Mark Eyking

[Libya, June 14th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I am glad the member opposite is satisfied that I was re-elected, but I am sure a lot of other Conservatives are not. However, I am glad to be working with the member opposite again on the foreign affairs file, but we have to look at the future. What are we going to be doing in that country?

Right now we are concentrating on military action and that has to be dealt with. We have to get Gadhafi out of there, but we have to look at the future.

As was mentioned earlier in the House, are the funds there? Are we just going to rely on the multilateral groups to go forward with this, or are we going to put funds to help in the reconstruction? Companies in Canada will want to know if money will be available to make that happen as they go forward.

We need to look forward. I know the Conservatives go day by day, but we have to look month by month, and I hope the hon. member will recognize that.

[Libya, June 14th, 2011]

Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time this morning with the member for Toronto Centre.

First, I thank the hon. member for appointing me as the CIDA critic in the Liberal shadow cabinet. I also thank the people of Sydney—Victoria for once again placing their trust in me to represent them here in Ottawa.

Helping people around the world in need has always been a passion of mine even before I entered politics. Since entering politics, the last 11 years I have had a lot of input on the foreign affairs committee and I have travelled to many countries to see the benefits of the help by Canadians.

As the Liberal critic for CIDA, I am honoured to stand in this House today to talk about our country's role in Libya post-Gadhafi.

I will begin by commending the brave men and women in the Canadian armed forces for the amazing job they are doing in Libya and around the world on behalf of all Canadians.

What will we see in Libya after the Gadhafi regime is gone? We will see reports of injustice toward Libyan women, men and children. We will hear more reports of mistreatment under a regime that must be dealt with. Funds will be needed for infrastructure but, most important, Libya will be without a democratic and judicial system, a basic right that we all cherish in this country.

When the G8 met at the summit last month in Deauville, the Prime Minister said that he did not intend to contribute any more funding to new democracies in Egypt, Tunisia or any other country that is now facing rebellions, such as we have seen in Libya and Syria, even though he strongly supports the democratic movements in these regions.

Democracy will not flourish without funds and proper guidance. The absence of social and government cohesion will be a tremendous obstacle in any possible transition to democracy. In fact, a post-Gadhafi Libya must first embark on a process of basic state formation, particularly the construction of a national identity and public administration, and, of course, the return of law and order before this democracy can take root.

The government seems to be in need of a bit of a history lesson. Some historians say that World War II may not have happened in Europe if the allies had assisted Germany in the reconstruction and instilling proper institutions. Instead, the victors after World War I were mostly interested in obtaining more land. The allies learned from this mistake and after World War II they set forth with a major reconstruction effort in western Europe. This was known as the Marshall Plan which was enacted in 1947 as a way to help rebuild Europe. This was also set up to discourage Communism from entering the region.

Canada also played another big role in the development of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We see that many of the east bloc countries have instilled our democratic institutions and our Charter of Rights in their constitutions.

Another example in Europe is the role we have played in the former Yugoslavia. We now see that justice is still moving forward in the court system .

At present, Europe is a thriving democratic region and, over the last century, Canada played a big role in making that happen.

Another example is after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. Iraqis were faced with turmoil and civil war. This House and many Canadians may not know but, under the Paul Martin Liberal government, Canada pledged over $300 million over seven years for reconstruction. The largest share of Canada's contribution of $115 million was disbursed through the international reconstruction fund for Iraq and was managed by the World Bank and the United Nations.

Canada's support focused on the development of stable, self-governing and prosperous Iraq, with a representative and a democratic government respectful of human rights and promoting equality between women and men. The Canadian assistance in the areas of social and economic development also helped meet human needs, such as food, water and medical care.

Another more recent example of the work we are doing is in Afghanistan where we are helping it move forward as the conflicts diminish. Why are we not taking lessons learned in Afghanistan to other missions such as Libya?

Afghanistan is Canada's largest ever bilateral aid recipient. We are rebuilding schools, helping to build a governance structure and we are training the military and the police. We also have programs to support maternal and child health. We are doing it in Afghanistan and we must continue to do it in other countries.

Another personal experience I have witnessed with the reconstruction of another country post a notorious regime was in Panama. In 1980, Panama, under Noriega, was a police state with no democracy. The largest revenue was from the drug trade. After the fall of Noriega, the Panama Canal was handed over to the people by the U.S. and a new constitution was formed, but the economy also had to be restructured. I was asked to help with the reconstruction of its agriculture industry. I witnessed a transformation in Panama, which is now one of the most democratic and thriving countries in Central America.

Those are all examples that the House must realize have made countries vibrant and democratic.

