Pat Martin

[Committees of the House, November 30th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I move that the first report of the Standing Committee on Finance presented on Wednesday, October 20, be concurred in.

I take this rather unusual step to draw the House's attention to the fact that the apparel industry is in crisis and needs the attention of the House of Commons. There is a very simple remedy found within the first report of the finance committee. It gives direction to the Minister of Finance to give relief to this industry in crisis and more specifically, from a self-interest point of view, to the 43 garment manufacturers in the riding of Winnipeg Centre. They have made representations to me that this is in fact an issue of urgency that should be dealt with in this session of Parliament. I also raise this matter because we are fast coming to a deadline where the opportunity to provide this relief will disappear.

It would be wise for me to back up a little to explain specifically what is in this first report of the finance committee and what measures we are asking the Minister of Finance to take on behalf of the garment manufacturers in my riding, and in fact the garment manufacturers in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and everywhere that this critical industry is located.

The issue is simple. Currently, there are duty remission orders that are in effect to help the garment industry cope with the pressures of international trade and globalization, and the pressures in recent years. Those duty remission orders have allowed these companies to keep their doors open in spite of overwhelming odds and adversity that this new global marketplace has put on them, and specific actions from this government that I will get into later. These duty remission orders are set to expire on December 31.

On January 1, 2005, these garment manufacturers will no longer enjoy this duty remission situation granted by the government. I can tell members without any hesitation or without any fear of contradiction that as soon as those duty remission orders expire these businesses will topple like dominoes. In my riding, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and everywhere we have a garment industry, these businesses will fail and with them will go Canadian jobs. I do not say this to be romantic or to raise the level of rhetoric. I am stating a fact.

I raise this in the House of Commons today and take the rather unusual step of highjacking the orders of the day because these garment manufacturers have tried every other avenue of recourse to get through to the Minister of Finance the urgency of their message. They have lobbied the Minister of Finance in every way imaginable. They have asked members of Parliament from every party to lobby the Minister of Finance, which we have dutifully done in the months leading up to this urgency that we find ourselves in now.

However, we are out of time. December 31 is around the corner. Parliament will adjourn in a few weeks and we will not have the extension signed that would extend the duty remission orders that would allow these businesses to stay open. It is on the Minister of Finance's desk, ready to be signed. A unanimous report from the Standing Committee on Finance has directed him to sign it, not once but twice.

In the last Parliament, in April 2004, the Standing Committee on Finance dealt with this issue. It heard the legitimate grievances of the garment industry, acknowledged their concerns and wrote a recommendation in its report saying that the Minister of Finance should sign the extension of the duty remission orders that are due to expire on December 31. Nothing happened. Then we had an election.

The situation got even more urgent in July, August and September, until finally a new Standing Committee on Finance was constituted. Its very first order of business in fact was to revisit this critically important issue because the clock was running out. The finance committee resubmitted a report to the 38th Parliament. I have it right here. I will not bore members with all the details but I will read the first recommendation. It states:

That the federal government immediately extend, for a further seven years, the duty remission orders covering the apparel sector that are set to expire on 31 December 2004.

Our Minister of Finance should take this as a directive. This should be a marching order for our Minister of Finance, not something to be shuffled away. I do not know who he is listening to, but he is not listening to the garment industry. He is not listening to those representing the workers in those garment industry sectors who stand to lose thousands of jobs.

In my riding of Winnipeg Centre 400 jobs have been lost already directly due to the meddling of the government and its failure to sign duty remission orders. That is 400 good paying unionized jobs with benefits. These are not stereotypical sweatshops in some old fashioned garment industry. These are bright, clean, modern workplaces with a day care centre, a cafeteria, and good paying middle income jobs with benefits. They are gone. Imagine what would have to be done to attract 400 jobs like that to a riding. People would pave the streets with gold. We have knowingly and willingly allowed them to disappear from my riding.

That is the not the only one. That is just Western Glove. I can talk about Gemini Fashions and Richlu Sportswear. There are 43 of these garment manufacturers in my riding. I can say without any hesitation or rhetoric that they will topple like dominoes if the Minister of Finance does not put pen to paper before December 31.

I apologize to my colleagues for hijacking the order of business today, but this is an emergency. This is urgent. This is real business that the House of Commons should be addressing. This is not some abstract esoteric debate we are having. This is reality.

