Mike Sullivan

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the NDP believes that Bill C-11 actually did much of what we are trying to do here, and in terms of the human smuggling portion of the bill, punishing the victims is not the way to go.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I agree with my colleague from Winnipeg North. It is somewhat ironic that there are occasions in this country when we apologize for the very things that we are going to do in the near future or have done in the recent past. We do not seem to learn by our mistakes.

However, I have to remind everyone that irony is often lost on the members opposite.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am very glad to hear we are going to be able to vote on this bill in pieces, because I will support that piece of the legislation. We have praised that piece of the legislation, which would increase the penalties and the risk to the smugglers themselves. We have said, yes, it is a good thing to increase the penalties for the smugglers.

Our problem is the fact that we would be penalizing the victims. The people who are the victims of crime, the refugees who come into this country, are the ones who would be imprisoned by the government. That we disagree with.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today on behalf of the good residents of York South—Weston, my constituents, to try to make some sense out of what is happening but I am afraid I am not able to make sense of it.

A bill has already been passed by Parliament to do what the Conservatives have been saying these past many months, since Bill C-4 and now Bill C-31 have come before us. Bill C-11 will take effect. For whatever reason, its implementation was delayed until June of this year, but it will take effect and it will solve the problem of 95% of refugee claimants from some European countries actually abandoning their claims because the provisions in Bill C-11 do precisely what the government says Bill C-31 would do. Therefore, what is the purpose of Bill C-31? It is really to put more control in the hands of the minister by making the minister solely responsible for determining which countries are safe and which are not.

That leads one to speculate wildly about what possible reason it could have for putting such control in the hands of the minister. We could speculate that it might have to do with the Department of Foreign Affairs or with giving favoured nation status in return for trade agreements. I have no idea. The problem is that we are rushing ahead with a bill that does the same thing as another bill already does. When we examine the difference, it is that the minister would have the power. It does not make sense. The portion of the bill that is new is the part that supposedly deals with human smuggling.

I was listening today to the U.S. ambassador, Luis CdeBaca, who is the head of the U.S. task force on human trafficking. So as we do not get confused, human trafficking and human smuggling are two different things. Human trafficking is engaging in slavery practices in other countries in the world and in countries close to home. What he said made me realize that had the kinds of things the Conservatives are proposing here been in place years ago, they would have prevented the praise that the U.S. ambassador gave us this afternoon.

He said that he was proud of the fact that Canada was one of the very first countries to abolish slavery. In fact, Canada accepted refugees from none other than the United States. Those refugees came to my former hometown of Windsor through the underground railroad. If this law had been in place, who knows what would have happened to those individuals who are now the ancestors of many prosperous and well-deserving families of this country, some in my riding? Those individuals could possibly have been detained in jails for up to a year and prevented from supporting or sponsoring their families. It beggars belief to imagine a regimen similar to what is being proposed by the government to deal with a supposed irregular arrival problem by detaining refugees.

We have heard the government say over and over again that it is on the side of the victims. This is making victims pay. These individuals are the victims of a crime. That crime is perpetrated by the smugglers and yet the government's reaction is to punish the victims. They are the only people it can get its hands on, because the smugglers have long gone, so it punishes them.

I have heard the Minister of Justice suggest that once people know that Canada's laws are such that it is not welcoming and victims will be punished, it will dry up the supply. It is a supply side economics argument, which we have heard a lot from the government, that it will dry up the supply of potential victims of crime.

The problem with that is that there are not a lot of Canadians who read the Criminal Code before they commit a crime, and I doubt very much that there are a lot of people in Somalia, Sri Lanka, or wherever these people come from, who have an opportunity to read Canada's immigration legislation to determine that they will go to jail if they pay someone $10,000 to bring their family over to Canada. That is just not going to happen. We do not publish our legislation in all the languages that might be spoken in these countries either. It is just strange.

In addition to those victims being punished, the minister is suggesting that we will not have to worry because the government will deal with refugee claimants from countries that he has designated as safe countries—he or she, depending on who the minister might be. The minister will determine which countries are safe, and people from those countries will be booted out of this country really fast if they are not true refugees. How do we determine whether they are true refugees? We do that by giving them a chance to plead their case within 14 days. They then have no access to appeal and no access to the Refugee Appeal Division.

There are in fact two classes of refugees. There is a class of refugees who come from countries that the minister has not designated, and we do not know which countries those are yet, and there is a class of refugees who are legitimate refugees in every sense of the word, but who come from countries that the minister designates as safe. They, therefore, would have only one kick to get their suggestion that they are refugees before a tribunal and they have no access to the Refugee Appeal Division. The minister has stated on several occasions that they could file an application in Federal Court. The trouble is that they will be deported long before an application in the Federal Court goes anywhere.

The other thing that bothers me about the attitude of the government toward the whole refugee system is that the minister has suggested on several occasions that he is upset that refugees skip over other countries before they come to Canada, that they should go somewhere else, that they should not come to Canada. I am proud of the fact that they want to come to Canada. We all should be proud that we have such a welcoming and such a wonderful mélange of all the countries of the world that people feel comfortable in coming to Canada. We should not force refugees to go somewhere else simply because they happen to pass by another country on the way. That smacks of a being reluctant to take refugees in the first place, although I know that possibly is not what the minister meant.

