Nicole Demers

[The Budget, March 4th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we cannot hide our heads in the sand. We must recognize that this is a very, very conservative and very, very right-wing government. We cannot help but be afraid that, with measures like the ones that have been adopted, things would be even worse if the Conservatives had a majority government.

My colleague mentioned the homeless. There are currently 4.2 million homeless people in Canada. We have never seen or known such poverty. Yet the government has a $14 billion surplus which it is whittling down by spending on military equipment and giving tax breaks to oil companies that are making so much money, they do not know what to do with it. The Government of Alberta is forced to send cheques to people because it no longer knows what to do with the money. It is disgraceful.

[The Budget, March 4th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to say that I will share my time with the member for Vaudreuil-Soulanges.

I am very pleased to rise today in this House to talk about my views on this budget, views that are shared by the women we represent, aboriginal women, senior women, single mothers, women who are still in school and veterans' widows. In short, we feel that the budget is certainly not favourable, and this is definitely one of the reasons we will vote against it.

Last week, the UN held its 53rd session on the status of women. The minister did not attend, but the coordinator of Status of Women Canada, Clare Beckton, was there. What a surprise it was for the representatives of the social groups at that session to hear Ms. Beckton's statements, in which she simply repeated that Canada would develop an action plan, as set out in the budget, and that Canada's position was very low compared to some European countries, such as the United Kingdom.

This meeting was also attended by Michèle Asselin, of the Fédération des femmes du Québec, Louise Riendeau, of the Quebec association of women's shelters and transition houses, and representatives of many other organizations such as the CSN, FIQ and FTQ. They roundly condemned the fact that, although the budget included an action plan, there was almost no point in mentioning it because an action plan had already been adopted some years ago, in 1995, namely the Beijing platform for action. This is the action plan that we should be implementing to ensure that women are afforded equality and equity.

This year, the rhetoric was to have been transformed into action by implementing the Beijing platform for action. I would also like to point out that the report submitted to the Status of Women Canada committee in 2006 by the expert panel of which Ms. Langevin of Laval University was a member, pinpointed the issues and the means of addressing the challenges.

Therefore, we really wonder why the budget mentions a plan, when there are no specific measures geared to women to improve their status, pay equity and so forth. Serious questions are being raised. Are they just trying to look good? In the throne speech, the word woman appeared only once. This year, we have a brief paragraph of six lines that talks about women without providing the means to meet the needs identified by a number of groups.

Prebudget consultations were held and groups told the government exactly what they wanted to see in the budget to improve their condition. It is fairly surprising to note that nothing came of all these consultations. We are left wondering. Is it worthwhile having these consultations? Does the government really want to know what women want to see in budgets or is it all just window-dressing?

Personally, I tend to believe the latter. I have the impression that it is just window-dressing. In fact, the budget before us takes a step backwards. A gender-based analysis should have been carried out before the budget. Unfortunately, there is no sign of it.

As Ms. Beckton explained it to us, gender-based analysis (GBA) is supposed to be carried out within the various departments and services before approaching the Treasury Board or the Privy Council. If the gender-based analysis had been done properly, the GBA champions in the various departments would have been able to point out the contradictions in the measures proposed.

I am convinced that these people, who do nothing but this kind of work, would have informed the ministers concerned of the different measures proposed and they would have persuaded them to make changes to those measures so that they truly respond to women’s needs and whatever had been found using gender-based analysis. Unfortunately, we see those concerns were not taken into consideration in the measures—and there are not many—that appear in this budget now before us.

Canada has been criticized several times in recent years by the United Nations and by CEDAW, the UN Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Moreover, Canada is still under investigation this year and CEDAW has criticized Canada many times. There is also ICESCR, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has criticized Canada on several issues, including employment insurance, the absence of day care in Canada and aboriginal women. I say “absence of day care in Canada” because everyone in this House certainly knows that day care services are well provided in Quebec. Quebec has provided day care services and ensured that women in Quebec have proper and effective day care services and that their children are well protected and receive an education that promotes their development until they are able to go to school.

I think that is a real shame because it was a wonderful opportunity for the government to demonstrate that it really is concerned about the status of women. We saw that with older women who are veterans' widows. I have said often enough that my own mother is a veteran’s widow. She took care of my father for 40 years. Today, she needs help. With this new program that the government has introduced, there is no way for her to receive help, even though she has been a widow for 20 years and she looked after my father for 40 years. It is very clear that my mother is much older than she was in those days. Now, she is the one who needs help.

Yet, the government is not interested in providing help to these widows whose husbands spent six years at the front. We see people now returning from the war in Afghanistan after spending six months at the front and those people are suffering from post-traumatic syndrome and all kinds of conditions. There is help for them.

