Monique Guay

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, this issue is of particular concern to me personally. CMHC is generating more than $7 billion in surpluses at a time when the government is withdrawing from social housing, discontinuing its financial support in that area. We should be aware of the fact that a family with two or three children may have to wait up to three, four and five years before getting social housing. Imagine how these people are living in the meantime.

I totally agree with my hon. colleague. This government has to focus on the real issues, not on things that turn out to be totally useless.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I do not wait for the newspapers to provide me with information. I am capable of speaking to people, to those who have worked in Afghanistan.

There is also the issue of wives of soldiers at the front, who have no means of support. This is a reality. They are looking for ways to get psychological help. It is very difficult to not know what is going on when their husbands are overseas—especially in Kandahar, where the battles are particularly tragic.

I have nothing to learn from my colleague. I read the papers and I speak to people. I know that there are people suffering, that some have been killed in combat, and that others are experiencing psychological problems after being sent over there.

This government is hiding all of that. It does not want us to know. It is worried that there will be increasing pressure from the public and from Parliament to bring back our troops as quickly as possible.

[Resumption of debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take the floor today. As this House is aware, the Bloc Québécois will vote against the throne speech. We have said so from the start. We had five official requests, which were not out of the ordinary. They are five essential, reasonable priorities. As usual, the government did not want to listen to us. As usual, it had its own agenda. The government places a great deal of emphasis on militarization, and it is going to invest a lot of money in that.

I will start by talking a bit about Afghanistan. Why is it that we are sending soldiers to Afghanistan and yet we have no information here? We never have any reports about what is happening there. We know nothing. We do not know how many soldiers have been wounded, what is happening or whether our troops are in good condition. We have no information. Even the Standing Committee on National Defence gets information in dribs and drabs. This House has not sat for five months. As parliamentarians, we should at least be able to know what is happening to our soldiers in Afghanistan.

I read in a newspaper that 15% of Canadian and Quebec soldiers returning from Afghanistan suffer from mental illnesses. That is a very high number, and it might be even higher than that. So why is it that we in the House have heard nothing about this? Why is it that we have to read about this in the papers? Why has neither the Minister of National Defence nor the Prime Minister told us anything about this? This is very troubling.

We talked about withdrawing the troops by 2009, and we were going about it responsibly. We said that we had to meet with the UN to discuss readying troops from other countries to go to Afghanistan. We did our part and we have to bring our soldiers home. But in the Speech from the Throne, the government said that it wanted to prolong the mission until 2011. It even wants to put together a committee that would pay someone $1,400 per day to study this issue even though we know that the decision has already been made. That is outrageous.

For those of you who do not know, tonight is homelessness awareness night in Quebec. People in 22 municipalities will be sleeping outside tonight. Members of a number of organizations and homeless people will spend the night out in the cold, trying to keep warm as best they can. What does the throne speech have to offer these people? Absolutely nothing. The employment insurance fund has a $54 billion surplus, yet the throne speech promised nothing for these people and nothing for the POWA that people have been demanding for so long.

I know that my colleague from Beauharnois—Salaberry has some problems in her riding. Some of her constituents have even committed suicide. It is unbelievable to think that people can be driven to suicide after having depleted all of their resources. This is unacceptable at a time when the government itself is running a surplus and the employment insurance fund is overflowing to the tune of $54 billion.

We have always asked the Conservative government and all of its predecessors for an independent employment insurance fund. Such a fund could be used to help the homeless. It could be used to increase employment insurance benefits or even to increase the number of weeks people can receive benefits. It could also help businesses by reducing their employment insurance premiums. Fifty-four billion dollars is more than a hill of beans. That is a lot of money.

What is the government doing with that money? It is helping itself to it. Where does it use it for? We have just learned from the throne speech that this money will be spent on military equipment for the Arctic. I have nothing against the Arctic, but these are billions of dollars not being spent where the need is the deepest.

Because of all that, we remain committed to fighting to protect the environment. In my riding, the Centre for Electric Vehicle Experimentation in Quebec, or CEVEQ, is conducting studies on electric automobiles and buses. It is doing a fantastic job. It is barely self-sustaining.

Help could be provided to the centre to enable it to expand its research and make faster progress, but no. The government would rather kiss Kyoto goodbye and follow China's lead. It is shameful to think that Canada could be comparable to China where the environment is concerned. How far back is this taking us? It makes no sense.

Immediate measures are required, but they are not being put forward. There is nothing planned in this regard. We have heard about some air pollution reduction effort, but in my book and that of ordinary people, that does not mean much. Real efforts are needed, but there is nothing planned right now—no measures and no intention to revert even the slightest to Kyoto. That is extremely serious.

Quebec is being penalized because it has made enormous efforts to achieve the Kyoto objectives. Because of the federal government and because of Alberta, among others, with its tar sands which create five times more pollution that any other pollutant, we in Quebec will be penalized. That is absolutely unacceptable.

Everyone has heard about the crisis in the forest industry, everyone knows it is a reality, and yet no measure is proposed in the throne speech to deal with it. It is all just nice words and rhetoric, and it is totally meaningless. There is no concrete commitment. It is old stuff. This is not my first throne speech. I have been here 14 years and I have seen quite a few. This is extremely disappointing.

