Maria Minna

[Petitions, February 4th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, in the third petition the petitioners are asking Parliament to protect children by taking all necessary steps to ensure that all materials which promote or glorify pedophilia or sado-masochistic activities involving children are outlawed.

[Petitions, February 4th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have three petitions, two of which are on stem cells.

The first petition asks Parliament to proceed using all types of stem cells, including embryonic stem cells, because it is impossible to predict which will provide the most medical benefits.

In the second petition the petitioners call upon Parliament to focus its legislative support on adult stem cell research to find the cures and therapies necessary to treat the illnesses and diseases of suffering Canadians.

[Prebudget Consultations, December 10th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I believe that the budget should reflect the Speech from the Throne. I am reminded of another budget today and that is the one in 1995 in which we had some major cuts. I believe that a good many of those cuts affected the social programs in this country. Canadians paid dearly for the fact that we had deficits which we now no longer have.

Since then, we have invested in programs in research and we have also had some major tax cuts. For instance, corporate taxation in this country by 2005 will actually be lower than that of the United States. Most people do not know that. Budget 2000 cut $100 billion of individual taxes.

We have consistently continued to pay down the debt. We had a plan where we said we would spend fifty-fifty, 50% on debt reduction and tax cuts and the other 50% on program spending and social spending. Quite frankly, I do not believe that we have actually maintained that fifty-fifty split.

It is time to reinvest in Canadians and reinvest in people. It goes without saying that one of the areas is the health care system.

We have just had what is probably the most important report since the Canada Health Act was introduced. The final report of the Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada should not be used as a discussion paper for high level chats among Canada's ministers of health. That report is a blueprint, an action plan. The sooner we get on with the job of implementing it, the better it will be for the health of all our citizens.

I firmly believe that we must implement all the Romanow report recommendations in order to leverage real change in the health care system. We must not cherry-pick bits and pieces. Social policy, if implemented piecemeal, is like a four-legged stool; if two legs are removed, it will fall apart and it will not stand up.

The report is very holistic and addresses some very fundamental changes that need to be implemented immediately.

Canadians want and need a truly national, more accountable and comprehensive health care system, a reinvigorated system that truly reflects the Canadian values that are at the heart of our system.

I support the creation of a national health council to help foster collaboration and cooperation among the provinces, territories and the federal government.

Furthermore, I support and push for the implementation of a new dedicated cash-only Canada health transfer to be enshrined in the Canada Health Act. The CHST does not work. There is absolutely no accountability in it and it is hard to trace where the funds go. It is important that we have the health transfer fund and I support that wholeheartedly.

I also fully agree that diagnostic services should be explicitly included under the definition of insured health services in a new Canada Health Act. I also support the recommended introduction of pharmacare and home care, along with a greater emphasis on prevention and wellness.

I was very disturbed to hear that most of the provinces have rejected out of hand accountability and some other recommendations of the Romanow report. Their position is unacceptable and is most definitely not in the best interests of the citizens of their respective provinces.

Only one province, Saskatchewan, had the maturity not to be self-serving. Saskatchewan believes that Canadians are looking for their governments to provide comparable services to Canadians wherever they live. For these reasons, Saskatchewan does not agree with a call for unconditional funding. To that I say, right on.

I call on all the provinces and territories and the Government of Canada to put Canadians first in this process. I ask them to build a first class health care system for the future and to ensure the modernization of the Canada Health Act by expanding coverage and renewing its principles. I call on them to take immediate steps to protect Canada's health care system from possible challenges under international law and trade agreements.

Commissioner Romanow said that medicare is sustainable if we are prepared to act decisively. He compared the cost of our system to that of other countries and found that spending in Canada is on par with most countries in the western world.

Medicare in this country, as far as I am concerned, is also an economic program. It definitely is an advantage for investment in the country, not to mention the benefits to our people. I hope we will move swiftly on that.

There is another area in which I think it is important that we invest. It should be noted that I am not talking about spending but investing, because if we do not invest in Canadians, we will not be able to reap the kind of economic benefits that we wish.