When my father went to war, from 1939 to 1945, he spent six years on the front lines. He took part in all the Mediterranean campaigns, and yet, when he came back, there were no services to help him deal with post-traumatic shock. The only way he could get through the post-traumatic shock was by being with his family, his wife, the woman who helped him his entire life. Today, those very people are being denied assistance, those people who acted in a very exceptional way to support our soldiers returning from the second world war after experiencing so much trauma.

They are not the only people who were abandoned by this budget. Indeed, aboriginal women were once again overlooked. Once again, the government decided to give small amounts of money to small organizations and groups, instead of giving significant amounts of money in order to ensure that aboriginal women living in first nations communities can benefit from adequate services to meet their needs.

We saw that shelters for aboriginal women receive a subsidy of only $90,000 a year, while women's shelters in Quebec receive a subsidy of $300,000 a year. Yet the needs are quite different. For aboriginal women, the shelters are in the community and are known to everyone. The challenges are therefore even greater. They need even more support and greater security. They must be given adequate services to get out of their difficult situations.

I am being signalled that I have only one minute left and I will soon be cut off. Yet I have so much more to say. I will come back to this topic, there is no doubt.

[Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, February 29th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the bill of my colleague from Parkdale—High Park. I listened carefully to what my colleagues said earlier. If this does raise concerns about allowing more people to enter Canada, we should examine this bill from another perspective.

When we talk about people who can be a sponsor once in their lifetime, we are speaking of human beings and not quotas or numbers. We are talking about people who came to Canada, perhaps years earlier, with dreams and sometimes without possessions, and who were able to integrate, to put down roots, to contribute to society and who now wish to have family members—not necessarily immediate family members—join them so they, too can have a better future and a better life.

There is nothing more noble than wanting to help someone who would like to immigrate to Quebec or Canada, even if you are a distant relative. We must not forget that when people leave their own country to go elsewhere, it is because they are looking for a better life in place where they can grow financially, physically and spiritually. That should be uppermost in our minds as we talk about this bill.

I am able to speak to this bill in this way because two people in my riding whom I know quite well are political refugees from Tanzania. These people have a specific problem today. They would like to be reunited with their family and have their children come and join them. Unfortunately, that is proving to be very difficult.

There has been mention of an immigration backlog. There certainly is a backlog, because roughly 50 of the 156 commissioner positions have been cut, even though there are 115,000 immigration applications. There were 115,000 as of September 2005, and then 50 position were cut. How are the poor commissioners who are left supposed to examine more applications? They are not robots.

These cuts were made after the Conservatives came to power. When the Conservatives took power two years ago, Canada was short five commissioners. The person who was to appoint replacements had a list of 80 people who could fill the positions effectively and immediately. But instead of acting right away, the government preferred to wait and leave the positions vacant.

If there is a backlog, it is not because Canada is accepting too many immigrants, but because the government cut immigration commissioner positions.

The two people who live in my riding are Tanzanian refugees who met in a refugee camp. The woman had children whom she believed had died when her village was attacked. She narrowly escaped death and was taken to the refugee camp before being brought here.

Imagine her surprise a few years ago when she was told her children had been seen alive. Since then she has been trying to find them to reunite with them, but she has had to go through so much red tape.

The case of the man in this couple also concerns us. He was working for the Tanzanian government at the time. When he realized that something bad was brewing, he quit his job. He was then perceived as an enemy of the military and he was set to be assassinated. He also ended up in a refugee camp. He then came here as a political refugee. When he left the camp, he failed to mention that he had children because he feared for their lives.

The one believed her children were dead and the other did not want his children to be killed. Today, these two people are having difficulty bringing their children here. They are being denied DNA testing, under the pretext that it is too complicated and too expensive.

All these immigrants are asking for is permission to sponsor a member of their extended family once in their lives. The government is in a position to help them. As my colleague said earlier, when immigrants come here, they have to find a school or a job, they have to put down roots and integrate and so on. Is there a better way for people to integrate than to come to a country where they know people, where they have family, people who love them and will help them settle in? Is there a better way than being able to count on people upon arriving rather than finding oneself alone, which was, sadly, the case for these two people?

I do not think there is a better way than that. Claiming that this would put the country at risk is not a valid argument. How could it possibly put the country at risk? People who were allowed to become permanent residents and citizens here have already had their backgrounds checked. The people they want to invite here, the people they want to sponsor, will also have to go through background checks. If an immigrant seeks to sponsor a person once in his or her life, that does not mean that the applicant will be exempt from the process that all immigrants have to go through. That is nonsense. People are trying to misrepresent the issue by saying anything they please to make others believe that this bill is no good.

