to fight. Providing shelters is important, but we also need to change the culture of violence in this country. For that kind of stuff, the Conservatives will not allow any advocacy, so it does not really work at all.

The Conservatives say that we did not solve child care. There was $5 billion. It was solved. They cancelled it. Why does the hon. member not tell us why they felt the need to destroy something that was working in this country and was helping families and women?

Again, the Conservatives are not doing anything on housing. There was a housing program, which--

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me today to speak to this motion. In two days we will be celebrating International Women's Day, but there is nothing to celebrate when it comes to the actions of the government with respect to women.

There is a very disturbing pattern with the Conservative government when it comes to intimidating and shutting down those who believe anything that is contrary to its own right-wing ideology, whether it be cutting funding, changing regulations, libel chill, bullying, and others that come to mind.

The government has failed Canadian women in several ways. Just to name a few, they are: child care, access to government services, failure to sign the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people, cutting off funding for research and advocacy, tax policies, affordable housing and pay equity. This is a pattern pushing women down, setting them back a considerable amount of time.

The theme for International Women's Day is “Strong women, Strong world”. The government is not helping women become stronger in this country. It is not removing the barriers that exist for women entering the workforce or to save money.

The government is doing nothing to help women become strong in this country. Let us look at some of the things that have happened in the last little while. Early education and child care is a major example. The first thing the government did was cut $5 billion from a national child care program which had been agreed upon by all provinces in this country.

The government cancelled those agreements outright. The moneys that were flowing were also eliminated which meant it started to dismantle some of the existing infrastructure that was being paid for by the initial $1 billion investment made by the Liberals.

The government promised, after having done all of that destruction, to deliver 125,000 child care spaces, but it never did. Nothing ever materialized. This disproportionately affects women as we all know, especially single mothers with restricted incomes.

Child care in my riding of Beaches—East York is backed up. I hear constituents every day. A new child care and youth centre opened last fall called Enderby. Within days there were waiting lists. One of my constituents, a mother, had lost her job because she was not able to secure full time child care for her child.

Then we say: “but we want people to work, we want people to be self-sufficient economically, and we want to help women's economic security”. How? How are we helping this woman and her child?

There is a child care crisis in our country and the government talks and promises, and talks and promises, but nothing ever materializes.

That is quite destructive and I do not think I have to go too far because I have seen the people in my riding who are desperately looking for child care and cannot find it. It costs them a tremendous amount of money, $1,300 or more per month, for a child care space if they do not have subsidy.

Let us look at another area, such as access to government services. Here again, the government says it wants to serve women, but it shut down 12 out of 16 regional Status of Women Canada offices across this country.

I met with rural women not too long ago who told me how they are very desperately isolated in their communities. They have no access to government services. If there is domestic violence in the home against a woman, there are next to no shelters to go to.

They pointed out that poverty is not just in the big cities, it exists in rural Canada. Many farm women, as well as their husbands, have to work off the farm in order to make ends meet. There is no training and services, and yet, what does the government do? It shuts down regional offices.

If people live in Newfoundland, they have to go to Moncton to access an office. Do members know how far that is? Of course, the assumption is that everyone has Internet, which is not true.

Again, the government has isolated and trapped these women, especially the poorest, and especially those who may be facing violence and difficulties in their lives. They need access to these services and they have been cut off.

The government keeps talking about caring about women's equality and women's conditions and yet it has cut off services, to, I presume, save some money because I do not see any other reason for this. The government has left only four offices for the entire country. This is a large country and it is far to travel and women in rural Canada have no way of accessing these offices.

Women talked to me when they heard about the offices closing. They were stunned at the government's sheer vendetta against the Status of Women Canada. This is how they saw it. It now seems to be the voice of REAL Women that is setting the policy. I have seen that from the standing committee a number of times. It probably told us that it had met with the minister. In fact, the Minister of Finance only consulted with two organizations, one of which was REAL Women prior to the budget process.

Let us look at what happened just recently. Canada failed to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

My colleague from Winnipeg South Centre has been very vocal on this. The Conservative government's vote against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples last year was a stain on our international reputation. It marked the first time Canada voted against a human rights document. It has sent a message to aboriginal women in Canada that the Conservative government will pick and chose when it will apply and respect human rights in this country.

For women, the declaration contained gender equality and non-discrimination clauses. The government's refusal to support the declaration shows a blatant disregard for the struggles of aboriginal women in Canada to achieve equality. Canada's aboriginal women deserve better.

