Michael Savage

[Business of Supply, June 17th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague takes these kinds of issues very seriously. He reads about and is informed on a lot of constitutional issues.

My colleague mentioned Nelson Wiseman as perhaps being a witness at the committee that he attends. Mr. Wiseman of the University of Toronto has said that no Canadian prime minister has abused the prorogation power to the extent that the current Prime Minister has. He has quoted Canada's pre-eminent parliamentary expert, Senator Eugene Forsey, as having said:

An unwanted and uncalled-for prorogation [is] a usurpation of the rights of the House of Commons, a travesty of democracy and a subversion of the constitution. Prorogation is more than mere delay for it prevents the House from voting, holding the government to account and possibly bringing it down.

Does my colleague agree with that quote? Does he believe that the Prime Minister was right to prorogue Parliament?

[Fairness for Military Families (Employment Insurance) Act, June 16th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak to Bill C-13 on the last part of its voyage through Parliament, the so-called fairness for military families act.

The proposed act will amend part I of the Employment Insurance Act to extend the period during which employment insurance parental benefits may be paid for Canadian Forces members whose start date of parental leave is deferred or who are directed to return to duty from parental leave.

This act will help relatively few Canadians. We are told by the department that it would be about 50 to 60 people a year at a cost of about $600,000. Nonetheless it is important for those who it will assist, and it assists Canadians that we all agree are entirely worthy of that assistance.

As my colleague, the parliamentary secretary referred to, at committee we heard from Lieutenant-Colonel James Duquette, who was posted to the Golan Heights just four days after the birth of his first child. As such, he missed his opportunity to take parental leave. It was very nice to hear from him, from Kabul, and his wife, Anne, who testified as well. They made very compelling witnesses in support of the bill.

There is a curious factor, though, which is the timeline of the bill. On April 5, the government had a press release about Bill C-13, indicating it would introduce it. On April 12, the legislation was introduced and then it was almost a month before it was debated in the House. It was very quickly passed by the House and went to committee. It was not until May 26 when the human resources committee had this testimony, went through clause-by-clause and everything passed. It is now another month since it came back to the House. I do not know if it would have even come to the House this week if the Liberal Party had not inquired about its status.

As the parliamentary secretary suggested, all parties support it. Therefore, it makes sense to get this through. It has been kind of a case of hurry up and wait and hurry up and wait on the bill. It is important.

I can talk from a personal point of view. I come from a military area, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour. It is home to many serving members of the Canadian Forces and many more veterans. I think we have one of the highest populations of veterans in Canada.

It was not very long ago that I attended the funeral for Petty Officer Second Class Craig Blake, who was the 143rd Canadian killed in Afghanistan. He was killed in the Panjwai District in Afghanistan. He was a member of the Fleet Diving Unit Atlantic. He was diffusing IEDs when he lost his life. He has a wife and two sons. He was a hockey coach. He was remembered at his funeral for the wonderful community work he took part in and the great loss it was to his family.

I remember having a connection to one of the earliest deaths in Afghanistan, and that was Corporal Paul Davis who died in March 2006. I have spoken in the House before about flying home from Parliament on a Friday with a number of other parliamentarians. When we arrived in Halifax and turned on our Blackberrys, we heard the awful news that Corporal Paul Davis had been killed in Afghanistan. His father, Jim Davis, is a dear friend of mine and has been an eloquent and passionate spokesperson on behalf of military families who have lost loved ones.

I have many constituents who have served in Afghanistan and have come home. Even if they have come home relatively unscathed from their service in Afghanistan, their families have paid a very significant price. They make great sacrifices. To go months without seeing their family is a very difficult thing, even if they return home safely.

Most of us who sit in this place travel from somewhere else in Canada and we find it difficult, especially with young families as in my case. It is difficult to be away for chunks of life. It is very difficult for military families to be away for months at a time, as in the case with Lieutenant-Colonel Duquette and others, especially around the time of the birth of a child or shortly after. It makes no sense that we should compound the sacrifice of that family by not allowing those families to have parental leave.

