Pat Martin

[Public Sector Pension Investment Board, April 22nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to speak to the motion and to the amendment to the motion. I firmly believe that the hoist motion was a very good idea because six months time may add some measure of reason to what is going on. I am confident that within six months the two parties may reach the outcome that there be a negotiated settlement on what to do with the pension surplus in question.

I believe that the President of the Treasury Board is in for the fight of his political life if he continues on the road of moving forward with Bill C-78. In the short time I have been here I have not seen the firing up of so much interest over an issue. The idea of taking, clawing back, or whatever we want to call the grab for the $30 billion surplus is such an emotional flashpoint with so many people across the country. I predict interest of the kind we have not really seen since Brian Mulroney tried to deindex the Canada pension plan.

When Brian Mulroney tried to deindex the Canada pension plan he started a grey hair revolution, a blue rinse uprising of senior citizens who demanded that it be stopped. Brian Mulroney and his government to their credit had the common sense to back off. They did not want to take on that group of people. They are the most powerful voting constituency in the country. Senior citizens, pensioners and retirees are well organized, well informed and they vote. They do not stay at home and grumble. They get on their feet, come out and vote at voting time. They are gearing up around this issue. As I said, I have not seen a level of interest like this on any issue since I have been here.

Today seniors organizations are on the hill. They are paying close attention to the first day of debate on Bill C-78. The Armed Forces Pensioners, the Association of Public Service Alliance Retirees, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, the CLC, the Canadian Pensioners Concerned, the Congress of Union Retirees of Canada, the Federal Superannuates National Association are all here. I did a quick tally and they represent over 1.5 million retirees and pensioners. They are watching this debate in West Block in a room which I rented for them.

I really believe that the hoist motion is at least the first glimmer of hope that possibly we can add some voice of reason to this whole debate.

I did not finish the list. There are others, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Veterans Association, the United Senior Citizens of Ontario Incorporated, the Ontario Coalition of Senior Citizens Organizations, the One Voice Seniors Network, and on and on. Do the President of the Treasury Board and the government really want to take on those people? They should think twice.

When the talks broke down it led to the introduction of this legislation. But the talks were not going that badly. Progress was being made. Virtually all of the clauses in Bill C-78, in the hundreds of pages of text, were agreed to by both parties. Some benefits were increased. Obviously the representatives of the pensioners were pleased about that.

Virtually everything else was agreed to, with the exception of this enormous, and I will avoid unparliamentary terms, grab of $30 billion from the pension fund. I suppose the representation of the pension investment board was another hot point. But these were not insurmountable.

The representatives of the pensioners were quite yielding in their arguments. It is a basic tenet of the trade union movement that all pension surpluses are the sole property of the employee. They are not the employers' money to use as they see fit. They are deferred wages. It is our money, speaking on behalf of working people.

The representatives of the employees at the table were willing to move on that. I have heard figures. I will not mention them here but they were willing to share that $30 billion, some going to improve benefits and some going back to the employer to use as they saw fit, but not all of it. That is where the impasse arose with the $30 billion. There was no hint of increasing benefits to the retirees.

The previous speaker did a good job of pointing out what these retirees are really making. There are more women in that beneficiary group than there are men. The average woman with 20 years of service makes a pension of $9,600 a year. Whoopee. It is a pension and I am sure they are glad to have a pension but it is not exactly a fat, lucrative pension.

This $30 billion divided among all the beneficiaries would be $30,000 a year for each of them spread out over the term of the period they collect. That could make a significant difference between living in poverty or living in some kind of financial security during their senior years.

It is ironic the theme the government chose for international women's day this year. Because it is the year of older persons the government chose “going strong, celebrating older women”. It should be “going wrong, robbing older women” because that is what the government is doing with this $30 billion grab of the pension surplus.

Bill C-78 is a history of failures. It is a failure to negotiate. It is a failure to reach a conclusion by negotiation which was within reach. It is a failure to manage the workforce adequately. It is a failure in developing satisfactory relationships with employees where the government could deal with an issue like this at the table as civilized people as should be done. It is a failure of epic proportions to live up to the promises of former Liberal governments.