Where is the government's post-Gadhafi strategy? The government has been notorious for its lack of detail. Why has it not put forward a more detailed plan regarding the future of a post-Gadhafi Libya or what if any role will Canada play in it? There is a known presence of extremist forces in certain areas of Libya, including some links to al-Qaeda. There is a very real fear that the extremists will gain a footing in a power vacuum that will undeniably occur once Gadhafi is finally ousted.

We know the situation we are facing in Libya. I have spoken of the great contributions Canada has made to help foster democracy. The reality is that the government has changed the way Canada operates on the world stage. By only offering to take military action and letting other multilateral international organizations do the restructuring is not acceptable.

The Prime Minister in a recent speech talked about playing a bigger leadership role on the international scene, but what we have seen is completely the opposite. It was with great interest yesterday when we heard in the House the member for Toronto—Danforth criticize companies for working in Libya. The companies the hon. member criticized will be instrumental in rebuilding Libya.

We need to work with Libya to help with reconstruction. There will be a benefit for our companies as we get the oil industry back and get everything to work well in that area. We saw the situation in Egypt where there was insufficient international support after the regime change left Egypt in a vulnerable state.

We cannot let this happen in the Middle East. We especially cannot let it happen in Libya. I ask the House to vote for the subamendment by the member for Toronto Centre.

[Protection of Beneficiaries of Long Term Disability Benefits Plans Act, March 11th, 2011]

Exactly. If they were able to. Point well taken.

I have had some of these people come into my office with tears in their eyes. Families are breaking up. They have nothing. They are going to be living in their cars.

For that to happen that night, and for this to continue to happen here, is just a disgrace and we need to do something about it.

[Protection of Beneficiaries of Long Term Disability Benefits Plans Act, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from Dartmouth—Cole Harbour works hard on the needs of downtrodden people. He follows his dad's example.

It was a shame what happened that night. I cannot believe the Conservatives can live with their conscience. If these disabled workers were standing near the party the Conservatives were having or stood in front of the Senate that night--

[Protection of Beneficiaries of Long Term Disability Benefits Plans Act, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague from Nova Scotia, who was an employer and an employee, knows what this is all about. He has bounced this back on to the province. We are talking about the bankruptcy act, which is a federal act, not a provincial one.

These people will be downloaded onto the province and they will expect the province to take care of them but the province does not have enough money to take care of them.

This issue has nothing to do with the province. This involves the federal bankruptcy act and we have the power in this House to make it happen.

[Protection of Beneficiaries of Long Term Disability Benefits Plans Act, March 11th, 2011]

moved that Bill C-624, An Act to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (providing protection for beneficiaries of long term disability benefits plans), be read the second time and referred to a committee.

Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to speak to Bill C-624, An Act to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (providing protection for beneficiaries of long term disability benefits plans).

Before I tell members of the House what the bill does, let me them what it does not do. First, it is not about pensions. It is about long-term disability, LTD, and that only.

Second, the bill is not about Nortel, although that situation precipitated the bill. It is about the over one million employees in Canada who can be affected now and in the future if they find themselves in similar circumstances with respect to LTD plans.

The purpose of the bill is straightforward. It is to protect employees on long-term disability, but while its focus is narrow, it speaks to larger issues, of fairness, justice and respect.

It aims to correct a situation that leaves the most vulnerable of our workers in the most desperate of straits and reaffirms the simple principle that people who pay their dues and play by the rules have the right to expect that they will receive what was promised to them.

At the moment, approximately 1.1 million employees in Canada have disability benefits that are self-insured by their employers. If a company with self-funded long-term disability benefits goes bankrupt, its employees who depend on these benefits, are given the same standing as an unsecured creditor. When a company goes bankrupt, they should be first in line.

In 2001, Amy Stahlke in Benefits Canada magazine wrote about the impending problem. She said:

In Canada, there has been little regulation of self-insured plans. There is no requirement that employers set aside adequate reserves to cover future liabilities arising from these plans. If reserves are set aside, there is no restriction on how those funds are invested. There is also no obligation to keep funds in trust to protect them from creditors. This means that a bankruptcy could spell the end of the benefits plan, including benefits for individuals already on disability.

Employees who are disabled, who cannot work, should not be shunted aside. Their needs are not over when their employer goes under. They still need their medication. They still need treatment. They still need rehabilitation. They still need all of the things that their long-term disability would have helped to provide.

The bill proposes to protect these beneficiaries under long-term disability plans by granting them preferred status. By bringing LTD claimants to preferred status, employees are more likely to get their full benefit coverage up to age 65 to be able to pay their medical bills and continue, which is very important, to live outside of poverty.