The minister also talked about jumping the queue. He does not want refugee claimants to be in a position to jump the queue ahead of legitimate immigrant applicants. He has now created the biggest immigrant queue-jump in the history of this country by eliminating what might be 300,000, and I am not sure of the exact number, legitimate applications for immigration to this country with the stroke of a pen and putting everyone else ahead of those people. Every other applicant to this country would now jump the queue if they applied post-2008, or whatever the year was that it was changed. Those individuals have jumped the queue and the rest must start again. That is so wrong, yet the minister says that he does not like queue-jumpers. He is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

The other issue that covers this whole immigration thing is the issue of temporary foreign workers. It is another example of the doublespeak we get from the government about how it wants to welcome refugees and welcome new Canadians, but we will now have a situation where temporary foreign workers are being allowed into this country and will be paid 15% less than everybody else. That will drive down wages. The minister says that it is only for those jobs where we have a shortage. We know there are jobs out there. Airline pilots are being brought in as temporary foreign workers. There is no shortage of airline pilots in this country, but we have companies bringing airline pilots to this country as temporary foreign workers, and now they can pay them 15% less. That is just going to drive down wages in this country.

Those are the kinds of immigration policies that we do not agree with, including this bill.

[Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, a lot has been said by the government, in particular about this problem of 95% of the refugee claimants from European countries not bothering to come for their hearings. That is what Bill C-11, in the previous Parliament, was supposed to fix, and will fix as of June of this year.

With the exception of giving the minister the power to determine which countries are safe, why are we in a rush to do what will actually be fixed if we just let the law we passed some time ago take place? What is so urgent, when we have a law coming into place to do exactly what the government says this bill was supposed to do?

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, in my colleague's questioning to me, she referred to the notion that the Canada pension plan is a tax or is hurtful to employers. However, we have discovered over the past 60 years of pension system history in Canada that if it is not mandatory for employers and employees to contribute, a large section of our populace does not, or cannot, save for retirement. Given that this plan is voluntary, what does she have to say about mandatory increases to the Canada pension plan?

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, there is a two-fold risk to having our money in a vehicle in which we must actually make the decisions about how to invest it and, at the end, about how to take it out of the plan.

We are at a situation right now in Canada where the stock market has not performed the way it did in the 1980s and 1990s. It has certainly not been the pillar that it ought to have been. People did wake up one day and discovered that their portfolios were worth sometimes as much as 50% less. Add to that the fact that interest rates are at historic lows in our country. When we take that money out, we get nothing in return. Now when people go to one of these friendly insurance companies to buy an annuity, they discover that they are lucky if they get $600 a month or $500 a month. Ten or fifteen years ago, when interest rates were at 5% and 6%, for $100,000 they could get $1,200 a month.

Those two things are combining together to make that kind of pension plan a disaster for persons who wish to retire.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, with all due respect to my colleague, this is not a tax. This is in fact a pension.

What we are suggesting is that over time, gradually giving people time to prepare, the Canada pension plan should be increased. It is by far the most effective and most consistent form of pension in our country.

The Ontario Liberal government in 2007 reacted exactly the same way when it was suggested that the minimum wage in Ontario should go from $7.00 to over $10.00. It said that businesses would fail, that it would be a huge burden on businesses to raise the minimum wage. That was not the case. It did not happen.

The kind of fear-mongering that goes on when we talk about this as a tax, which it is not, when we talk about this as somehow harmful to business is wrong and has the same illogic as suggesting that the minimum wage in Ontario would kill business, which it did not do, and which eventually the Liberal government adopted.

[Pooled Registered Pension Plans Act, May 17th, 2012]

Madam Speaker, I am very glad to rise today on behalf of the residents of York South—Weston, who sent me here to look after them and to try to make sense of what the government is doing.

One of those residents, a young fellow named Scott Jackson, finished in the top 12 in the Canada's Got Talent show last week. We want to congratulate him for being such a great self-employed musician. I say self-employed musician because those are the kinds of people who are going to suffer most from the kinds of policies and practices the government is putting forward to try to deal with the future of the retirement scheme in Canada.

First and foremost, people like Scott are going to work until they are 67, make no doubt about it. The minister may say people have time to prepare for that, which means they are going to save more money, but that is not unless they can earn more money. They cannot earn more money in the systems we have today, when the government is telling employers they can now bring people from other countries and ask them to work for 15% less than the people who are currently working in Canada.

It makes no sense. The government is driving down wages as quickly as it can. It is working hard to prevent organized labour from getting any further in the wage battles in this country. Its friends, the CEOs and captains of industry, are doing quite well. I do not see any 15% regulation for CEOs of big corporations, or calls for them to be replaced by temporary foreign workers. That is the reality the Conservatives put forward.