The bill will make a difference for those families. I think it could have been stronger. We appreciate the amendment that the government promised us. I spoke to this when it first came to the House and indicated that we should ensure we covered as many military families as possible. The government, through the parliamentary secretary, indicated that the government would do that and it would ensure that amendment would be in place.

Others serving abroad could have been included in the bill. With the cost of the bill being only about half a million dollars a year, it would not have been very much to add others, for example, those in police forces who serve overseas.

When Lieutenant-Colonel Duquette appeared from Kabul via video conference at committee, he was asked a question by an opposition member about police and RCMP. The question was “Should we be amending this bill, in your view, to include those people as well?” In his answer, Lieutenant-Colonel Duquette said, “Yes, I definitely think that applying it to police serving internationally would be very important”.

Even departmental officials indicated at that same committee that this would not have been such a terrible hardship. I asked Mr. Louis Beauséjour, a fine bureaucrat in the Department of HRSDC, “How much of a problem would it be to have this bill apply to other personnel beyond serving members of the Canadian Forces?” His answer was, “There was no reason other than to determine what the underlying reason for the amendment was”.

We could have amended the bill. It could have been a much stronger bill, but nonetheless it is what it is. It will assist a certain number of military families. I want to indicate my appreciation to the parliamentary secretary and to the government for providing the amendment that is part of the bill today.

When we look at employment insurance, we need to look at the big picture. This has been a topic of much debate in the House and across Canada in the last couple of years.

Our social infrastructure is not suitably designed for the kind of recession that Canada has undergone in the last couple of years. After the economic update of 2008, there was an outcry from people across the country saying that we needed to provide support to people who needed help the most. Among the most vulnerable people were those who had lost their jobs and those who would lose their job. At that point in time, the recession was just taking hold and the government was very slow to act.

Then the issue of stimulus came up over Christmas and January 2009, and the new budget came in January 2009. Everybody assumed that the government would seriously address the issue of employment insurance, that it would look at, particularly, the issue of access to EI and the fact that many people simply did not have access depending on where they lived across the country. Access could be denied in a lot of cases. Quite often it is denied to women who have lost their job because they tend to work part-time hours and may not have enough hours to qualify.

When the government brought in its plans for employment insurance in the budget of early 2009, it did not address that issue at all. That brought cries of protest not only from who we might expect would be opposed to its inaction, such as labour unions and public policy people, but from people in just about every province, including provinces that were led by spokespeople like Premier Brad Wall, Premier Gordon Campbell and Premier Dalton McGuinty. All of them said that one of the gaps in the employment insurance system was the issue of access. Still we had no action from the government.

At one point in time, 1.6 million people were unemployed and almost half of those people had no access to employment insurance.

Changes have been made to the EI system over the years and some of those changes have been made by varying governments, but they have always reflected the fact that employment insurance should be there for those who most need it. A lot could have been done.

Bill C-13 to me is a very worthy improvement to EI. All parties have indicated their support for the bill. We need to do all we can to support military families, to recognize they have a particular burden, that those who serve and the families that serve those who serve make a special and significant sacrifice on a regular basis. The bill will do something to alleviate that. It is a limited bill and it could have been made better. It has been made a bit better but more could have been done. Nonetheless, I want to assure the Liberal Party's support for the bill. It is a worthy initiative and a recognition for those who serve our country valiantly.

[Petitions, June 16th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present two more petitions regarding the decision in budget 2010 to cancel the exemption for post-doctoral fellows.

This is an issue that has brought a lot of attention from the research community, certainly from young researchers. Their view is that this decision is very harmful for the research environment in Canada, particularly for encouraging young researchers. They are asking that the decision be suspended until the government is able to meet with the national working group on post-doctoral fellows to establish a course of action. They are simply asking for a bit of notice before their lives are turned upside down.

I have presented this petition in a number of other formats for other petitioners and I am pleased to present it again today.

[June 15th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, with respect, the comments of the parliamentary secretary are complete and utter hogwash. He could not find any reputable person in Canada who would say that CCL was not doing a good job. He quotes Don Drummond but Don Drummond said that it was a disturbing thing to cancel the funding to CCL.

The parliamentary secretary talked about cuts to education in the 1990s. His side wanted much deeper cuts and said in this House that we did not go far enough in terms of cuts to the transfers. It is the most hypocritical thing we could ever imagine.