The garment industry runs on real time, not on government time, and it cannot wait for bureaucrats to have another go at this. Again, I do not know who is advising our Minister of Finance, but it is not sound advice. He should listen to the real authorities on this issue. He should listen to the garment manufacturers who want to keep their jobs in Canada, but are being forced to outsource those jobs because of an unwillingness by the government to recognize the critical important of this industry.

In other industry sectors, it seems, on the basis of a phone call, the chequebook comes out and $100 million cheques get written. I am not going to criticize any one industry sector or the government intervening to help a sector, but for God's sake help the clothing and apparel sector today because we have a deadline looming.

I raise this with some emotion and passion because my inner city riding in downtown Winnipeg is the third poorest riding in the country. The largest single opportunity for employment is the garment sector. It is a gateway for new Canadians to get into the mainstream economy because the face of the garment sector worker today is largely Filipino, Laotian, Cambodian, or Eritrean. All of the immigrant groups that are settling in my riding more often than not find their first job opportunity in the garment sector. Maybe their children go on to become the nurses, doctors and lawyers in the next generation, but they get their start, and it is a good start, in the garment sector. We cannot provide those jobs without some assistance from the government.

I urge my colleagues to look at the first report from the Standing Committee on Finance. It is only five pages long. It is of critical importance and value. It outlines the extent of these duty remission orders and the dollar value of them. It is not a huge amount of money. Nationwide it is only about $40 million. One would say that surely the industry could cope and adjust to this relatively small loss, but people have to understand that this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

It has been coping and adjusting with incredible market forces and adversarial situations for a decade or more now, 15 years really, because these duty remission orders were put in place to help the industry cope with the free trade agreement and with NAFTA. Granted, they were interim measures.

I do not believe these duty remission orders should go on forever. They are still interim measures until we can put together an action plan to help the industry cope in some more permanent way, such as, increases in productivity or whatever it is going to take to help that industry survive. In the interim, do not cut it off like this. We are standing at the edge of a precipice and we are about to be pushed over. Build a ramp so these duty remission orders can be phased out perhaps in time, but not this sudden jump.

I can tell everyone that the garment industry has to have lead time. The garment industry already has its next year's production scheduled and has planned nine months ahead. It has to plan in advance. It has planned with the confidence that the Minister of Finance would listen to it and extend the duty remission orders.

All of these companies and factories that I am talking about have set their 2005 production schedules with the comfort that the duty remission orders would in fact be extended. Yet, month after month goes by and it does not get signed and they cannot get through to the Minister of Finance in any other way.

This is why we are taking this unusual step today. They call, but their phone calls do not get returned. They do not get meetings with the Minister of Finance. They get passed off to some underling, some bureaucrat, who clearly has a bias against this type of duty remission order because they are advising the minister not to sign it in spite of overwhelming evidence of how necessary it is from one coast to the other.

It is not just my riding of Winnipeg Centre that will have catastrophic effects if these duty remission orders are not signed, but it is downtown Montreal, where there is a rich and vibrant garment sector that is hanging on by its fingernails. The riding of Vancouver East, my colleague reminds me, has a vibrant garment manufacturing sector which has also been subjected to overwhelming contrary forces.

It is a tribute, a testimony, to the strength of these Canadian nationalists, who own these companies, that they have managed to keep their jobs in Canada to date. It is almost a miracle, really. All of the evidence or all of the reason and logic would tell them to give up and do their manufacturing offshore, to do their design here and keep their books and accounts here, but do all their manufacturing offshore, because it just does not add up.

However, to their credit they have been creative and resourceful. They have tried to keep those jobs here in Canada. We are not helping them for a lousy $40 million. I am not saying that to be flippant. I know it is a lot of money. It is $40 million spread out over the whole industry. “For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost”, and so the poem goes. For the want of this small amount of intervention on behalf of the government, we are about to lose this industry. I tell all hon. members, it will not be coming back. It will not be an interim plant closure. Once they are closed, they are gone.

Hon. members can tell from my tone that I am frustrated by this. I am frustrated because there are representatives from virtually every party who have personally and individually tried to reason with the Minister of Finance, first by letter then by phone calls and then by stopping him in the hallways, in the gymnasium, anywhere we can find him. We are begging, pleading, and imploring him to sign the paper that sits on his desk and save an industry.

