Pat Martin

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I think I understand the question from my colleague, the member for Saint Boniface. The Conservative government is trying to do through the back door what it could not do through the front door. By statute, to make these changes to the way the Wheat Board operates, it has to be put to a vote of the member farmers.

The government started a gerrymander with the voter's list because I think it knows it is on shakey ground. It is going to have to allow farmers to vote on this. It is not just because we accuse it of being undemocratic. It is probably getting that same advice not only from the Canadian Wheat Board and the member farmers. Maybe there are people who are not afraid of democracy breaking out.

The government is trying to do this through the back door without going to a vote of the people, which is required by statute. That is what led me to say that this is Fascism to deny democracy in this way.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I do not know what to say. I do not think one can make this kind of broad policy decision based on isolated ad hoc incidents.

I read a letter from one farmer and he read a letter from another one farmer. Therefore, we are even on that front.

The point is that no one is being allowed, in any kind of a public way, to make this case to the Canadian people. Instinctively, I think most Canadians would understand that, collectively, we are a lot stronger in terms of marketing this product. This is the only chance we have to be taken seriously on the world market.

The Canadian Wheat Board is respected as perhaps 18% or 20% of world market. We are taken seriously as a player. If we dismantle that, we will not have that advantage in terms of world marketing and et cetera.

One issue I do want to point out is that the spokesman for the National Farmers Union talks about how the dual market kills the CWB because its monopoly seller position is precisely what earns farmers premium prices in those global markets. In unity there is strength. It is an old adage that we use on this side of the House. Those guys would be well advised to consider that as well.

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

We are calling it a gag order. It says right here on the top of my page, “The minister's gag order”. It clearly says that the Canadian Wheat Board will not be allowed to expend funds directly or indirectly, even for market research. One would think that would be a necessary aspect of its day to day function, to conduct market research, publishing and advertising et cetera. It will not provide funds to any other person to do a similar task.

If there are two legitimate sides to this debate, and we would have to be pretty pigheaded to say that there are not two legitimate sides to this argument, it has been wrestled with for the last decade, then should we not be hearing both of those sides equally? Should we not be allowed to have both sides of the argument represented and then the one side will win on the virtue of its merits, hopefully, not on some ideological crusade?

[Committees of the House, October 18th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to take part in the debate. I represent the downtown area of Winnipeg, which is home to the headquarters of the Canadian Wheat Board. Also coming from a prairie province that depends so much on agriculture and farm income, I felt it was necessary for me to enter the debate.

Let me start by simply saying there is no business case for abolishing the Canadian Wheat Board. It is pure ideological madness. It is an ideological crusade that the Conservative Party has undertaken, really to do the Americans' dirty work for them.

The Wheat Board has been the subject of 11 separate U.S. trade attacks. The board has won every one, something the Americans could not do. Even before the ink was dry in the 1989 free trade agreement, they were gunning for the Canadian Wheat Board. They made no bones about it whatsoever. In fact, the Americans wanted the Wheat Board out of the way. It is a trade irritant just as the softwood lumber deal is a trade irritant. The new Conservative government is dutifully falling in line to do the dirty work of the Americans.

Many people, if they are not in the industry, do not understand how the Wheat Board works. The reason a dual market will not work and the reason it will be the death rattle of the Canadian Wheat Board is very simple. If the open market is higher than the initial payment, the board will not get any deliveries. However, if the initial payment is higher than the market, then it gets all these deliveries, but it has to sell them at a loss. That is why this dual marketing will not work.

I respectfully ask members to think back to the voluntary central selling agency run by the pools in the 1920s and to the voluntary Canadian Wheat Board, which was run in 1935. Both of them had spectacular bankruptcies. They were the greatest business bankruptcies in Canadian history for that simple reason. A voluntary Canadian Wheat Board do not work nor will it survive.

We have had letters from farmers and I want to read one. I know people have questioned the veracity of these letters. These are letters written by individual farmers and signed by them. This one is from a farmer in Richmond, Saskatchewan. He challenges the statements from our current Minister of Agriculture and from the Parliamentary Secretary. He says, “The statement that the majority of farmers support the concept of dual marketing is false”.

I believe it is false as well. I believe if it was put to a plebiscite, if it was put to a fair vote, we would be able to verify that.

He goes on to say, “The statement that the present government has a mandate to end the monopoly of the Canadian Wheat Board is false and the statement that it's not about economics, it's about freedom, which I have heard the minister and others say, is just plain stupid”. That is according to him. I would not say that. “In this case, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Leave the Canadian Wheat Board alone. It's the only support left for western Canadian farmers”.