Another area in which we must invest, and we have talked about this many times before in the House, is early learning and care. It is high time that we acknowledged the fact that there are thousands of children in Canada who are not getting the best start possible in their lives. There are parents who cannot go to work because they do not have child care, but every child, whether the parents are working are not, should have access to early learning programs, and child care is early learning. A quality, nationally regulated child care program is essential. We are behind most western countries at this point with respect to this issue. I think it is time for us to wake up and address this.

Another area is the issue of child benefits and income support for families. We started this some years ago and I was very involved. We have increased the income support for families but we must increase it even more. We must ensure that children are looked after. As has been said before, children are not poor by themselves. They are part of families that are poor.

During the finance committee's hearings across Canada, the recommendation by most organizations was that we should be looking at reaching a threshold of $4,200 per child very soon. I support that wholeheartedly.

We must remember that the children of today are the future of tomorrow, and addressing child care, child benefits and income support also addresses the issue of health and health costs in the future.

The other area I would like to talk about is housing. Affordable housing is in a major crisis. We have not built affordable rental housing units for a very long time. We just recently signed agreements with the provinces to build new affordable housing but that is only a start. I believe we must have a long term, sustainable program for affordable housing. In Toronto the waiting list for seniors is 10 years. It is impossible for families and seniors to have proper housing, so to the health of children and to the health of families goes substandard housing. Affordable housing is extremely important. I cannot even imagine my childhood without having had a proper, secure place to live with my family.

The other area that we must address, as I follow along on the people in whom we must invest and who I think have paid a major price for reaching our deficit situation, are our seniors.

The guaranteed income supplement is not meeting its target or it is not helping all seniors. We have about 647,000 unattached seniors who are living below the poverty line. In fact the poverty rate for unattached seniors has gone up in the last couple of years to 48.7%. Most of these seniors are women. It is important that the GIS, guaranteed income supplement, be increased to meet the needs of unattached seniors who live below the poverty line.

In Toronto, probably for the first time in a long time, we have seniors who are living in shelters because the guaranteed income supplement gives a person the maximum of $11,800 a year. A one bedroom apartment in Toronto costs about $800 or more per month. By the time a person has paid the rent I am not sure there is much left for food or for medicine. We now have seniors who are having to choose whether they eat and whether they buy certain medicines or not. Where do they end up when they become ill? They end up in the hospital.

Again, this goes to health care, to prevention and to wellness, and, in the long term, it saves a great deal more. I encourage the government to look at increasing the GIS. This was in the finance committee's report to the government and I hope it will be addressed.

We must also ensure that we deal with cities in Canada. Cities have to be funded properly. They need long term, sustainable financing to address the social programs that they have been asked to address. A great many things have been devolved to the cities but the property tax base cannot deal with all the problems. In the meantime, we must start with infrastructure, public transportation and housing to be able to work with them to have a sustainable program to address the most urgent needs for the cities.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Wait a minute. The Alliance is complaining now. The reality is that I am a member of Parliament so why can I not respond and discuss this issue? This is a democracy. We have a lot of MPs in the House who have a right to speak on the issue. It does not have to be just the minister who does it every day in question period and at other times in the House and elsewhere across the country. This is a debate that was put forward, and appropriately so, today. It is one that I support. I want to see Kyoto ratified. I think it is the right thing to do. I am quite happy to see that the Alliance is supporting it and that the member from the Bloc is also supportive of the ratification of Kyoto, if I am not mistaken.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the minister has spoken on this issue many times. We have been consulting with Canadians for five years. With respect, this is a democracy.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, with respect, the hon. member should know that a thousand scientists across the world have signed on to the science behind climate change. The Government of Canada has invested in innovation and technology. Technology Partnerships Canada is one example of that.

Quite frankly, I think the hon. member likes to talk about gloom and doom rather than deal with some of the facts that are all around us. For instance, 50% of emissions come from large industrial emitters. I know that the oil industry in Alberta will be opening up some new energy plants using coal. Why can we not use, for instance, electricity that is in surplus in Manitoba and across the country? Instead of silos, why can we not use all our best resources?