There is no other single, more important thing he could do to preserve Canadian jobs in this session of Parliament than to sign the duty remission orders that we find here in the first report of the Standing Committee on Finance. If he needed more reason, he should listen to the Senate Standing Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce because it recommended the same thing. We have two reports from the Standing Committee on Finance, a report from the Senate Committee on Banking, Trade and Commerce, all telling the minister to sign the duty remission orders. What do we get? A deafening silence. What does it take to get through to these people? We have an emergency on our hands.

Perhaps nobody says it better than an actual practitioner in the trade. Gemini Fashions of Canada Limited in my riding just closed a plant with 150 employees. It is a block away from my constituency office.

The owner said, “Dear Minister, Gemini Fashions is a company in Winnipeg with a very proud tradition in Canadian apparel manufacturing. We just had to close our state-of-the-art outerwear manufacturing plant on Notre Dame Avenue in Winnipeg. This facility employed 150 skilled workers. This closure was a direct result of Prime Minister Chrétien's least developed country initiative to allow duty free and quota free imports into Canada from some 48 low cost countries”.

That was a unilateral and arbitrary move that the then Prime Minister made without consulting the industry to allow least developed nations to export products into Canada without duty. The problem is that everybody knew. Global corporations simply moved their production to least developed nations and they now manage to get their product into Canada without duty. It was a bad idea. They were advised against it.

The owner of Gemini Fashion points out: “But this action was done without consideration of the Canadian apparel industry and rendered many Canadian manufacturing assets useless and nearly worthless. There has been no effective or meaningful consideration afforded to those most affected by this unilateral action of the Canadian government, and without meaningful consultation in our industry. We cannot turn the clock back now but there is something you can do. You can pass into law the unanimous report of the Standing Committee on Finance completed on March 31-04, enclosed herewith for your reference”.

Here we have a garment manufacturer who has just had to close his factory, his family business, and lay off 150 skilled workers, appealing to the minister in a letter in April 2004 to please implement the recommendations of the Standing Committee at that time. That was six months ago. The situation was urgent then. The situation is desperate now, because essentially we have two weeks to go in this Parliament to try to reason with the Minister of Finance, to implore him once again in this more public way to please sign these duty remission orders so that this industry can live to fight another day.

That is what we are asking. We are asking the minister to give the industry a pardon, what could we call it--

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, we will fiercely fight to protect our jurisdiction in Manitoba when it comes to the delivery of social programs, but we will just as fiercely demand that this new ministry of social development does something about the inadequacy of the transfer payments to the provinces so that they can meet the genuine need within inner city ridings like ours.

The Canada health and social transfer has been an abject failure in terms of block funding for post-secondary education, health care and social services. Perhaps through this new Minister of Social Development we will be able to argue that basic needs in our communities are not being met by their current structure, their current policy and their current miserly treatment in the transfer of money to the provinces so that we can deliver those programs in our own jurisdictions.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

What an idiot. I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. What I meant to say is that the program I was making reference to is the EI program. Changes to the EI program took $20.8 million per year out of my riding, which would be comparable to a plant closure losing $20.8 million in payroll.

Obviously our first choice is to have opportunities for work for everyone. I can point to one thing that would point us in that direction. On the desk of the Minister of Finance right now is a duty remission order that he could sign that would extend the duty remission for garment manufacturers for a further seven years. I have 43 garment manufacturers in my riding and many of them do employ immigrants and aboriginal people who come into my riding looking for work, but they will topple like dominoes if the Minister of Finance does not sign the duty remission order because the garment industry needs that support while it transitions to the stresses of the new global marketplace.

I agree with him that jobs are the number one priority and that the best social program in the world is a job, but the Minister of Finance could help us in that regard in my area by signing that duty remission order ASAP.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I and I think members of my caucus are optimistic that having a ministry of social development and a minister assigned specifically to social development may result in more attention to the issue of social development. I am willing to concede that but I do have to comment on some of the parliamentary secretary's remarks.

I do not believe we have done enough to make sure that everyone who is eligible for the guaranteed income supplement is getting it. It really is not up to members of Parliament to knock on every door and ask seniors whether they may be eligible for this. The government is the one that knows who they are, how much they make and whether they are eligible. It is through their income tax returns that the government can see quite plainly if a person is making less than the $12,000 a year, or whatever the cutoff is, if they are eligible and how much they are eligible for.

I believe the onus is on government to make sure it gets this necessary income supplement to everyone who is eligible for it.