The federal spending power is a very important issue for Quebec. We are told that the government is committed to negotiating and reaching an agreement on the spending power, but that is utterly false. This government does not want to eliminate the spending power: it wants to control it. In any case, there are hardly any joint Quebec-Canada initiatives left, because over time we have managed to set up our own programs.

Everything that we are told in the throne speech about the spending power is absolutely false. They will create programs that we will probably not need, that we will not want, or that will not be useful to Quebec, because we do things differently. We will be stuck with those programs, and we will again be fighting with the federal government, rather than try to work and move things forward.

A large number of us have been here for many years. We defend Quebec and a number of major issues. One issue that is very dear to us involves women. However, the throne speech is totally silent on this issue. In fact, the term “women” is not even mentioned. That is really terrible.

In my riding, all the women's centres, which we so desperately need, are located in one large town. The female staff in these centres does an extraordinary job with young women and other women in need. These people are doing their utmost to fund their facilities. Yet, the throne speech does not provide a single penny to these people. This is extremely disappointing, and this is why we will definitely vote against the Speech from the Throne.

[Taxation, October 19th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, had the Bloc Québécois never spoken of a nation, it would never have come to pass here in the House of Commons. Thanks to our hard work Quebec has been recognized as a nation.

All federalist parties were in league yesterday to defeat the sub-amendment by the Bloc Québécois, the voice of the unanimous will of the Quebec National Assembly, which is calling for the unconditional right to opt out with full compensation.

Does the government acknowledge that with this vote it has demonstrated, once again, that it does not have any intention of eliminating federal spending power?

[Taxation, October 19th, 2007]

The results in Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot also prove something, Mr. Speaker.

If the elimination of federal spending power is not accompanied by the unconditional right to opt out, with full financial compensation for Quebec, then they are trying to fool us because the government intends to restrict its spending power only in cost-shared programs, which are almost nonexistent.

Will the government admit that, with the promise in the throne speech, there is nothing to stop it from continuing to meddle at will in Quebec's areas of jurisdiction?

[Nuclear Energy, June 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, not only does centralizing nuclear waste pose some problems, but transporting the waste presents other problems and the government must also take into account safety-related costs.

Instead of blindly encouraging something as perilous as nuclear energy, would it not be wiser for the government to invest its money in developing truly clean energies?

[Nuclear Energy, June 15th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Natural Resources, who is so enthusiastic about nuclear energy, is now announcing the government's intention to centralize radioactive waste disposal. Using nuclear energy is not a very environmental choice, to say the least.

Is the real reason behind all of this that the government is trying to pave the way for oil companies in the west to build nuclear generating stations in order to extract more oil from the oil sands at a lower cost instead of promoting clean energy such as geothermal and wind energies?

[The Environment, June 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, Greenpeace condemned the G-8 leaders, saying that they had failed to live up to their historic responsibility to the Kyoto commitments.

By playing the same game as George Bush, is the Prime Minister not showing this government's complete lack of will to respect the Kyoto protocol and to truly fight climate change?

[The Environment, June 8th, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister will no doubt return from the G-8 claiming to have succeeded in getting across his climate change views. His only success will have been lowering the bar. Even if he claims to have fought for real, mandatory targets, what we are looking at is a failure, because the final declaration of the G-8 did nothing but pay lip service and offered no real, binding commitments for the future.

Will the government admit that we are far from playing the role of mediator that the Prime Minister sought and that, at best, he was nothing more than George Bush's pawn?

[Points of Order, June 1st, 2007]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I ask for the unanimous consent of this House to adopt the following motion:

That the government's notice of ways and means motion No. 13, tabled in the House by the Minister of Labour on December 8, 2006, be deemed adopted and that the bill listed on the order paper under “Introduction of Government Bills” and entitled “An Act to amend the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, the Wage Earner Protection Program Act and chapter 47 of the Statutes of Canada, 2005” be deemed to have been introduced in the House, deemed to have been read the first time and printed, deemed to have been read the second time and referred to a committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported with the following amendment:

“That clause 32 of the bill be replaced by the following:

Paragraphs 67(1)(b) to (b.3) of the same statute, as enacted by subsection 57(1) of Chapter 47 of the Statutes of Canada 2005, are replaced by the following:

(b)any property that as against the bankrupt is exempt from execution or seizure under any laws applicable in the province within which the property is situated and within which the bankrupt resides;

(b.1) goods and services tax credit payments that are made in prescribed circumstances to the bankrupt and that are not property referred to in paragraph (a) or (b);

(b.2) prescribed payments relating to the essential needs of an individual that are made in prescribed circumstances to the bankrupt and that are not property referred to in paragraph (a) or (b);

(b.3) without restricting the generality of paragraph (b), property in a registered retirement savings plan or a registered retirement income fund, as those expressions are defined in the Income Tax Act, or in any prescribed plan, other than property contributed to any such plan or fund in the 12 months before the date of bankruptcy”,

deemed concurred in at the report stage as amended, and deemed read the third time and passed”.