Les Barnes, a former PIPS leader, wrote a letter to the editor. Mr. Barnes was present in 1967 when a firm guarantee was made by the Pearson government that the terms and conditions of the plan would never be amended by unilateral government action. Never. That was the trade-off to keep it off the bargaining table.

Pensions are usually part of the collective bargaining process but the government wanted it removed and separated. The government did not want it to be dealt with at the bargaining table. Okay, it was a deal. It was an arrangement, a pact, a contract. The government would not talk about pensions at the bargaining table and the terms and conditions of the plan would never, ever unilaterally be altered. It is being done today in Bill C-78 and done very dramatically.

Mr. Barnes also talked about the Minister of Finance at the time, Walter Gordon, who wrote to the national joint council of the public service assuring its members that as a result of the integration of the plans, which is what they were trying to achieve then, there would be no increase in the rate of contributions.

Bill C-78 is jacking up the rate of contributions by 33%, from 30% of the total contributions to 40%, one-third of an increase. The government is jacking up the contributions and taking the surplus out in one fell swoop. It is no wonder the seniors movement is mobilizing and building up a good head of steam to come to Ottawa and tell this Liberal government what they really think of Bill C-78.

The minister made a very good and revealing speech. One of the first remarks he made was that Bill C-78 is part of an overall plan. You are darn right it is part of an overall plan. The government takes $25 billion out of the EI fund from unemployed workers and then it takes $30 billion from retired senior citizens, many of whom are living on an income of $9,600 a year. It is a plan all right.

The Liberal government is going to pay down the debt on the backs of the most vulnerable people in the country, unemployed workers and senior citizen women. My mom is one of those senior citizen women. She is 82 years old and is living on a public service pension plan. She is glad to have it but she is not exactly living well. Who is next? The government will be stealing pencils from blind men's cups. It is getting ridiculous when we think of the choices the government is making in terms of the grabbing it is doing.

I talked about the Pearson years and so on and the current Prime Minister was part of that cabinet. He was a part of the promise to not ever unilaterally alter the terms and conditions of the plan.

In 1991 and 1992 the dialogue really began to amend this plan to make the changes that everybody agreed were necessary. At that time the union agreed to the private investment board, the 12 person board that was talked about earlier. Had we reached agreement at that time and started investing privately, God knows where that plan would be now. Those were some very good high interest years. That $30 billion might be $100 billion and we could really make some changes to the benefits.

In 1996 the advisory committee made a report and it struck another committee, a consultation group to start fine tuning things. This is when the issue of the use of the surplus came to a head. In the last month of 1998 the consultative group broke down over the surplus and representation. Then in March 1999, rather than trying to pull the pieces back together, Bill C-78 was sprung on us. Really, it is an abrogation. It is an admission of failure or an admission of inability on the part of government to manage its concerns.

I could talk about all the nuances of the bill and a few of its good qualities. I will point out the things the retirees are glad to see in the bill.

There will be a dental plan for the first time ever, albeit a lousy dental plan because it has a $200 deductible. I have been dealing with employee benefit plans all my working life as a manager of these plans and as a negotiator of union agreements. I have never seen a $200 deductible in a dental plan in my life. I do not know what kind of deal has been made or who the carrier of that plan is.

The recognition of same sex couples we applaud fully. We are extremely critical that the government tried to sneak this in and wrap it up in a package of things that obviously no working person can support. It has been rolled in there to make it very difficult. It is a very cynical way of dealing with the good and the bad aspects of the bill.

The increase going from six years down to five years with two years vesting, all these things obviously we can support.

The big problem clearly is the use of the pension surplus and I will try to limit my remarks to that.

The problem lies in the attitude of senior officials and the minister himself. Here is a quote from Alain Jolicoeur, the chief human resources officer of the Treasury Board Secretariat in 1998. He said “Employees and retirees have no proprietary interest to the surplus in the superannuation plan”.

Plain and simple, we are that diametrically opposed. We argue that all pension surpluses are the sole property of the employees to be used only for the improvements of benefits. That is what the whole purpose of a pension plan is. The other camp is diametrically opposed 180 degrees and says there is no proprietary benefit.