With regard to ethanol, the United States has bought into ethanol and its farms will be producing a heck of a lot more corn than we will. That will reduce the emissions. I can use example after example. Our caucus and our government have been dealing with the issue of ethanol for some time. We have taken some initiatives on that and I think we should be much more aggressive with that as well.

We should be looking at solutions that will make our environment much more healthy for our future generations who will inherit the earth rather than talking about gloom and doom. We should do what we can instead of sticking our head in the sand and saying that it cannot be done. With respect, it can be done.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Their motion today says they support it.

In recent months there has been a wide range of estimates on the economic impacts of Canadian implementation of the Kyoto protocol. Even in the House we have heard repeated some of the large scale claims from different interest groups on the impact of taking action on climate change. I want to comment on the economics of action and of inaction. I also want to take a step back and comment on all these estimates that are being tossed around.

Probably the single most important point to make is that this work of preparing estimates has been a cooperative effort between the federal government and the provinces for years now. The federal government has worked closely with the provinces on this because the goal is an approach that enables all of Canada to be part of meeting our Kyoto target.

To achieve this goal, a working group of economics and modelling experts from both the federal government and the provinces have worked with specialized economic models operated by the private sector to undertake a comprehensive forecast for Canada. All of this work has been and is being done outside of government by two organizations in the private sector, Informetrica and the Canadian Energy Research Institute. But did they work on their own to do all of this? No, they also worked with experts in those industries that are most concerned about the potential impacts of climate change, such as the oil industry, the chemical producers, manufacturers and so on, to fine tune the model. Every time the policy options have become clearer, the modelling has been updated to reflect the most likely situation.

This is important because all too often some people have been willing to use old information to create scare stories about the potential impacts of Kyoto on Canadian jobs and Canada's economy. For example, the ability that Canada negotiated in 2001 to get credit for the impact of our well managed forests and farmlands on greenhouse gas emissions has an important impact on the modelling results. Old estimates that do not take that into account simply are not as accurate as the new estimates based upon the real world of Kyoto.

Where does all this economic modelling stand right now? What does it tell us? The modelling looks at the impacts on Canada, on individual provinces and territories and on sectors of our economy. In doing all of this, it uses the most current thinking on possible policies that governments could put in place, so it takes into account different ways of addressing greenhouse gas emissions.

The modellers were clear, as economists always have been, that this modelling has its limits. It normally can offer only partial assessments of costs and benefits. It cannot hope to capture the full range of choices and decisions in a complex economy such as Canada's, but here is what they found in general. They compared the general economic impact of Kyoto to what would happen if there were no Kyoto protocol. They estimated that our total gross domestic product by 2010 would be a small amount less than it would have been otherwise, somewhere between four-tenths of 1% less to 1.6% less, depending upon what assumptions we use. This is a modest impact relative to the strong economic growth of 18% that economists expect over this eight year period.

Which is the more likely scenario? There is a pretty strong consensus that the impact probably will be to the low end of the range because the international price of carbon is expected to be around $10 per tonne. The impact on growth will be fairly minimal. We will have a lot of growth, just a modest amount less than we might have had otherwise.

What about jobs? The analysis shows that instead of the roughly 1.32 million new jobs that Canada would gain over the next eight years, we would gain between 1.08 million in a worst case scenario and 1.26 million in the more likely scenario. We must remember that this is not about actually losing jobs. It is about creating slightly fewer than we might have otherwise. This has to be put into perspective. For one thing, the economists only make a small allowance for new job creation in response to Kyoto-generated opportunities and innovation.

More than that, we have to remember how well the Canadian economy has been creating jobs. The Canadian economy generated 427,000 new jobs in the past nine months, so if the economists tell us we might not create 60,000 jobs over eight years, it pales in comparison to what we are creating just because of our economic strength.

We cannot stop with that kind of analysis of the costs. After all, actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions also typically reduce other atmospheric emissions. The federal-provincial working group of economists estimated the health benefits of clear air due to Kyoto actions at between $150 million and $250 million per year. These come from more smog-free days, fewer cases of respiratory diseases and asthma, and fewer hospital admissions and avoidable deaths. Those are the straight economic impacts. They say nothing about the value of improving the health of our communities, our kids, our seniors and everyone else. Even with that, the models did not try to estimate the impacts of related reductions across all pollutants. The models did not include non-environment related benefits, such as economic and safety benefits from reduced traffic congestion if we can make public transit more attractive.