CCL is necessary. The Conservatives say that we need surveillance in education but then they take it away and replace it with nothing. There is nothing and they cannot produce something as cheaply and effectively. CCL was all about value for money.

The best thing we could say about this decision is that it is stupid, stupid, stupid. The worst thing we could say is that it is another example of political cronyism and reaching back into the past to kill anything that was not initiated by the present government.

There is not one credible person in education in the country who would say anything bad about CCL, not one. I would ask the parliamentary secretary to quote me one.

[June 15th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak tonight and follow up on a question I asked about the Canadian Council of Learning.

Earlier this week, my colleagues from York Centre and Winnipeg South Centre held a round table which was attended by a number of organizations whose funding had been cancelled by the Conservative government or, in some cases, whose funding was threatened to be cancelled.

CCL is one of those organizations whose funding was cancelled for absolutely no sensible reason. It was set up by the Liberal government in 2004 for five years, entirely renewable, to do an assessment of education in Canada. It produced some of the most remarkable and innovative documents in terms of understanding where we are as a nation in terms of education, particularly post-secondary, but also looking at aboriginal education, early learning and child care, and a number of things.

The government said that it was only a five year project and that it would never be renewed and yet, in a letter dated May 8, 2009 to the chair of CCL from the minister, the minister said, “I share your assessment that knowledge and skills are particularly important in these turbulent economic times and I agree that CCL has played a key role in supporting efforts in the area. Your desire for a clear and immediate resolution on the question of the council's future is understandable. I understand that HRSDC officials began discussions with CCL about stabilizing strategies for the organization”.

The government cannot say that it was never going to be renewed. What it can say is that it was killed for two simple reasons: first, that it was a Liberal initiated program; and second, that it worked. Who was watching this with amazement? A number of people were.

Arati Sharma of CASA said:

Without the research of groups, such as the Canadian Council on Learning, Canada will continue to lack the knowledge needed to improve access, persistence and quality in our post-secondary institutions. ,

The Toronto Star had an editorial saying:

...the learning council's work was of value to Canadians, particularly at a time when our economic future depends more than ever on our ability to compete with other knowledge-based economies....

We had an associate professor from the University of Alberta say:

This is a terrible, short-sighted action on the part of the Conservative government and I am so sorry to hear about it.

Don Drummond indicated on a number of occasions his very strong support for CCL, even at a time when he was actually doing a review for HRSDC.

I will quote an article from The StarPhoenix in Saskatoon which says, among other things:

The council's groundbreaking composite learning index to Canada and its online adult literacy assessment tests so impressed the OECD that its secretary general wrote to the Prime Minister last May praising the government for supporting the council's work and urging that it continue to be funded.

The Ottawa Citizen said, “The decision to cut funding to the CCL is very worrisome”.

Don Drummond's direct quote was, “It is disturbing. Even the scant information we have is not adequately funded”.

At a time when we say that we are interested in education, innovation, research and all those things that were started by the Liberal government early in this century, it makes no sense to cut this. This is one of the few tools that we had to measure how we were doing versus other countries. In fact, now that the funding has been cut, other countries want to fund CCL. Other countries have seen the value of it and yet our own country is so short-sighted that it has cut the funding to CCL and would not even let it carry forward the few million dollars it had when this year ended. It is a desperate situation. Students, universities, professors, economists and business organizations all know the value of CCL.

It appears that the government, for purely political reasons, decided that it would not continue to fund CCL and we are much the worse off for it.

[Petitions, June 15th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present two petitions today. These come mainly from Quebec and Ontario, and relate to the cancelling of the exemption of the post-doctoral fellows which took place in the 2010 budget. I have presented a number of these which represent the frustration of post-doctoral students and many others involved in the research community who fear that without having had discussions with the post-doctoral community that this decision is going to be a disincentive to research in this country.

It does not work well at all with a country that wants to increase its research and innovation, particularly with young researchers. They call upon the government to have some consultation with the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars before imposing such a punitive measure. I am pleased to present these two petitions today.