It is not too late for the Conservative government to reverse its ideological opposition to the United Nations declaration and to send a message to aboriginal women that their rights are human rights.

I will give a very quick example with respect to aboriginal women in terms of other areas where the government has acted.

The court challenges program, which I will come to again later, was cancelled by the government. One specific example is the McIvor case. This is an aboriginal woman who, with the support and the assistance of the charter challenge fund, was able to fight for her rights that were being discriminated against under the Indian Act. She was able to go to the Supreme Court of British Columbia and win. Now that the government is appealing that decision to the Supreme Court of Canada and there is no charter challenge program, this woman cannot fight for herself anymore because she no longer has the ability to fight. Again, this is a wonderful picture: the great big government with all of its resources and this single aboriginal woman who it is afraid to give a penny to just in case she might be able to fight for her own rights in this country.

The charter challenge program was set up so that those people who were not wealthy could defend themselves and fight for their rights just as much as those who have money so that there would be equal opportunity of rights in this country for everybody, but it seems that it is selective.

The next thing the government did was cut off funding for research and advocacy. This was one of the very first acts of the government. For decades, groups, NGOs, volunteer groups and women's organizations have been funded to conduct valuable research and advocacy work, work that gave women rights. The rape shield law was changed because of work by these organizations. Our right to vote happened because women were courageous and fought. Our rights in the Constitution would not have happened had there not been women who organized and fought to ensure that women's equality were entrenched in the Constitution.

When it comes to violence against women, yes, there are programs that assist women who may need assistance but there is not enough money, nowhere enough shelters and, as I mentioned earlier, the problems for rural women.

The women who are lucky enough to get a program to help their specific situation may help but there is no money available to change the conditions, the policies, the environment, the culture and the violence these women live with. That is no longer possible because we cannot get money for research and cannot advocate research money.

The Standing Committee on the Status of Women has had many hearings recently. We have been studying the human trafficking of women and children, economic security of women and violence against women. Do members know who comes before us? It is women's organizations that have done research and are advocating and informing the standing committee on these issues so we can make sensible recommendations to the House. In future, these organizations will no longer be there because they have already started to shut their doors.

The irony in all this is that the government will fund $500,000 worth of lobby money to the Conference of Defence Associations lobby group, a group that will lobby the government for contracts for arms and military equipment but it will not fund women's advocacy organizations that fight for women's rights. How sad is that?

The government has clearly not been doing any gender based analysis on its budgets because most, if not all, of its social provisions in the last several budgets have been done through the tax policy, which are very detrimental when it comes to women because women hardly benefit from them.

If the government were to do a gender budgeting analysis, it would ignore the results. I suspect that it did not do a real one at all.

When Kathleen Lahey, a professor at Queen's University, came to our standing committee of the House of Commons, she noted that the $1,200 that was supposed to be for the universal child care program, which is money given to everyone, misses the women and families who need it the most.

First, the $1,200 is taxed back in the hands of the person who receives it. A single income family is likely to keep most of it but if both husband and wife are working they get much less. A single mother gets much less so they are lucky to get half of it and still there are no spaces for child care and no infrastructure. The income itself does not really help anyone financially to do anything. As an income support, it is too low and, as a child care measure, it is laughable, quite frankly. It seems to me that this program was designed specifically to damage or hurt.

To be more specific, let us look at a low income single mother for instance. If her children are under six, then she gets maybe $50 of the $100 a month that is supposed to go to her for child care. First, there are no spaces, and second, child care spaces cost upwards of 20 times that amount. It is not a child care program no matter how many times the Conservative government refers to it as universal child care. There is nothing universal about it because there is no access. It is income support and it is taxed back. The people who suffer the most from this are women.

Our side of the House, the Liberal Party, did have and still has a program called a child benefit program. It was described as the most significant social policy in decades when it was introduced but the current government had to play around with that too. It eliminated the young child supplement. Not only do low income women not have child care, because the $1,200 does not work, but they also lost the young child supplement. Since the Conservatives have been in power they have done nothing to increase the child benefit program. So much for their interest in eradicating child poverty, assisting families with children and assisting women who generally suffer the most in these areas.