This argument is arrived at through a very convoluted bit of logic that the minister used again today. I would like to explain how the government arrived at this position that it assumes part of the risk. It assumes all of the risk for a deficit in the plan, ergo if there is any profit in the plan it is the government's to keep.

I would like to quote from a letter from Bob White to the President of the Treasury Board which was written in March. He puts it very well in one simple paragraph:

Typically employers have tried to justify the removal of surpluses on the grounds that because they take the risks involved in providing defined benefits, therefore they should get the reward of the surplus in the form of surplus removal or lower employer contributions. This commonly articulated relationship between risks and rewards is far too simplistic for two reasons. First, the actuarial assumptions that are used to value pension liabilities are chosen with a deliberate view to making experience gains and surpluses far more likely events than the losses and unfunded liabilities. Thus, the risk for which a surplus is supposedly the reward is limited. Second, if experience losses occur and employers are stuck with unplanned amortization payments, it is impossible to prevent the employers from lowering either the pension benefits of other parts of employee compensation from the levels they would otherwise have achieved.

In other words, the downside risks may be shifted to the employees despite appearances to the contrary. Really, there is very little downside risk.

The way the actuarial experts deal with plans, especially in a privately invested fund, it is far more likely that a surplus will occur than a deficit in the plan. I would say 10:1 and I am pulling that number out of my hat. If the tradeoff is “I will keep all the surpluses, but if there is a deficit, I will assume the risk there too”, that is a very good bet, frankly. In a gambling hall that would be a very safe bet to undertake.

That is really the issue. That is what is going to fire up the country. It is only just beginning. This is day one of what will prove to be a very long debate. We are talking about a huge amount of money. We are talking about an amount of money that could make a huge difference in the lives of the beneficiaries of public service pension plans.

We should put some of the facts on the record. As of March 1998 the public service pension plan had a $14.9 billion surplus, the RCMP plan had a $2.4 billion surplus and the Canadian forces plan had a $12.9 billion surplus. We should think about how we arrived at such huge surpluses. Nobody should be so bad at his or her actuarial research to arrive at such sloppy work.

The government did some very obvious things which led to very predictable consequences. The government froze people's wages for seven years. Obviously, the pension people receive when they retire is going to be a heck of a lot lower if the wages are that much lower for that period of time. It is kind of a double whammy, and even more so for women. When the government refuses to pay up on pay equity, obviously the women's pension calculations will be a heck of a lot lower than they would have been had they been receiving fair wages the whole time. There has also been a lower than expected rate of inflation. We have an actuarial anomaly to wind up with this huge pension surplus.

I will talk about the net effect this whole thing is having on the morale of the public sector. This is a group of workers which has suffered indignity after indignity. Most people go into the public sector for a couple of reasons. They are willing to accept lower wages because they trade it off for job security. After all the cutting and hacking and slashing and butchering of the public sector there is not a whole lot of job security left. The sword of Damocles is hanging over their heads every minute. Job security is out the window. There is no longer any reason to work for the public security if job security is what you are after. Let us face it, everybody is afraid for their jobs.

Public servants are still plugging along. They can expect reasonable wage increases, but they have had six to seven years of no wage increases. They are falling way behind the private sector. Not only do they not have job security, what are they making? A carpenter makes eight bucks an hour less than an outside carpenter. I was a union carpenter making $25 an hour and the guys working for defence or wherever as carpenters were making $15 an hour. That is not bull. That was the difference.

At least people could take some comfort in the fact they had a pretty good pension plan. Pretty good? Nine thousand dollars a year for 20 years of service. That is not a pretty good pension plan.

Then, when there is an opportunity to sweeten the plan by taking that $30 billion and giving it to the people who paid for it, it gets taken away too. It is no wonder there is poor morale in the public sector. If people are concerned about productivity, or whatever the buzzwords are these days, that is certainly something they could look at because public servants are demoralized and browbeaten. The government is pushing people too far. That is all there is to it.

I raised the gender issue once before. This is very much a gender issue. There are more women beneficiaries than there are men, and for good reason. In the public sector there are a lot of clerical-type jobs.