[Department of Social Development Act, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have this opportunity, on behalf of the New Democratic Party, to speak to Bill C-22, regarding the new social development bureaucracy and the new ministry of social development. I note with interest that our critic for this area recommends that we support the bill at this stage because we support the idea of restructuring HRDC into two separate entities.

We were always critical that HRDC was too much. It was a mega portfolio, a massive undertaking, that was clearly too big for any one minister to manage. The issues and subject matter being dealt with were overwhelmingly difficult to manage, especially when we looked at the type of issues with which it had to deal.

I note the new Minister of Social Development deals with issues such as the Canada pension plan, the old age security program and the guaranteed income supplement. I hope, in a broader context, the new Minister of Social Development would not simply administer programs, but would help guide the government in a new national objective, a new set of priorities, regarding social development so we could think outside the box and dare to dream of elevating the standards of living conditions for all Canadians in measurable ways and then put in place a yardstick to measure that progress.

I take no pleasure in pointing out that the campaign 2000 was recently on Parliament Hill reminding us that over one million Canadian children live in poverty, in what one could argue is the wealthiest and most successful democracy in the free world.

Clearly, our priorities have been skewed or our interests have been diverted and we have not paid enough attention to the area of social development. We should be measuring the progress of the country not by the monuments and structures in our cities and not by our GDP, but by the quality of life of Canadians. Maybe the Minister of Social Development could be seized with that issue as a national priority.

My riding of Winnipeg Centre is the third poorest riding in Canada. Some people do not realize that, and I take no pleasure in pointing that out either. Of all the families in my riding, 47% of them live below the poverty line and 52% of all the children. I raise this with a matter of great urgency, especially in this era of cutbacks. The cutbacks have come from social programs. Granted we have paid off the deficit, but we have left an enormous social deficit in its wake. I can testify to that on a day to day basis. I deal with this reality every day.

We went through an era of the 1990s, which was a record profit era for Bay Street, Wall Street, the banks and corporations and record era of cutbacks in social spending. The predictable consequences are record numbers of poor kids in my riding and all the predictable outfall of that. Somehow we have been derailed.

I am a socialist, granted, so maybe I am jaded and biased in this regard. I have a theory that the big money has controlled things in Ottawa for so long that all of our bills, laws and legislation are geared to look after the interests of big money, and everyone else has been forgotten. I can point to the social conditions in my riding as evidence of that.

I do not think it is by neglect or innocent oversight that we have allowed these circumstances to overwhelm certain regions. I point to the guaranteed income supplement as an example. My colleague from the Bloc Québécois pointed this out, quite rightly. I do not care how busy the Minister of HRDC has been in recent years. What the Liberals did in the administration of the guaranteed income supplement was nothing short of cruel. They knew full well that hundreds of thousands of Canadian seniors were eligible for the supplement, but they did not get it.

They knew this because of the income tax records of those Canadians. They knew full well that these Canadians, by virtue of the amount of money they earned from other sources, were eligible for this payment, but they took no steps to advise them of that. We had seniors living in abject poverty when they could have been receiving another $500 a month. There is a natural justice issue here. These people had a right to know. Then when we called attention to this, they used the guise of the Privacy Act. They said that it would be a violation of a senior citizen's privacy, if Revenue Canada told HRDC that the person was eligible for this benefit

I do not think seniors would complain if somebody advised them that they were eligible for another $300 to $500 a month when their income has to be lower than $12,000 a year to be eligible. These are poorest of the poor, yet the government hid behind the guise of the Privacy Act so it did not have to give these seniors the benefits they were due. That did not happen because the Minister of HRDC was too busy and seized with other issues. That happened as a conscious choice of the government trying to pay down the deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable people in society. It is reprehensible, and I condemn the government in the strongest possible terms for that.

An added irony to this is the Privacy Act does not seem to apply if a person who is collecting EI benefit crosses the border for a day. Let us say from my home town of Winnipeg, a person on EI crosses the border to buy some jeans in Fargo, North Dakota and comes back through the border. The border customs agent turns him or her in to employment insurance officers saying that the individual is on EI and is supposed to look for work all day, every day, not driving across the border to shop.

Somehow it is not a violation of people's privacy to rat them out because they took an afternoon drive, but it is an invasion of privacy to advise senior citizens that they are eligible for a $500 a month guaranteed income supplement premium. What kind of pretzel logic is that? That is what I mean when I said that some of these policies bordered on cruelty. They certainly were not designed in the best interests of Canadians. I do not know in whose interests they were designed, but it was not to benefit us to the maximum.