That brings me to the point of this gag order. The minister says that I called him a Fascist for denying them the right to vote and then imposing this gag order. I did not call the minister a Fascist. I said it was like Fascism to deny them democracy. I said that Mussolini would be proud the way the government introduced this gag order over Canadian farmers because it is an unfair fight. It is an issue of natural justice.

We have misinformation abounding or information with which we disagree. The Canadian Wheat Board claims to have other evidence to the contrary, but it is not allowed to bring it into this public debate about the future of the Wheat Board. How can that be seen to be fair?

Let mention a couple of the facts that we would enter, and I am sure the Wheat Board would make public if it were allowed to. One study found that in 2001 farmers got about $10 per tonne more under single desk selling than they would have otherwise received. That is a study by a Dr. Richard Gray. I would be happy to table that.

Another study, the Kraft-Furtan study in 1997, showed the benefit from single desk selling at $265 million per year. Again, we would like to promote those figures as opposed to the figures we heard from the parliamentary secretary, who said that farmers lost up to $400 million a year by single desk selling, I believe.

Another earlier study by a Dr. Andrew Schmitz showed that marketing through the Wheat Board increased the returns of barley producers by $72 million a year.

The Conservative government would have to admit that there is a body of evidence on the contrary of the position it is tabling. How is it anybody's best interest to deny the Wheat Board what I would see the legitimate right to make its case and to have its argument known. It is a bit like a boxing match where we have one guy with his hands tied behind his back. In nobody's mind could that be viewed as even remotely fair.

There are things that we could challenge about the parliamentary secretary's comments. I have a quote from Hansard where he said, “In fact 60% to 80% of the farmers do support change, I am not sure why 20% to 30% of the farmers should hold the other 70% captive”.

One cannot get away with that kind of thing without being challenged. If the Canadian Wheat Board is being denied a voice, we will be the voice for it. I serve notice right here that we will be dedicating our time, between now and whenever the government plans for the axe to fall, to make the case for the Canadian Wheat Board and to fight the government if it intends to tear down this great prairie institution.

Nobody should want to go back to the bad old days, least of all a party that says that it represents the grassroots farmers. I used to deliver papers in the rich part of Winnipeg when I was a kid. Virtually every one of those mansions was built by the robber barons, the grain barons, who used to systematically rip off the prairie farmer. Those mansions were built on the backs of prairie farmers who could not get a fair price for grain, so they started to act collectively and cooperatively.

Maybe that is what the Conservative Party has in opposition, that it is ideologically opposed to acting collectively. It is against public auto insurance, unions and that kind of action.

Farmers banded together to protect their own interests, and that is a good thing. It was a survival thing and an issue of basic fairness. Since 1943, when the Wheat Board was founded and given it its single desk monopoly, they could get a fair price, compete on the world market and get the prices because its was a superior product.

Also, because I come from the province of Manitoba, the future of the Port of Churchill is in serious jeopardy because the grain will be sold south. It will be mixed with the inferior American product. We will lose the commercial identity of our superior Canadian wheat product, and that will be to our lasting detriment as well.

I am happy the minister stayed to listen to the speeches. I beg the government to reconsider this idea. There are consequences that go far beyond living up to the campaign promise that Conservatives made to their base. Clearly, there is a legitimate pocket of farmers who do want the Wheat Board dismantled, or at least a dual marketing system. However, it is a more complex issue than that.

We remember the bad old days on the Prairies, when an individual farmer had virtually no bargaining strength in terms of trying to sell product to the Paterson's and the Cargill's and whomever would be dominating and controlling these things. Maybe Cargill is a bad example.

In our experience, the Canadian Wheat Board is the best opportunity to get a fair price for the product. I cannot argue enough that we need to defend this great prairie institution for all those compelling reasons.

Let me go back to the directive that the minister put forward, what we are calling a gag order.

[Points of Order, October 17th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, very briefly, I do have a point of order that I would like to raise. During question period, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, in answering a question from the member for Winnipeg South Centre, made reference, accidentally, I suppose, to the member for Winnipeg Centre not being in favour of matrimonial property rights for aboriginal women.

I would like the record corrected. I believe the Minister of Indian Affairs misspoke and meant to say the member for Winnipeg South Centre, not Winnipeg Centre.

[Committees of the House, October 17th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I will try to make the most of what little time we have left, but I do appreciate the opportunity, on behalf of the NDP caucus, to enter into the debate.