Some may have concerns about the cost, the impact it might have on credit markets and about the overall competitiveness of our businesses, but when we look at the evidence we see that not only can this be done but that many countries around the world are already doing it.

Thirty-four of the 54 countries studied by the OECD and the World Bank already have either super-priority or preferred status for employee claims in their bankruptcy laws, so 34 of 54 countries have better laws than we do, and that is for all pension claims, not just long-term disability. They have properly functioning credit markets and are still competitive with these in place, so the two are not incompatible. We can protect our most vulnerable employees and retain dynamic credit markets and stay competitive. We can do both. Other countries do and it has given stability for these people and these companies.

Also, at least 12 countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom, require the payment of insurance premiums by their corporations to fund their public pension plans and disability income guaranty insurance programs.

The United Kingdom system goes even further. In 2004, it enacted the pension protection fund that states that if an insolvent company's long-term disability fund has been underfunded, the government will compensate the scheme to protect employees. The government backs it, but the government is not going to have to put in one red cent in what I am proposing.

Employees are therefore protected before an employer goes bankrupt because the government requires their company to fund the LTD funds. If there is a shortfall, the government will step in to cover it. In essence, the most vulnerable will be protected.

Even our friends south of the border in the United States, LTD employees have disability protection for pensioners through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Also, employees have legal recourse to go after LTD benefits after bankruptcy provided by their federal employee retirement income security act legislation. There is no such avenue here in Canada. They even have better protection in the states than we have in our country. They also have a more generous social security disability program, which pays more than twice what CPP disability pays the disabled in Canada. It is unbelievable that we treat sick employees this way.

Nowhere is the inequity of the present situation more starkly illustrated than in the case of the Nortel workers who live right outside Ottawa and in the surrounding areas. As that company goes about the business of divvying up its assets, over 400 of its employees on long-term disability are being cast aside.

Currently, the bankruptcy court has accepted an agreement for the dissolution of Nortel's health and welfare trust, pretty well taking it off the hook. The trust was set up to fund life insurance, long-term disability and other benefits for 18,000 Nortel workers. That fund has been underfunded for years and holds only 35% of the assets necessary to fund its obligations to all employees. This is a dire situation for Nortel's long-term disability employees whose average age is 54 years and may need benefits for many years to come.

I am going to tell a story about a lady who came to my office. She is not from my riding. She is from the riding of Glengarry—Prescott—Russell. It is a very sad story. It is a story about Josée Marin. She was a lab technologist at Nortel and a single mom. She had been on long-term disability since 2002. She suffers from Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel condition, and scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune disorder. She is in rough shape.

This is how bad it is. Under this agreement, because of the chronic underfunding of the trust by Nortel, Josée will see her monthly average benefit which she received on long-term disability go from $2,143 to $433. Effectively, she will be receiving only 20% of the income replacement benefit she has been receiving since she became disabled.

To make matters worse, Josée also faces high health care costs which were paid through her medical benefits. No more. These benefits ran out in January of this year, which adds a significant burden. The Conservatives could have made it right. This bill was in the other place and it had a chance to make this right. She could still be receiving benefits.

What will happen, of course, is that employees like Josée will increasingly turn to social assistance and make greater use of social services. One could say that is what they are there for, but people will have to make heart-wrenching decisions because there is not enough money to live and pay medical expenses. They will have to make heart-wrenching decisions on whether to buy medication or food for their families, to get treatment for their illnesses or to pay rent. Those are the decisions they are faced with after working many years.

Effectively, Nortel will have downloaded these costs onto taxpayers while the company walks away from its responsibilities.

Josée does not want to become a burden to the taxpayer or to her family. She just wants to be able to live the remaining years of her life in dignity, or as she has starkly stated:

I want to die in the comfort of my home, not in my car or on the street.

That is a pretty strong statement.

Nortel employees are not alone. Long-term disability workers from Pacific Newspaper Group, which is owned by CanWest faced this uncertainty last year. Thank goodness CanWest survived the bankruptcy. However, if the situation had led to liquidation, as in Nortel's case, those employees would have seen their benefits cut off as well.

This problem is not new. We have seen this kind of thing play out before. In 1988, when Massey Combines Corp. went into receivership, 350 employees saw their disability payments vanish, gone. Ten years later, the bankruptcy of Eaton's resulted in hundreds more being left without benefits. Everybody else is getting their money, but not the people on long-term disability.

Long-term disability is based on a simple bargain, if workers pay the fees, they will be covered should anything happen that makes it impossible for them to work. That is what it is all about. It is very simple.

In the case of Nortel and others, that bargain has been broken. In the future, if no action is taken, similar bargains can be broken again and again. As I said, one million workers in this country could be under this threat and taxpayers will have to pick up the costs.