All of these are the costs and benefits of action, but let us also be clear that inaction has very real costs too. Climate change is expected to lead to more droughts and severe weather events such as floods and intense storms. The scientists who study these issues say that we could see more episodes like the ones we have seen in recent years.

We may remember that droughts in 2001 cost the Canadian economy more than $5 billion. The 1998 ice storm cost Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick more than $6 billion. The floods in Manitoba and the Saguenay region of Quebec a few years back are other costly examples that we want to avoid through strong action on climate change. These floods will happen more often. For example, between 1900 and 1950 there were two peak flows of the Red River that surpassed the 2,000 cubic metre per second mark. In the next 50 years there were eleven, with the last flood exceeding all of them by a big margin.

Inaction would make it a lot less likely that we could spur innovation in Canada. Many firms in Canada and internationally are already making more efficient use of energy and resources and introducing new processes to cut their GHG emissions. With a national commitment to reach our Kyoto target, we could realistically expect to see more innovation and the creation of more export opportunities for these new technologies and processes. We have already seen this in the past because the history of environmental action shows an enormous capacity for innovation. Costs are typically lower than expected and results come sooner. We saw this on acid raid and on protecting our ozone layer, for example.

The best evidence tells us that while there will likely be some costs of action on Kyoto, they will probably be modest and almost certainly much more so than the claims that some interest groups suggest. Those costs will actually be more in terms of forgone activity, not losses compared to today. But there will be benefits: the benefits of better health, the benefits of innovation and economic benefits as well. All of this pales beside the benefits of taking action to address a challenge that future generations will be glad we did.

[Supply, October 24th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Parkdale--High Park.

I am quite pleased to see that the Alliance is supporting the Kyoto accord. That is what the motion says and I must admit my surprise at seeing the motion, which supports exactly what the government is talking about doing, that is, ratifying Kyoto after we set out an implementation plan. I look forward to joining my colleagues in the Alliance Party in December when they vote in favour of the Kyoto accord and ratification.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, first, on the issue of diagnostic equipment, it is not necessary to open up 20 clinics in the private sector because the money that was transferred from the Government of Canada should have gone to hospitals. I can tell everyone that the hospital in my riding, the Toronto East General Hospital, has been waiting for 10 years for an MRI. The people who go to the hospital cannot access an MRI because the government chose to give up that money to the private clinics. With all due respect, I do not accept that argument.

Second, I said quite clearly in my statement that while I commend the government for the 10 year commitment, I believe that we must start negotiating and looking at long term sustainable financial assistance for the municipalities. I believe we must start looking at municipalities and the kinds of services they provide to make sure they are properly financed.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 8th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, it is easy to talk about losing a leg and how this was an emergency but that is why we have an emergency department. Is it not wonderful that we have hospitals with emergency services?

I went through three difficult years with my mother, who passed away last year. I was in and out of the emergency department a great deal. She was treated well and we received service. Yes, there are problems, there is a shortage of funding and, yes, I will say that I noticed a great deal of stress on some of the staff, especially the nurses. The system does need reforms but it does not need privatization.

What the member is saying is that when people with money have an emergency they can go to a private clinic and be served. It was $775 but maybe next year it will be $1,000 or $2,000. It is for profit, after all. It is there to make money. Let us face it, it is not about health care, it is about profits. That is why we have a health care system.

He could have easily gone to the emergency room at the hospital where he eventually ended up because he had to have surgery. He would have been treated properly, just like anyone else who goes to emergency. It is quite evident that they prefer to have a private for profit, pay as you go system because those who have money would be able to go to the head of the line. If there are 10 people who have $1,000 each and another 10 who do not, guess who gets to go first to get this kind of treatment? It will not be the ones who do not have the $1,000.

The health care system in this country is a pure gem. If we were to talk to the American people, we would discover that they and other people around the world envy us. Health care is not totally broken. We must make some reforms and we must bring in some accountability measures but we must at all costs maintain a universal health care system in this country.