I would like to recognize and pay tribute to my colleague from Ottawa—Vanier for bringing the issue to the floor of the House of Commons today by moving a concurrence motion to a report from the heritage committee. It is timely. He is doing a service to the country by bringing this fulsome debate to the House of Commons today.

This is an issue that the government clearly wanted to slip in under the wire, with very little fanfare and very little notice. We are not prepared to let this issue go under the table. We will not let the government slip it under there without having a full scrutiny debate in the House of Commons and without a vote in the House of Commons. We want to shine the light of day on what really is going on with this issue so the government does not get away with it, not if we can help it.

The federal government would have us believe that it is eliminating the court challenge program because it is somehow frivolously funding every Tom, Dick and Harry to sue their own government over legislation that it puts in place. Essentially this is the answer we heard in question period when the President of the Treasury Board was pressed on this issue. We were pressing the minister for the business case. We were pressing him for some reason, some rationale as to why this heavy-handed move was justified. This is a deliberately simplistic and misleading overview of what the court challenge program does.

The one thing that the member for London West has done for us is spell out, not just what the federal court challenge program does, but the things that it does not do. It certainly does not provide funding to anyone who wants to sue the federal government. There are very rigid tests. The bar is set very high as to what type of challenges qualify for any support under the court challenges program.

It is a matter when legislation, by omission or commission, offends the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or the Constitution of Canada, or it somehow is applied in such a way that a legitimate group of Canadians feel that they are not being treated equally by their own Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The highest duty of a member of Parliament is to ensure that all Canadians are treated equally.

I am proud to say that this is one country in the world where equality is our main objective, which is not the case everywhere in the world. In Canada we have very meticulously written in to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms the assurance that Canadians can count on being treated equally as far as the application of services, benefits or anything provided by the government. Therefore, it is not a nuisance to the government to have Canadians or organizations test the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by these regular court challenges. It strengthens our rights. Our rights are made more secure by these challenges.

We should keep in mind that the Canadian Constitution is not a rigid document. It is a living, breathing, evolving document that can benefit from these rare and infrequent tests and challenges.

We should at least start from the same base level of information as we ask Canadians to concern themselves with this debate. They should go into this with their eyes open. Clearly the government has tried to sneak this through in a flurry of other activity and other cutbacks, hoping no one will notice this relatively small budget line. Let us be fair. This is a very small amount of money on the global scale of things. Let us also ensure that misinformation is not what is guiding us here. We have to challenge comments from the President of the Treasury Board when he says that all the money just goes to Liberal lawyers anyway.

My colleague from Windsor pointed out that these challenges are often collaborative efforts by non-profit groups and NGOs. They find lawyers to work pro bono. The court challenge money they get, or the enabling money, is often used to pay for court costs, expert witnesses, research, et cetera.

Having laid that foundation, I challenge the veracity of both of the excuses given by the President of the Treasury Board. I think we could then begin to have a proper debate about whether or not we need this assistance in our judicial system.

Let me point to one case to illustrate how valuable this program can be. It is my own personal experience. In Winnipeg Centre the Community Unemployed Help Centre deals with people who are having trouble with their employment insurance. On behalf of one client, Kelly Leisuk, the centre launched a Federal Court challenge sponsored by the court challenge program . The centre maintained that the EI act does not treat women equally, that women suffer a gender imbalance with the application of EI as it was evolved by the Liberal government.

When the EI system went from a weekly based system to an hourly based system, women were disproportionately and negatively impacted in that more women worked low wage part time jobs and so women qualified less often for any EI benefits than men did. The empirical evidence was fairly straightforward. Frequent appeals to the federal government bore no satisfaction at all. We made the case to the federal government that the EI program was affecting women negatively, but the government of the day was deaf to this gender imbalance. The only avenue of recourse was to make a charter challenge under section 15, the equality provisions of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that the EI act as contemplated by the Liberal government offended the charter.

Where else would a non-profit workers' organization go? Its total budget, and I know because I sat on its board of directors, is $250,000 a year. That funded four staff to advocate on behalf of people having trouble with their employment insurance. Where would an organization like that go to launch a massive Supreme Court challenge if not to the court challenge program?

When viewed in that light, it is an issue of natural justice, in this case on behalf of Canadian women. They would not have a voice and would not be able to have legal representation in this compelling matter were it not for the court challenges program. It is not unlike legal aid. We do not allow defendants to go into a courtroom unrepresented. They are given legal aid. No one argues if that is fair. It is a natural justice issue. In that same context, from time to time we need to test the veracity of our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and thereby strengthen it by these court challenges by legitimate groups within Canada.