I would point out another thing. The government has paid down the deficit on the EI surplus. There is no secret there. The Auditor General reminds us of it all the time. We went through riding by riding across country. When I say “we”, we hired professional pollsters to do this. They analyzed the impact, riding for riding. In my riding of Winnipeg Centre, the third poorest riding in the country, the cutbacks to EI alone cost $20.8 million a year. For people who were already at the margin, if not poor, this pushed a lot of people from the edge of being working poor to unemployed to abject poverty.

Imagine what we would do if we could attract an industry into our ridings that had a $20.8 million payroll. We would pave the streets with gold to attract businesses like that to our ridings. Those guys in the government cut that payroll out of my riding with one stroke of the pen, when they changed the EI provisions to where nobody qualified any more. No wonder there is a surplus in EI. Nobody qualifies any more. We have to pay in, but we cannot pull out. The government paid down the debt on the back of that surplus.

The other thing on which the government paid down the debt was the $30 billion cut from the Canada health and social transfers. Where did it get the remaining $30 billion? At the time I did this math, there was a $30 billion surplus in the EI fund and the government announced a $100 billion tax cut. A further $30 billion came from the public sector pension plan. People forget there was a huge surplus in that pension plan. It was built up largely because the government let go or fired a third of the Canada public service during those cutback years.

Rather than negotiate some sharing mechanism with the beneficiaries of the plan or simply admit that this was the employees' money, part of their wages and therefore their benefits should go up, the government took it all. The last act of Marcel Masse, when he was president of the Treasury Board, was to force, through closure, a bill through the House which gave the government the right to grab all $30 billion out of the public service pension plan surplus, call it the property of the Government of Canada and put it into the general revenue.

It is no secret that it did not take any good money management skills to pay down the debt and deficit. The government took it out of EI from unemployed workers, the most vulnerable people in the economic force. It took it out of guaranteed income supplement payments to low income seniors. It took it out of the public service employees pension plan.

That is the paucity of social development standards that we see in the previous government.

When I rose today to say I support Bill C-22, I support having a minister perhaps responsible for social development. However, I can serve notice right now that we will be holding the government to a standard. We will have our own yardstick by which we will measure progress and that measurement will be this. Will there be less poor kids in my riding? Will anything we do in the House ever elevate the standards of poverty and living conditions of the people in my riding?

The last thing I would point out is the face of poverty in my riding is by and large native. I can say without any hesitation and without any fear of contradiction, the overwhelming majority of the people living in poverty, and true abject poverty by anyone's definition, are off reserve aboriginal people who flock to the city in the hope of finding some measure of opportunity. In many cases they go from the days drudgery in their reserve to the inner city of Winnipeg. Desperation is what they find when they arrive. There is no social services network really left. There is a mere shadow of what it used to be when we used to talk about the just society. We used to say that the number one priority of Parliament and of government was to elevate the standards of living conditions of its people. That seems to have been lost in the shuffle.

Therefore, we had a decade of record profits in businesses and corporations and a decade of cutting, hacking and slashing. What happened to the post-war labour compact? Perhaps our new Minister of Social Development would like to talk about that when the department gets up and running.

In the post-war years, there was a deal, a tacit agreement with labour that when productivity went up and when profits went up, workers' wages were supposed to go up, thereby creating a burgeoning middle class, thereby having a healthy economy. That was thrown by the wayside. Somehow the Liberals decided they did not need to live up to their end of the bargain anymore. Now record profits do not justify any sharing with employees. In fact, it justifies in their mind a screwing down of standards and labour laws and a reduction in the rate of unionization, the only effective tool for elevating the living conditions of most working people, with free collective bargaining.

I am anxious to speak to our new Minister of Social Development when the new bureaucracy is fully engaged and up and running. These are glaring shortcomings and oversights that we take note of on this side of the House.

I have already said that in my riding, 47% of all the families live below the poverty line. Overwhelmingly the face of poverty is native. The National Association of Friendship Centres is struggling to try to cope with servicing the needs of aboriginal people in the communities in Quebec and in other provinces in Canada.

We have been visited by the National Association of Friendship Centres. It has said that it exists as a national chain of institutions. It is already up and running. It is a structure that could deliver some of these services to non-status, off reserve and Métis people who are floundering in the inner cities, needing assistance to get into the mainstream economy, whether it is life skills training of access to adequate housing, et cetera. Many of these services could be delivered through the Association of Friendship Centres were there the political will to do so.