I am sorry, but we believe this bill has merit and certainly deserves to be referred to committee for further study and review of the parameters. If certain things about the bill bother or upset the members, they can examine them. That is what parliamentary committees are for.

I hope my hon. colleagues will not listen to our Conservative colleague and that, quite the opposite, they will be willing to side with reason for once, and vote to refer this bill to committee.

[Status of Women, February 28th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, the 450-page budget document has only six lines pertaining to women and these do not reflect their demands. La Fédération des femmes du Québec has even called it irresponsible. The minister has talked about an action plan, but the solutions have already been identified; they just need to be implemented.

Can the Minister of Finance tell us why he could not find $11 million to reinstate the court challenges program, restore the original criteria for the Women's Program, and re-open the regional offices of Status of Women Canada?

[Canada Elections Act, February 14th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I was listening to my colleague and I can come up with a whole host of reasons why the Conservative Party would want this. It is true that the Prime Minister did not declare all the contributions he received for his leadership race. He declared a few contributions over $1,000, but not all of them. It is also true that there are very few women in the Conservative Party. It is not important for them to give women the opportunity to run for politics. The fewer there are, the less they are challenged and the fewer problems they have within their own party. That is clear. Women who do get elected are often there as tokens. It is unfortunate.

My colleague is right to say that every time a party tries to limit people from seeking election, there is something behind that. In the United States, the more conservative parties that denounce pornography, pedophilia, gays and abortion, are most often the parties where we find people accused of pedophilia and other offences. It does not surprise me in the least that the current government is trying to implement changes to ensure that as few people as possible take part in the democratic process.

However, the Conservatives are taking advantage of the money in their coffers to do things before the election campaign and while they are still in power. We saw the unelected Minister Fortier campaigning with signs on the bus and spending thousands of dollars on ad campaigns. He has offices in a riding where he was not even elected. He is a minister who was appointed. This is something else the Prime Minister swore he would never do. Those are the people we end up with. It is easy for them because they have thousands of dollars.

Where did they get this money? They did not get it for nothing, nor did they get it for their good looks. They did not get it because the Conservative Party suddenly discovered a social mission. They got it because the people who gave them money knew they would do something in return. That is wrong.

[Canada Elections Act, February 14th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, although I am usually quite happy to rise in this House to debate various bills dealing with social problems, I find it difficult to debate this bill because, for me, anything that has to do with money and math is esoteric. It is all Greek to me. It is a language that I do not understand at all. In that regard, the chair of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women could corroborate. I have to work very hard to understand anything concerning money.

What I do understand, however, is that the government was too anxious to put through Bill C-2 and that the bill has several shortcomings. That does not surprise me, but what I do find surprising is that the government now wants to address some of those shortcomings. Indeed, over the past two years, none of the objectives of Bill C-2 has been met in its original form. The purpose of the bill was to guarantee a responsible, transparent government that would never commit any wrongdoings as serious as those we had seen in the past. We now see that that is not the case and we must quickly put forward another bill to correct the shortcomings. Let us hope that Bill C-29 will correct these deficiencies, not only in words or in the text of the legislation, but also in action.

Contrary to what my colleague just said, if a young woman from Rimouski went to a bank to get a loan so that she could run in a federal election, I do not think she would have the problems he was describing. In Quebec, the caisses populaires have a social duty and must lend 60% of the amount that a person is entitled to receive from the Chief Electoral Officer for federal elections. So we have something here that is probably already better than what exists in the ROC, the rest of Canada. We have created financial institutions for ourselves in Quebec and passed laws that prevent the kind of abuses they are trying to prevent today with Bill C-29.

At the same time, though, as they try to prevent abuses, they are handicapping the political parties a bit by removing their ability to decide—along with the— whether he or she can borrow money. According to the bill, the parties would be responsible for the money their candidates borrowed. That is totally absurd. I wonder whether the party of which I am a proud member would have been able to meet my needs when I decided to enter politics. I made my own decisions about how much money I needed, an amount that was very personal. It is not up to the parties to foot the bill for people who decide to run for them in elections.

A candidate is chosen and talks with his party. He determines his strategy together and in collaboration with his party, but ultimately, it is the candidate who decides how much he wants to spend on his election campaign. If the political party were made responsible for the money that a candidate spends, we would be opening the door to major abuses.

It is the same as if I decided to buy a new house and told the bank it could have confidence in me because the Speaker of the House of Commons likes it and supports my getting a loan. Since you are a solid citizen, the bank would give me the money. That would be a bit ridiculous.

Once again, we see the party in power, the Conservatives, trying to put more restrictive rules in place when they do not follow their own rules. It is rather paradoxical. When we adopt rules, we should start by following them ourselves before insisting that other people should follow them or thinking that a new rule should be invented to prevent one party or another from making progress.