I am going to call this a scheme, because that is really what it is. The suggestion that this scheme of pooled registered retirement plans will somehow be the solution is just looking at the world through such rose-coloured glasses as to be laughable. If one wants to be generous to the government, it is perhaps an addition to an arsenal of possible retirement schemes, but it is really fundamentally no different from what is already there, except in the ability to pool. There is already a registered retirement savings plan scheme and a tax-free savings account scheme, which most Canadians cannot afford to contribute to. In fact, 74% of Canadians do not put money into RRSPs, and yet 60% of Canadians, as the minister opposite already stated, do not have a workplace pension plan.

The number of workplace pension plans is actually going down, and they are being converted, as we speak, from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans in record numbers. Employers across the land are discovering they can no longer afford to continue the good, solid, defined benefit plans that are similar to the Canada pension plan and were supposed to work in tandem with it.

The systems that current and previous governments have put in place make it impossible for employers to deal with the huge deficits these plans rolled up. These deficits are not caused by some kind of structural problem with the defined benefits system. They are caused by the abnormally low interest rates that we have in this country, which are forcing employers to put huge amounts of money into pension plans for a potential windup of those plans. It is not likely to happen. If a company continues to exist and is profitable, it will continue to contribute into that defined benefit plan.

The windup costs become enormous. As soon as one tries to buy annuities, with the windup of a pension plan, one has to come up with enormous sums of money, so employers all over this country are dropping them like hot potatoes. The government has not provided them any relief. There has been no discussion by the government to find a way around this, to make it possible to preserve the system of a combination of the Canada pension plan, OAS and a defined benefit plan in an employer setting. Those are the three pillars of what we have now. Two of them are under attack and the third is being left stagnant.

The NDP has a plan. The NDP plan is to suggest that the Canada pension plan is so successful that it should be doubled. It is clearly the cheapest, the most reliable and the most sustainable form of pension in our country. The Canada pension plan, which is a type of defined benefit plan that is a recognition of years of service times wages, which is how most good pension plans in our country are calculated, provides a portion of what is intended to be the pension regime for Canadians when they retire.

One portion is the old age security, one portion is the Canada pension plan and the third portion is either personal savings or a workplace defined benefit plan. Because 60% of Canadians do not have a workplace pension plan, and a number of those Canadians are now in workplace pension plans that are precarious and dependent upon the stock markets, and if people happen to retire at the wrong time and the stock markets are down, woe betide them, they will not be able to retire.

We have not come up with an overall scheme. The government has put a band-aid on a scheme that needs something more than a band-aid. The only thing it has proposed is kind of like a bigger group RRSP. It still has the same precarious nature, depending on market forces for its success. It still has the issue of no mandatory provision to it, so people do not have to belong and do not have to contribute. It has no requirement for the employer to contribute.

With those three things missing, with those three things being a problem with this pooled system, it is a bad system. It may suit a very small minority of Canadians and a small minority of Canadian corporations, companies, businesses, owners that have no other alternative. However, if that is going to be the case, the better solution is to double Canada pension, gradually over time.

The Conservatives call it another tax. It is not a tax; it is a pension. It has nothing to do with taxing anybody. It is a way of maintaining a pension. If we are suggesting employers are contributing already to the Canada pension plan and that over time those contributions should double so Canadians who have no other alternatives will at least have something sensible to retire on, a portion of money that comes from a Canada pension, let us think of the downstream benefits to that.

First, it will reduce poverty. Reducing poverty is a good thing. Second, it will reduce the government's reliance on guaranteed income supplement. If Canadians have a doubled Canada pension plan and old age security, fewer and fewer of them would need that government handout.

We are making the future more sustainable through a present that looks forward. That is not what the government is doing. The government is trying to scare Canadians by suggesting that somehow the old age security system we now have is unsustainable and that this in combination with the guaranteed income supplement will bankrupt the country.

That is the absolute furtherest from the truth. Yes, there is a slight bump when the baby boomers retire, but the plan allows those baby boomers to all retire anyway and continue to collect OAS. Therefore, the bump is not being dealt with. This belies the fact that the government considers this to be a problem.

By the time we get around to implementing the government's plan, we will be on the downward slope of the baby boomers and we will end up with a sustainable system again. The plan is crazy. It is not an effective way to create sustainabilty in our pension system.

We in the NDP have determined that the best way to go forward, and the best way for the sustainability of the entire system, is to double the Canada pension plan. The government is not doing that. The government is suggesting that we should put our money into more personally risky investments. As long as that is the case, as long as there is a personal risk, then it is a roll of the dice on which year to retire. If people retire in a bear market, well, too bad, so sad, they will run out of pension.

[Iran, May 14th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, in his questioning earlier of the member for Lanark—Frontenac—Lennox and Addington, the member mentioned that the demise of rights and democracy has left us with very little in the way of bringing democracy to the people of that country because we no longer have an independent agency on the ground to do that. One of his responses was that we could undertake Farsi language broadcasts. However, as part of the Conservative budget the broadcasting of Farsi languages or any other language for that matter from CBC, through Radio Canada International, is now gone. It has been cut. We cannot do it anymore. If anybody thinks we will be able to get information via the Internet into an oppressed country like that, they have another think coming.

Would the member like to comment further on that?