[Petitions, June 14th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present four petitions today, all dealing with the same issue. The issue is that budget 2010 prohibits post-doctoral fellows from claiming the scholarship exemption. This is a real disincentive to researchers and is a discouragement for research and innovation.

The petitioners suggest that the decision should be held in abeyance until at least some discussion takes place. The government should suspend that decision and get together with a national working group on post-doctoral fellowships to establish the best course of action to ensure we have the best environment for encouraging young researchers in particular in this country. The budget works against that. I am pleased to present that petition on their behalf.

[Creating Canada's New National Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Act, June 14th, 2010]

Madam Speaker, it has always been my view that every Canadian should, at least once in their lifetime, attend a citizenship ceremony, to see the pride of new Canadians, to hear them take the citizenship oath and to stand ramrod straight and sing O Canada. Whether born in Canada or, like myself, come to Canada at a young age, one cannot help but be absolutely touched and amazed by the pride and the passion of those who have chosen Canada.

Every Canada Day, a citizenship ceremony is held at Pier 21, and a more perfect union could never be made. New Canadians from all over the world become citizens on the very ground that started the Canadian journey for so many others.

As the first nation to embrace multiculturalism as a national policy, it seems natural that we would have the National Museum of Immigration, but it has only come about through vision, dedication and unrelenting hard work.

Many people played a big role in the evolution of Pier 21. It is not possible to pay tribute to all of the volunteers, donors, partners and staff, but if there is one thing that ever person who ever worked for Pier 21 could agree on, it is that Ruth Goldbloom is the driving force, the heart and soul, the energy that made Pier 21 come back to life.

In 1989 Mr. Leblanc asked her to join the Pier 21 Society and in 1993 she became its president. At the time, Pier 21 was a dusty, empty old shed on the waterfront that reeked of history, and likely reeked of much else, but seemed an unlikely candidate to be chosen as one of the Seven Wonders of Canada. However, Ruth could see something and, more important, she could translate that vision to others. She not only encouraged people to get involved, she appreciated everybody who ever helped with Pier 21, whether they worked in the gift shop or whether they gave $1 million.

The most remarkable thing, in fact, about Ruth Goldbloom's leadership is her sincere belief that she is genuinely privileged to have been able to serve. When she speaks of people like Bill Snooey of the Dutch Reformed Church, who visited Pier 21 when it was an old shed on the harbour and how she connected with him and his ancestors, we get a sense of her humility and her connection to those who loved Pier 21.

Pier 21 is more than just a special place or an historic place. To many, it is an honoured place and to some it a sacred place. Thousands of Canadians, such as my leader, connect to ancestors at Pier 21. It helps to make them whole. Indeed, Pier 21 helps to make Canada whole.

Today is a special day. I would not be surprised if Ruth Goldbloom, who once was known as Nova Scotia's Shirley Temple, does not have a little celebratory dance tonight, with John Oliver, Wadih Fares, Bob Moody and the many others who are celebrating. This is a special day. Parliament has come together to honour our past, to celebrate our great country today and to prepare for a bright future and let Pier 21 take its rightful place as Canada's National Museum of Immigration.

Congratulations to everybody.

[Petitions, June 11th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure to present two petitions today mainly from Ontario and Quebec. These are from post-doctoral students who highlight one of the real flaws of the recent budget, which was the elimination of the exemption for post-doctoral students.

The petitioners point out that this will create strong disincentives for junior researchers at the beginning of their careers and discourage the attention of highly-qualified recent Ph.D. graduates within Canada. It makes no sense at all, in their view that, while we want to encourage research and innovation and bring and keep researchers here, this exemption was taken out. It will be harmful and they think, at the very least, the government should have consulted with them and other stakeholders before it went forward with this.

[G8 and G20 Summits, June 11th, 2010]

Mr. Speaker, the government has such disregard for taxpayer money that another billion dollars does not phase it a bit. It is just like water off a fake duck's back. That billion dollars could pay the full cost of four full years of post-secondary education for 23,376 low-income students.

Does the government believe that the 72-hour spendapalooza, fakes lakes, lighthouses and choosing wallpaper that would make Martha Stewart blush is a better use of our money than investing in the future of Canadian students?