We have to win the argument on the whole issue of why that money is ours. We think it is ours. Obviously the minister thinks the opposite. Let us look at why we would argue that it is ours.

If there is a surplus in a private sector pension plan, the law of the province of Ontario is that 90% of employees have to approve any employer use of the surplus. Clearly that contemplates that it is the employees' money. Why else would they be required to vote on giving it away?

The other evidence is that during public sector negotiations, at the bargaining table, the employer, time and time again, says, yes, they are getting lower wages and, yes, we will not provide much of a raise, but look at the great pension plan. It clearly uses the pension plan as part of the wage package. It uses it against the employees at the bargaining table and then reverses the argument when bargaining is over.

There is jurisprudence. Consider CUPE Local 1000 v Ontario Hydro. CUPE initiated a legal challenge in response to Ontario Hydro's attempt to take a contribution holiday and it won. It won fair and square because the employer did not have the right to use the contributions for anything other than the trust document dictated, which was to improve the benefits to the employees. It is there on the books and people should be looking at it.

Bill S-3, an act to amend the Pension Benefits Standards Act, received royal assent in parliament in June 1998. This legislation applies to private plans operating under federal jurisdiction. It requires a two-thirds vote of the employees before the employer is allowed to use a single penny of the plan for anything other than improving benefits.

That is some of the more obvious jurisprudence. I am sure there are many more who would argue that any pension surplus is the sole property of the employees who paid into the plan, whether the contributions are from the employer or the employee. It is part of the wage package. It is deferred wages for the employees' use and their use only.

[Public Service Commission, April 20th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, on Friday I asked a question about a government job posting which says that only persons residing within a 500 kilometre radius of Ottawa can apply. In other words, western Canadians need not apply or Atlantic Canadians or northern Canadians, for that matter.

If one of my kids were qualified and willing to relocate, he or she deserves the right to apply and be considered for that job. Somebody should tell that to the Liberal task force on western alienation.

Will the minister tell us today that he will open the competition for all federal government jobs to all Canadians who wish to apply?

[Public Service Pension Plan, April 20th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the minister responsible for the Treasury Board is in for the fight of his life if he thinks he is going to grab $30 billion from the surplus of the public service pension plan.

The government may have succeeded in stealing $25 billion from the unemployed workers in the EI fund—

[Public Service Of Canada, April 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am holding in my hand a job posting for what seems like a really great job in the federal public service: Space Agency, $40,000 a year. The only problem is that under the heading who can apply it says “Persons residing within a 500 kilometre radius of Ottawa”.

What if my son or daughter from Winnipeg were qualified and wanted to take this position, or some kid from Halifax or Vancouver or Edmonton? What does it matter where they live in the country if they are qualified for the job?

Will the government commit to stopping this unfair hiring practice and giving every Canadian equal opportunity to good public service jobs like this one?

[Youth Criminal Justice Act, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Mississauga West for what I thought was a very good speech. It is a pleasure to watch a real pro get a good head of steam up now and then, especially when they are comments that I can associate with.

I have quite a bit of personal knowledge about young offenders, street gangs and so on, coming from Winnipeg. In the inner-city of Winnipeg we have quite a serious problem. We have been forced to deal with it and forced to find lasting solutions.

I want to thank the member for pointing out some of the exciting and innovative things that are being done in the province of Manitoba to try to deal with kids as kids. The member clearly pointed out the folly in treating kids like adults in terms of the criminal justice system.

Former Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba, Yvon Dumont, was the first Metis lieutenant governor of Manitoba. He started something that was called the Lieutenant Governor's Foundation for Youth. I was a member of its board prior to being elected to this place. One of the things he pointed out in dealing with the young people who were causing a lot of the property crimes in the inner-city, like car theft, was that these kids do not steal these cars for the lousy $50 that they get from some fence, although that certainly is part of it.

What really motivates these kids to steal half a dozen cars in an evening is that they crawl underneath the steering column in the car, they break it open, find the three wires, push them together and the thing starts. It is exciting and it is interesting. It is auto electronics. It is like the thrill a mechanic gets when he tunes up a car.