The bill before the House today attempts to end this practice. It declares in no uncertain terms, that promising long-term support and making short-term decisions that leave those promises in tatters is not just a matter of liabilities that are unfunded, it is a matter of practices that are unfair, unjust and unacceptable.

This bill will not only bring a greater degree of fairness in the bankruptcy process, but will help protect some of our most vulnerable citizens now and in the future or, as Josée Marin said:

These changes to the bankruptcy act are about human decency. They ensure a situation like the one I have been through for the last year never happens to any critically ill or disabled worker ever again.

As I am wrapping up here, this reminds me of a couple of years ago when I introduced a bill in the House for employees who get sick. Right now there is only 15 weeks unemployment. My bill, at that time, would have given them a full year of unemployment.

Across the floor, the Conservative government quashed it. It was a really sad thing. Not only opposition members believed in that bill, many of the MPs across the way believed in it. They had people coming to their offices. I have a list of all the ridings around Ottawa where the Nortel workers had visited MPs, of all stripes, especially the Conservatives. They came into the offices with tears in their eyes, wondering how they were going to pay their medical bills.

There is no need of it. There is no need of it in today's society. There is no need for this to happen. There is no need for a wealthy country like ours, or countries that are rich, where everybody takes off with the money and people cannot pay their medical bills. They are going to be dying in their cars. They are going to be dying on the streets. And it is because we are not planning any action here. It is a sad what happened in the other House, but we cannot let it happen here.

I urge all members in the House to vote for this bill. It is the right thing to do. We are very fortunate, the 308 of us here. We have a good job. We represent people. We have a pension. We are going to be taken care of if we have medical problems. Our families are going to be taken care of.

People are not being taken care of. Other countries are doing it. We are not doing it. Why are we not doing it? Why are we letting this happen when these companies go bankrupt? Why should these people not be the first up to get their money?

It shows meanness. We do not have to be like that. I want my Conservative colleagues to really think about this over the break week. I want them to go back and check with the people who do case work in their ridings. Check and see the situation. It is not just Nortel. There are companies right across Canada that are having this problem.

I will ask everybody to support this bill. It is the right thing for us to do. This situation makes a mockery of our country when we do not take care of the people who need help.

[Electricity, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, the development of the Lower Churchill transmission line to Cape Breton has the potential to create thousands of jobs. The proponents of this project want the federal government to provide a loan guarantee to help make this project move forward. All three parties in Nova Scotia endorse this project.

Will the Prime Minister stop delaying and provide this loan guarantee so that we can move this critical project forward?

[Taxation, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, rural Canadians are faced with skyrocketing prices for gasoline and home heating oil. It hurts those who can least afford it. It hurts those on fixed incomes and it hurts our seniors. Loggers, tourist operators, farmers and fishermen will be faced with a cash crunch.

The Conservatives betrayed these people in the last election by promising them a 2¢ a litre break that never happened.

Why is the government giving a corporate tax break to big oil companies instead of giving a break to rural Canadians?

[Outstanding Cape Bretoner, March 11th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, Cape Breton has a rich history of many stories yet to be told, but much of our history would have been lost had it not been for the work of Ron Caplan.

Mr. Caplan was born in Pennsylvania and came to Cape Breton in the 1970s. He heard the great stories of Cape Breton and saw the need for them to be documented. Tape recorder and camera in tow, he collected a rich oral history.

The founder of Cape Breton's Magazine, Ron's work can be found online today. He also founded Breton Books which enabled other writers to publish many fine works. His documentation of our history and culture is unprecedented.

In December 2010, Mr. Caplan was appointed to the Order of Canada for his contributions to the protection of Cape Breton Island's history and culture as a writer, editor and publisher.

As a fitting tribute to a great Canadian and Cape Bretoner, I ask the House to stand and applaud him.

[John J. Nugent, February 18th, 2011]

Mr. Speaker, this past week across Cape Breton many people mourned the loss of a community leader and a great Canadian. John J. Nugent had been fire chief for Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia for 31 years. He worked as a coal miner and postal worker. He was instrumental in the construction of a local fire hall and community centre which, fittingly, was named after him.

A dedicated fire chief, John made sure his department had the latest in training and equipment, making Sydney Mines one of the best volunteer fire departments in this country. John did not seek the spotlight, but demonstrated great courage by saving a boy from drowning in an ice-covered pond. For his actions, John was awarded the Star of Courage from the Governor General of Canada.

John J. Nugent was a father and grandfather and he will be missed by all who knew him, especially his family and friends. I urge all members of the House of Commons to remember him as an outstanding citizen. His legacy of community involvement will live on for future generations.