Continuing with the tax policy way of doing things, let us look at pension splitting. Pension splitting has been touted as the biggest thing but it only benefits about 12% of seniors and only those seniors who have very large pensions, who tend to be men and not women. If both husband and wife have worked throughout life and saved probably the same amount of money, they do not benefit very much because as one gets lower on the income scale one saves very little. If someone is single, there is nobody to split with anyway. The largest group of poor people in our country as seniors are women who are not able to split with anyone. Of the seniors in this country, 1.7 million are not helped by this at all. This, again, is a scheme that helps wealthy Canadian seniors who, I guess, are happy and have no problems. However, low to middle income seniors in general are not helped and women in particular are completely left out in the cold.

Again, this is another tax measure that does not work and certainly not for women.

We have said that the government cannot deliver. Five thousand dollars is the next one in the most previous budget. Now we have a $5,000 tax-free savings account, which supposedly will help seniors to save money. First, they need to have $5,000 to save and a lot of seniors do not have $5,000. A lot of poor mothers, single moms and women do not have that much money. This account will be a good top-up to the RRSP for the people who have it but it certainly does not help the average woman in this country who, by the way, earns about $38,000 a year according to the data that I have seen. While there are women who earn a lot more, that is the average income and many other women are below that.

The government does not understand that it cannot deliver social programs through the tax system because it does not work. Maybe it is doing that purposely, and that has been my conclusion. It has spent all this time emptying the cupboard and now the cupboard is bare, and it has left women behind in the process. It has spent billions of dollars.

The GST cut will help people who have lots of money but for the average income family chances are they will not save a lot of money, but they will have lost a lot in investment that could have happened, some of which I have already mentioned.

Lisa Philipps of Osgoode Hall Law School, who appeared before a Senate committee that is studying the gender budgets, said:

...one must always consider I think is the impact on men and women as individuals. In other words, we need to get beyond the household-level analysis, which is the standard analysis that's done by tax policy-makers. There's an assumption that if you deliver a tax cut to a household, all members of the household will benefit equally. I would disagree with that. I think giving a tax cut to the breadwinner does not guarantee that women will get a share of it.

That is why we have asked that it not do just do a gender budgeting analysis, but then listen to the results because if the policy then does the exact opposite of what the results show, and the results obviously show that women are being left behind, then that is a real problem.

In 2004, 38% of women did not have a high enough income to even pay income tax. These women will not benefit from any Conservative tax credits at all. The importance of gender budgeting should not be understated because it is very important.

On the issue of affordable housing, the government has not put any money into housing at all. I just want to quote the Ontario minister for municipal affairs for Ontario who said:

Under [Minister of Human Resources and Social Development] watch, funding for affordable housing will steadily go down, starting this fiscal year, because he has refused to even consider a new program.

On affordable housing, who are affected the most? Women, low income families, middle income families and women are affected the most. Our 30-50 plan is one that works.

As I have to wrap up, I note that I would have liked to talk about pay equity. One of my colleagues may do that for me today or perhaps I can do it through questions.

[Business of Supply, March 6th, 2008]

moved:

That, in the opinion of the House:

(a) women's equality is a matter of human rights and, since the Court Challenges Program was a useful tool in achieving that end, it should be reinstated;

(b) to provide a legitimate and necessary voice to the needs of women, research and advocacy should be restored to the government's Women's Program;

(c) an adequate supply of high quality childcare spaces is essential to ensuring women’s participation in the workforce and the government should take the necessary steps immediately to create 125,000 spaces as it promised;

(d) since access to government services is essential in rural areas and the government’s closure of 12 of 16 regional offices of Status of Women Canada further isolates rural women, the government should take immediate steps to improve access for our most isolated Canadians;

(e) there is a growing need in Canada for a national housing strategy designed to assist the most vulnerable in our society and to treat them with the respect they deserve; and

that, therefore, the House condemn the irresponsible and self-serving actions on November 28, 2005, by the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois which led to the installation of a government that is hostile to the rights and needs of vulnerable Canadians.

[International Mother Language Day, March 3rd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, on Sunday, February 24, I joined members of my community to raise funds for a monument in Toronto commemorating International Mother Language Day. UNESCO declared February 21 of each year International Mother Language Day. It is meant to represent the solidarity among languages and multiculturalism.

The monument will be a symbol of the 325 major languages, through which more than six billion people engage in dialogue, inspiring tolerance and understanding while helping to preserve culture, heritage and diversity. Toronto, a city which is one of the most multicultural in the world, will now join only Tokyo and Sydney in commemorating both the diversity and solidarity that language creates with an International Mother Language Day monument.