Rather than set up any new bureaucracy and try to invent new institutions to deliver services to low income aboriginal people in the inner city of all of our major cities, I urge the new minister to forge a relationship with the National Association of Friendship Centres. It might form some kind of a service delivery contract, single window operation to reach out to people.

In closing, we expect the new Department of Social Development and the new Minister of Social Development to set targets for social indications of progress in the same way that the government set targets to eliminate the deficit and tackle the debt. We want to see new targets and a new yardstick to measure progress which results in less kids living in poverty and a better standard of living in our inner cities. That is something that we could be proud of as members of Parliament if we use that as our indication of progress as Canadians.

[Textile and Clothing Industry, November 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, there are 43 garment manufacturers in my riding who want to keep their jobs in Canada, but they will close their doors if the Minister of Finance does not sign the duty remission orders which are sitting on his desk right now. Two separate unanimous reports from the finance committee directed him to sign these duty remission orders, as well as the Senate committee on banking.

Will the Minister of Finance sign these duty remission papers before they expire on December 31 and save thousands of Canadian jobs all over Canada and Quebec?

[Department of Human Resources and Skills Development Act, November 23rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to add my comments to the remarks by my hon. colleague from the Bloc Québécois. I listened with interest to his passionate portrayal of the rights of free collective bargaining and the rights to organize and ultimately to withhold one's services in the event of an impasse when labour and management are unable to agree on the terms of a collective agreement. It is very fitting that this place should be reminded of those fundamental principles and rights that Canadians enjoy.

The problem we face in the rest of Canada is that we do not enjoy the same labour laws as in the province of Quebec. This has resulted, in my home province of Manitoba, in more days lost to strikes and lockouts and a greater possibility of the incidence of violence on the picket line when frustrations boil over. None of the natural pressures of free collective bargaining and negotiating exist because scabs are at work. Scabs are taking the jobs of the legitimate employees. It ruins the pressures that stem from free collective bargaining when it is working properly.

I would like the hon. member to expand on this. Is it in fact statistically true that in the province of Quebec, because it has anti-scab legislation, there are fewer days lost to strikes and lockouts, and less likelihood of violence on the picket line because it is free collective bargaining working as it should work?

[First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act, November 19th, 2004]

As my hon. colleague says, it is déjà vu all over again. I do not mind doing that because frankly I believe that with each incarnation the bill does in fact begin to take a form that we in the New Democratic Party caucus can work with.

We had a great number of reservations about the previous incarnations. We were not at all satisfied with Bill C-23 when it came before the 37th Parliament. I believe we have articulated those views and voiced them. They exist on the record. I do not think I have to belabour the point here today to make it abundantly clear that we rejected the first nations governance act as it was and we rejected this bill because it became part of that suite of bills which was known as the first nations governance initiative. We thought the timing was poor, the treatment of it was poor, and the content of the bill was poor. I suppose one could say we were critical of just about every aspect of that bill.

However, I do recognize the advantages of components of Bill C-20. I recognize that the finance authority borrowing pool idea could be advantageous for smaller communities that may benefit from sharing the risk and the lending or borrowing ability with other larger, more stable and established first nations.

I point out that this is an idea that finds its origins within the New Democratic Party, in fact, with members of Parliament from British Columbia who worked very closely with the provincial government and B.C. municipalities to form the B.C. Municipal Finance Authority, which in a similar way gives strength to those smaller communities that may in fact be able to borrow money at a better rate and get a better bonding rating in their efforts to finance economic development initiatives in their communities.

Another aspect of Bill C-20 is that it seeks to create another fiscal institution called the tax commission. When we are dealing with first nations taxation, we are dealing in this case with the rights of first nations communities to tax, for instance and perhaps, property owners who may be renting or leasing property from them. I think sometimes in terms of cottage property in some areas.

However, there is another issue of first nations taxation that we should comment on today. While I have the floor I wish to draw the attention of the members here to a recent change in the way the government treats first nations in terms of taxation and that is as it pertains to post-secondary students.

Many of the members may not be aware, but a fundamental change is taking place. For the first time ever, the tuition given to first nations students and their cost of living allowances and so on will be taxed. Thus, in my view, first nations will be able to send fewer students to university because those students have to pay income tax on these student loans and student cost of living allowances given to them by their communities so they can seek post-secondary education.