That is the impression given by this bill.

Bill C-54, which was introduced in the last session, was very similar to this bill. It was examined in committee and debated on several occasions. In fact, an amendment from the Bloc Québécois had been incorporated into the bill. As a result, it was a better bill that provided a great deal more latitude to political parties, to individuals and to companies. We know that we must act responsibly.

Now, the government has tabled other amendments, which are unacceptable, to prevent us from acting in a way that any political party should have to right to act.

In Quebec, we have had regulations governing political funding for more than 30 years. René Lévesque was very conscious of the difficulties and temptations that political parties, individuals and legislature members must deal with. Some members or ministers think they have a great deal more power because their party is in office. That is not how we are supposed to think. We are supposed to take our responsibilities very seriously. Unfortunately, too many people do not do that.

Therefore, we have created a very strict framework that requires parties, members of the legislature and individuals to follow the rules. Those rules have been followed for more than 30 years and that works very well in Quebec, contrary to what some government members here have said. If there is electoral fraud in Quebec it does not happen often. When there is fraud it is discovered immediately, and not two, three or four years later, because we have provided the tools to do that.

The government seems to forget that in the past two years it introduced Bill C-2 to deal with some of the difficulties that parliamentarians might encounter. But they have not even respected the spirit of Bill C-2.

We have heard of influence-peddling in recent weeks. We have also seen appointments that are clearly favouritism. In the past few weeks, we have seen contracts awarded to third parties in ways that do not comply with the regulations. Those contracts were for just under $25,000, which made it possible to award more contracts, to more people, without following the usual procedures.

In my opinion, when we create legislation it is because we recognize that we have a responsibility toward our fellow citizens. If we only do it to look good, would it not be better to think seriously before trying to put through a bill? Would it not be better, as a political body—I am speaking of the government—to look deeply into its conscience to ensure that Bill C-2 is respected?

They tell us all day long that they brought forward Bill C-2, but for the past two years that bill has been laughed at and ignored by the government in power. For two years they have twisted that bill in all kinds of ways. Now, they want to make amendments to Bill C-29 in order to make life difficult for the political parties that are not in power. It is ridiculous.

Part of this bill is certainly important. We will vote in favour of that important part; but the majority of the amendments that have been added are not acceptable to us because they simply do not make sense. We want nothing to do with those.

We do not want those.

[Livestock Industry, February 13th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask a question of my colleague from Malpeque, whom I thank for his speech.

In recent weeks, we have had to sign a slapdash agreement because the government had promised money for the manufacturing and forestry industries. That money was promised as blackmail. Now we see that the beef and pork producers will be receiving money under a program that will only come into effect in April.

Does he not have the impression that the people of Canada and Quebec are being somewhat held hostage in the various programs that the government wants to institute? Does he not have somewhat the impression that this is the case both for beef and pork producers and for the manufacturing and forestry industries? We are seeing a strong trend. Could he answer me on this?

[Privilege, February 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a matter of privilege. In his response to a question, the hon. member for Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière made a very disparaging remark about receptionists.

I think the hon. member for Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière should realize that receptionists are much more than “charming”. They are skilled, efficient and diligent people, not just “charming”.

I would like the hon. member for Lotbinière—Chutes-de-la-Chaudière to apologize to all secretaries and receptionists.

[Pay Equity, February 8th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, we recently learned that Human Resources and Social Development Canada, the Treasury Board and the Canada Public Service Agency discriminated against medical adjudicators at the Canada Pension Plan.

The medical adjudicators—nurses, 95% of whom are female—earn from $50,000 to $60,000. Medical advisers—doctors, 80% of whom are male—earn twice as much as medical adjudicators. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal has stated that both groups do the same job, which is to assess medical fitness to determine eligibility for CPP disability benefits.

It is shameful to see the federal government treat its own employees this way and to claim that there is equality among men and women, when it does not even apply pay equity. The government must set an example and introduce proactive legislation on pay equity, like the legislation in Quebec.

[HIV-AIDS among Aboriginal People, February 7th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, it is true that we have a lot of programs to help people struggling with drug problems, whether injection drugs or others are involved. Those programs are important.

We know that HIV transmission is often linked to injection drug use. People may not have enough money to buy new syringes every day or even every hour, or they may simply be unable to get the devices they need to administer drugs correctly.

Organizations like CACTUS are very active in syringe distribution programs. Other programs, such as those offered by community health centres, provide information, support and help. Drug users have rights too. Drug addiction is an illness and it can be treated. However, to treat the illness, people need access to comprehensive programs that treat not only their bodies, but also their souls. This is not just a physical illness; it is a spiritual one as well.

We have developed a number of programs in Quebec. I know that in Vancouver, too, there is a place that is very useful to people—