As the chair of the Canada-Bangladesh Parliamentary Friendship Group, I am proud to represent this initiative which was inspired by the language movement day that took place on February 21, 1952 in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. This initiative is embraced fully by the Bangladesh community in my riding of Beaches—East York. The monument has been designed by a local Bangladeshi Canadian architect, Nazmul Jaigirdar.

I applaud the International Mother Language Day monument committee for this initiative and symbol of diversity and togetherness.

[Petitions, February 27th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to present a petition, with approximately 1,000 signatures, on behalf of the Canadian law students.

The students are calling upon the Government of Canada to reinstate the court challenges program with at least the funding that it enjoyed prior to September 2006; to reinstate the Law Commission of Canada with at least the funding that it enjoyed prior to September 2006; to reinstate funding to the Status of Women Canada with at least that funding that it enjoyed prior to September 2006 with a return to its original mandate, including funding for advocacy, lobbying and general research for women's rights, and to return the word “equality” to the goals of the agency.

I commend the Canadian law students for their work. I think they are the future and they have shown a tremendous amount of leadership.

[Afghanistan, February 25th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, for me personally it is good to hear that many women are being helped in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, as the hon. member knows from what I have said, there are still far too many who are truly out of reach and we are not reaching them.

The member has made an artificial separation in terms of diplomatic reconstruction and training and that the military then would not be needed. The hon. member knows full well that when we do reconstruction in a country that is as unstable as Afghanistan is we need to secure the areas where new construction is taking place. Of course, as has happened in other countries, if the individuals who are working are attacked, then the military is there to maintain peace. We want the military to be there to help with reconstruction and to allow for the governance structure to take root.

Quite frankly, none of this is going to happen unless we start right now and there is a Canadian envoy who will talk about reconciliation. There are different factions in every country as there are in Afghanistan. We must start bringing those factions together and have reconciliation. In many other countries reconciliation discussions have taken a couple of years. We must start immediately.

It will take a number of years, but if we want to eventually leave behind a stable self-governing country with a stable governance, we need to start that process now. Perhaps this is why the government in its motion is not going with a Canadian diplomat. I believe that is wrong. I hope that the motion is amended because I believe very strongly that without a Canadian diplomat we will not succeed. Military action in itself is not the answer.

[Afghanistan, February 25th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, Afghanistan, as we all know, is an issue that has divided Canadians mostly because of the government's lack of transparency and accountability about the mission.

In 2006, the six hour debate on whether or not to extend the mission was simply not enough time and not enough information was given by the government. It was actually a bit of a joke, I thought, at the time since the Prime Minister said that he would extend the mission regardless of what the House said.

It was for that reason that I voted against it, although I am happy to see today that the government has changed its tune and is willing to have an open debate about Canada's future role in Afghanistan. It is not a secret any more that the future of Canada's role in Afghanistan has to change. I think most Canadians want that.

The Prime Minister was told by the Leader of the Opposition to inform NATO at least a year ago that Canada would rotate out of the combat mission, that is, the counter-insurgency part, by 2009.

The Prime Minister, who obviously disagreed with that, continued to persist on his position, knowing full well that he did not have the support of the House. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs would say abroad that they would like to leave in 2009 and were looking for replacements, but that they would rather stay and finish the job, as the Prime Minister has said a number of times, which to me meant that they were prepared to stay indefinitely.

There were no replacements. Of course, we should not be surprised that they could not find any replacements. Why should any other country go against the popular vote of its own population when it knows in fact that Canada was prepared to stay? Why would it offer anything?

In essence, we have wasted a year by not letting NATO do its job. It is not Canada's role to look for replacements. That is a NATO responsibility and if the Prime Minister had in fact informed NATO with proper time, it may have happened long before now.

Finally, after pushing and shoving by the official opposition leader for some time, the Prime Minister has adopted the Liberal motion, except for some areas which I am still not too sure of and need to evaluate, as I believe they still need some changes.

Clearly, Canada must change the mission. There is no question about that. That has been said for some time now.

The mission should move out of a combat role, that is, the counter-insurgency part, and let other NATO countries move into that role. The Canadian mission then will focus on reconstruction and diplomacy.

The reconstruction part consists of things such as training the troops on the ground, which would be helpful, but there are also areas of reconstruction which are absolutely important and necessary. Canada has a tremendous amount of experience in the area of reconstruction and development, and can provide extreme support.

I will provide one example. We are trying to change the growing of poppies to growing produce instead, vegetables and other crops. Afghanistan used to have a very good system of aquifers, underground pipes, to irrigate their land. These canals were destroyed when the Russians were in Afghanistan.