I raise this because even though there was a huge protest from the Assembly of First Nations, this will be implemented in the next taxation year. This is a shot across the bow on treaty rights, because by the Government of Canada saying it is going to start taxing student allowances it is also saying that it does not see post-secondary education as a treaty right. It sees it as a policy.

The government is trivializing and reducing the fiduciary obligation under aboriginal treaty rights to provide education per se. Nowhere in the Constitution and nowhere in any treaty does it say “education meaning kindergarten to grade 12” is a treaty right. It says “education” is a treaty right. This is a shot across the bow by the government to start to tax those benefits. I am very critical of this.

I want to recognize and pay tribute to the efforts of aboriginal students right across this country under the guidance and leadership of Algonquin College counsellor Kimberley Smith Spencer, who is also the president of the Ontario Native Education Counselling Association. She and a bunch of committed activists and students have developed a petition of 11,000 signatures of people across this country who think it is fundamentally wrong to make this policy shift and start taxing tuition fees and living-out allowances of first nations students, because the predictable consequences will be that there will be fewer first nations students in post-secondary education. It is as simple as that. What a glaring contradiction.

I met just last week with the Minister of Indian Affairs and he itemized for me what his main priorities would be for this parliamentary session. Let us guess what they were. Post-secondary education was number one and housing was number two. Those were his main priorities.

At the same time he is stating that post-secondary education is his main priority, his government is starting to tax this benefit that used to enjoy a tax free status so that first nations students could get the post-secondary education they needed and so that communities could build the administrative capacity they needed.

We all know that the way to go from poverty to the middle class in one generation is through education. Is there anybody here who does not agree that the most important thing we could possibly do as first nations communities are welcomed into the mainstream of Canada is to help them educate a generation of capable, competent and suitably skilled students with graduate certificates from post-secondary institutions?

I cannot help deviating from the topic in this way because we are called upon today to make a speech about the creation of a brand new first nations tax commission and one cannot mention first nations taxation without noticing this glaring contradiction in the policy of the government. It is like having an elephant in the bedroom and trying to pretend it is not there. I cannot not talk about what the government is doing regarding the practical problems that first nations students face.

I know of many communities and I will mention one. Chief Moses Okimaw spoke to me from God's Lake in northern Manitoba. He said his community can only afford to send a few students per year out for post-secondary education.

My time is almost up, but I will just illustrate the scope and breadth of the problem. Yes, post-secondary education is granted to aboriginal people as a treaty right. We view it as a treaty right; the government apparently views it as a policy decision. But it is a bit of a Catch-22 when there is not enough money within the community to send more than a couple of students per year. And now it is taxed. If a student is given $10,000 a year for a living-out allowance for school and has to pay taxes on it, that leaves the student with $5,000 or $6,000 to actually spend. Fewer students will be able to go to school by virtue of this policy shift. I believe it is completely contrary to the government's own stated goals and objectives.

It is completely contrary to all the romantic and flowery language we hear from the Prime Minister all the time that this is the generation of social justice for aboriginal people. If that were true, we would not see a policy direction like this as it pertains to education. The most effective tool to fight poverty in aboriginal communities is to put forward a generation of aboriginal kids who are trained and skilled and have the administrative capacity to lead their people out of poverty and into the mainstream of Canada.

I recognize, pay tribute to and celebrate the actions of the students who are sending this message to the Government of Canada. I know they have brought 11,000 signatures in a petition today, which I will be proud to table in the House of Commons at the earliest opportunity. I know that the people of Canada want the government to listen to this common sense and reasoning.

[First Nations Fiscal and Statistical Management Act, November 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to bring the views of the New Democratic Party caucus on Bill C-20 to the House of Commons at this stage.

I will note first of all that this is a repeat for me; this is the third incarnation of the bill, let me put it that way, that I have spoken to since I became the aboriginal affairs critic for our party.

[Supply, November 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Burnaby--Douglas for his very thoughtful remarks and for emphasizing in his speech one aspect of this whole debate over trans fats, which is the broader public policy debate around health care and the energy, resources and emphasis that we necessarily put toward the back end of health care, which is really managing illness once we are already sick, and the very low priority we seem to put at the front end of health care, which is trying to create a healthier community of people who are less likely to get sick.

Could the member perhaps expand on that broader public policy issue and on how this idea to ban trans fats is the very essence of public health issues, or perhaps public health care versus managing illness?