These kids have some redeemable virtues in the fact that they are interested. They would make good apprentices.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1999, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it may seem that I was off topic, but if the member was actually here and listening to my speech he would know that what I was talking about was how we got into a surplus situation in this country and what the source of revenue was to put us into that surplus, revenue that we should be spending on the basic needs for families to improve their quality of life. That is how we arrived at that. The member would know that if he was actually in the House to listen.

I will talk about Bill C-71. I will talk about the budget for a minute because everybody knows what a charade it is to bribe people with their own money just before an election. It is leading up to an election year.

First the government takes about $8 billion or $9 billion out of the Canada health and social transfer, and then it puts $1.5 billion back and it expects thanks from everybody. We talked about trickle down economics. We are getting trickled on again on that issue. We are getting hosed in that respect. It is not a trickle, it is a flood.

Nobody bought that. That is why Canadians are disappointed. There was an opportunity to correct some of the historic imbalances in our social fabric.

We could use the tax system for the redistribution of wealth. It is one of the most effective tools. In fact I think the parliamentary secretary pointed out in his speech that one of the most effective tools we have to deal with the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a fair taxation system. However, there has been no effort to do that. Instead, the only real reference to taxes has been to give millionaires an $8,000 tax break.

In this budget millionaires now get an $8,000 tax break. The woman standing at the bus stop on the way to her minimum wage job, who does not have adequate day care, is going to take great consolation in that because if we have more millionaires we know that it will trickle down sooner or later. We in the lower classes will get our share. It is a good thing that more people are getting fabulously rich.

The growing gap between the rich and the poor should be the number one concern of this government because the shrinking middle class is a serious problem. Our biggest strength in North America is a burgeoning middle class, a consuming middle class, a middle class that has money and coins in their jeans to buy things. That is disappearing. We are going to have the very rich and we are going to have the very poor, from the day's drudgery to the evening's despair. It is a despair budget.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1999, April 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to have an opportunity to speak to the budget. This is the first chance that I have had to share my point of view on what most Canadians viewed as a huge disappointment.

We all thought that the bad news was over. Stoically, Canadians suffered through years and years of cutbacks. They were being told they could not afford anything even though we are one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world. They were being told they could not afford the basic needs for a family to survive. We were all sold that bill of goods. We were told this over and over again until working Canadians believed it. They really believed and accepted that there was not enough money to go around.

For seven, eight and nine years they suffered through this era of cutbacks, restraint and whatever buzzword the government was using at the time. This year was surplus time. They really thought there was a surplus. They thought they could finally get back to where they were in the pre-cutback era. Even if they were not moving forward, they thought they could at least get back to where they were.

No, there was none of that. They are being told again that we cannot afford the basic needs for a family to survive, such as a national daycare program. How long have we been waiting for a national daycare program? How long has it been recognized as a necessity? To get more people into the workforce we are going to have to provide for those basic needs.

While driving to work in the wintertime in my riding of Winnipeg Centre, two or three times I drove by the same woman standing at a bus stop at 6.30 a.m. on a cold winter morning. The temperature was probably 25-below, as it often is on a winter morning in Winnipeg. This woman was on her way to daycare, I presume, because she had with her a toddler of about 18 months old who was wrapped up in a parka, scarf and mitts. The child could hardly stand because of all the layers of clothing.

I thought to myself that this woman, to her credit, probably has to get up every morning at five to get this child wrapped up because she is standing at a bus stop at 6.30 with her child to go to work. This woman probably has to take the bus all the way across town, drop the child off at daycare and then take the bus back to get to her job. God knows what kind of work she was doing. She looked to be about 22 years old. This really drove home to me what an urgent need there is in this country for adequate, decent, quality child care that is affordable and accessible. No, there is no mention of that.

The basic needs and expectations of families was that maybe this year the bad news was over. Finally, we are in a surplus budget and we will start spending on some priorities that people really care about. No, that simply was not to be.

Everybody knows that the child tax credit does not go to families on welfare, the people who need it most. Our illustrious premiers are clawing it back dollar for dollar.

Yes, the feds are making a gesture in the right direction. However, the program is so flawed that it is not going to wind up in the hands of the people who need it most, the people on social assistance. It is being clawed back. We lose dollar for dollar, at least in our province. It is small consolation.