I condemn the government for cutting the court challenges program. I thank my colleague from Ottawa—Vanier for giving us the opportunity to voice those concerns in the House today.

[Hazardous Materials Information Review Act, October 16th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, asbestos is the single greatest industrial killer the world has ever known. There is no safe level of asbestos exposure and no material safety data sheet will protect us if we are exposed to it. Asbestos kills. It should be banned globally. At the very least, the Government of Canada should stop being a globe trotting propagandist for the asbestos industry and it should stop handing out corporate welfare to corporate serial killers.

[Hazardous Materials Information Review Act, October 16th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the member's helpful question gives me the opportunity to point out that the proposed amendments in Bill S-2 will permit the voluntary correction of material safety data sheets and product labels when the commission finds them to be non-compliant. We can save that burdensome step.

At present, the commission must make formal correction orders even if the manufacturer or the person distributing whatever material claims it is fully prepared to make voluntary corrections. Therefore, there is some room for optimism that we can benefit the situation in workplaces around the country if it is not such an onerous task to make orders to correct deficient workplace safety and health data sheets.

One of the figures my colleague, the member for Windsor West, pointed out, which we should all be well aware of or take note of and be concerned about, is that 95% of those data sheets examined by the commission were found to be non-compliant and not just in immaterial ways. On average eight or nine errors were in those sheets examined. Therefore, clearly the WHMIS regime in the country is sorely lacking and it needs correction.

I hope I did not overstay my welcome by arguing about asbestos, but I would like to see the material safety data sheet on Quebec asbestos, on chrysotile asbestos. That safety data sheet would say that there is no safe level of asbestos, that we should not handle the product and that our wives and children should not be exposed to it because it will kill them. This would be the only fair WHMIS data sheet on asbestos that we could put because there is no safe level of asbestos. There is no control or safe use of asbestos. Exposure to one single fibre can and in many cases has caused life threatening disease.

[Hazardous Materials Information Review Act, October 16th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, chrysotile asbestos kills in the same way that all types of asbestos kill.

The mine that I worked at mined chrysotile asbestos, long-fibre chrysotile asbestos. That is the same material that is currently being mined in Thetford Mines, in the Jeffrey mine and the LAB Chrysotile mine. Both mines were recently bought by Warren Buffet, I should point out.

We are really putting Canadian workers at risk in these mines to make foreign capitalists rich. We are exploiting Canadian workers in these dangerous workplace conditions. I pointed out that the incidence of asbestosis and mesothelioma is among the highest in the world in the Asbestos region of Quebec. No one can ever tell me that chrysotile asbestos is in some way benign or in some way healthy because chrysotile asbestos causes cancer the same way all asbestos do. There are five different kinds. Chrysotile is deadly.

[Hazardous Materials Information Review Act, October 16th, 2006]

You are right, Mr. Speaker. I was taking the long circuitous route to bring me back to my original point which was dealing with workplace health and safety issues. The connection was so plain and so obvious in my mind.

What I am advocating here is an amendment to Bill S-2. I believe there should at least be a reference in Bill S-2 to our international obligations. The type of workplace safety and health conditions put in place in Canada in 1988 are admirable. They are some of the best in the world. There are some hiccups and some problems with the material safety data sheets, but the intent is laudable and honourable.

There is a glaring contradiction though in the fact that we do not extend this beyond our own shores, and as such, we are doing a great disservice to other underdeveloped countries. Part of our overall development aid in recent years has been building the administrative capacity of countries as well as brick and mortar development in terms of digging wells or infrastructure.

With the globalization of capital, one of the things that is terribly lacking is the fact that there has not been a globalization of harmonizing workers' rights. We have globalized the free movement of capital, but we have not globalized things like a commitment to human rights, and a workplace safety and health standard. I wish Bill S-2 dealt with these things.

I think there would be broad interest in the general public's point of view. Canadians would be horrified to learn that we continue to be the third largest producer and exporter of asbestos in the world. Canadians do not realize that asbestos is not banned in this country and we need to caution them about this fact.

Just because we will not let a Canadian be exposed to a single fibre of the stuff does not mean it is banned. It certainly does not mean that we are doing anything to stop pushing this material into underdeveloped countries in the third world.

We have put the Rotterdam Convention in jeopardy. At the same instant that we are debating WHMIS in this country, the international equivalent of WHMIS, the Rotterdam Convention, is near collapse because of the corporate greed of the asbestos industry and Canadian government officials who are handmaidens to that industry. They have put the integrity of the Rotterdam Convention at serious risk. I predict they have jeopardized its very future.