These canals were used by the Afghani people in fact to attack at different times, so they were destroyed. We need to rebuild the irrigation system, not to mention the larger water supply problem in Afghanistan. This is just one example of reconstruction that is needed in the country very desperately.

We also need a Canadian envoy. We have had envoys before in dealing with countries like Burundi, Sierra Leone and other places. This is very much needed in order to start discussing and looking at a national reconciliation process. There is not going to be a military solution in Afghanistan alone. That is just not possible.

It was not possible in many other countries and I could list a number of them where that happened. A national reconciliation has to take place so that all other parties in Afghanistan are part of the solution. A political and diplomatic solution has to be found.

In addition, I would like the government to set up a House committee to allow for transparency and accountability, and to report back to the House. We had this in fact under the previous government, when Canadian troops were in Kosovo, and it worked very well. Accountability is very important.

Leaving Kandahar by 2009 is a must and NATO needs to be informed now. Canada needs to get into the reconstruction, development and diplomacy mode.

There is a general consensus that we must not abandon the people of Afghanistan for strategic and humanitarian reasons. We cannot allow Afghanistan to be another failed state.

The job our soldiers have done is tremendous and second to none. I saw them when they worked in Kosovo and in Haiti. Indeed they are the best, but they also deserve a break. They also deserve to do some of the other excellent things they do.

Let me focus on the humanitarian aspect of why we need to be there. As a former minister for international cooperation, I saw firsthand the conditions in which Afghan women lived under the Taliban rule, conditions that no living creature should ever be forced to endure. Women and girls experienced gender apartheid in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule and lost all basic human rights. Afghan society as a whole has much to gain by women re-entering into the dialogue with the various sectors of Afghan society. They must be involved in the solution from the bottom up. They must be involved in civil society, governance, political, cultural and social decisions.

Outside Kabul there is a perception that the minister of women's affairs is not even a legal entity. In some regions of the country Human Rights Watch reports that women continue to be assaulted or abused for not adhering to edicts that strictly control women's behaviour, dress, expression and movement.

Under the old regime, women were not permitted to see doctors as the doctors were males. There were not many women doctors as women were not allowed to be trained as doctors or to study. Women were denied health care for any reason. Women were also malnourished and there were frequent deaths because food would first be supplied to the men in the armed forces, then to the boys and then to the girls and women. Their bones were weak and feeble and they would not develop properly. Women were not permitted to get an education. That was only allowed for men. The life expectancy of a woman in Afghanistan was 42 years. Imagine.

Only 12.6% of women age 15 and up were literate, compared with 43.1% of males. The youth literacy rate for females age 15 to 25 was 18.4% versus 50.8% for males of the same age.

Child malnutrition prevalence, weight for age, was 39% in 2004.

These statistics indicate that much more is needed in terms of development and reconstruction. Also, NATO must not fail in providing more troops and appropriate forces so that development can in fact take place. All of these things cannot take place if there is not some secure and more aggressive attention to reconstruction and development. It is very important.

Contrary to what the government wants us to believe, international intervention in Afghanistan did not present women with an immediate change in status, rights and opportunity. The deteriorating security environment has actually made it harder for women to enjoy the rights promised to them by the international community. For instance, 85% of Afghan women in rural areas have seen little or no benefit from the strategies or interventions by the international community.

Again, women continue to remain oppressed, particularly in education and health care. Maternal mortality still sits at 1,600 per 100,000 births and the child mortality rate is the highest in the world.

Violence against women is widely believed to have reached epidemic proportions and consists of marital rape, sexual assault and other forms of violence in the household, the physical and psychological violence associated with child and forced marriages, neglect through malnutrition and inadequate health care. Forced and childhood marriages constitute 60% to 80% of all marriages.

One area in which Afghanistan seems to have surpassed Canada is that women are guaranteed a particular proportion of the seats in the lower and upper houses of the national assembly. However, it is widely believed that these women are marginalized even within the assembly and that their level of influence is highly questionable, as is reflected with only one woman having been appointed to cabinet. The women's affairs program is considered to be a dumping ground for women's issues.

Development without women is no development at all. I saw it in many other countries while I was minister, that when women are not part of the development process, development is almost non-existent. It does not happen. Development, reconstruction and reconciliation are extremely important if we are going to see a stable country, a successful state and some success in Afghanistan.