There are people, like that woman standing at the bus stop, who go from the day's drudgery to the evening's desperation. That is the whole scope of their life. They will take very little solace or comfort in the budget that we saw today.

When I say that the government is finally in a surplus position and could start spending on some priorities, one has to ask how it got there. One way it got there is from the $25 billion it looted out of the EI fund surplus, the overpayment. I will put this into context so people will understand. The surplus in the EI fund is $600 million, a month not a year, above and beyond what it pays out. It is staggering. This again is on the backs of those who can least afford it, the most vulnerable.

Unemployed Canadians are being denied benefits while this huge surplus is burgeoning. This is how the fund has arrived at a surplus. It is not going back. There is no trickle down. The only trickle down in this country for working people, if it is not water that is getting trickled on them, it is something else that is getting trickled on them. It is no beach party to be a working Canadian these days.

How else did the government get this money? How else did it put itself into a surplus? It stole $25 billion from the EI fund. Today the minister had the gall and the audacity to announce that he is going to steal $30 billion from the surplus of the public service pension plan. The man has more gall than Ceasar. It is absolutely atrocious. The same piece of legislation, Bill C-78, also jacks up the premium.

If the plan and the actuarial research was such that the premiums needed to go up to meet the government's obligations, why would it not take it out of the $30 billion surplus that is already in the plan? Why would it raise premiums and still pull out the surplus? Should it not use the surplus to increase the benefits to these people?

Everybody thinks the public service pension plan is such a rich gravy train. In actual fact most of the beneficiaries in the plan are women given the nature of the public sector. The average woman with 20 years service collecting a pension makes $9,600 income from her public service pension plan.

If the government divvied that $30 billion up and gave it to the people who properly own it, it would amount to $30,000 per beneficiary. If we spread that out over our retirement years it may be $4,000 or $5,000 a year more. That would improve the quality of life for our retirees and our senior citizens.

I caution the minister responsible for the Treasury Board that he is going to unleash a sleeping giant. He is going to have a grey hair revolution, a blue rinse revolt. We do not take the senior citizens of this country lightly. We go there at our peril. Ask Brian Mulroney what happened to him when he tried to de-index the pension plan. They drove him to his knees and he had to withdraw.

The same thing is going to happen here. The momentum is already building up. The people are already talking about today's announcement of Bill C-78. My phone has been ringing off the hook. They are asking me if the government can do this, if it can take the surplus from their pension plan. Raising the premiums and pulling $30 billion out is reprehensible. It is going to lose. It is going to pay—

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly share the member's feelings that everyone's first choice is that the ethnic Kosovars end up going back to their own homes. As I outlined, there could be some obstacles in that records are being torn up, land titles are being burned. As the member said, even IDs such as birth certificates are being seized to make it harder for them and to further destabilize the region.

A second problem exists. As a previous speaker pointed out, we have underestimated the level of animosity. Some of the refugees are so seized with the idea of going back and reclaiming their homeland that they are turning down an opportunity that would actually be better for their families, to get their families out of harm's way, get them to a safe sanctuary like Canada even if just temporarily. It indicates the level of animosity and even hatred between those two camps. Most Canadians, unless they have been there and I have not been there, probably underestimate that.

What level of interest does the member have in pushing to have more of the ethnic Kosovars taken from the area where they are in imminent danger or living in unsatisfactory refugee camps and having them come here, providing them safe refuge and ultimately hoping that many will choose to make Canada their home and settle here?

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the member raises a very valid point. However, I do not have the same optimism that the Kosovar refugees will be able to return to their homes in the near future.

It is not unusual for refugees to find themselves in refugee camps for weeks, months and years. I recently hired a Vietnamese woman who spent two years sleeping on a dirt floor in a refugee camp, waiting to come to Canada, with 60,000 other Vietnamese refugees.

There are two reasons for which I do not think the Kosovar refugees will be able to return home. The first is the indication of how sinister and calculating the Milosevic Serbian government is being in its clearing of people. As it throws people out of their homes, whether they are torched or not, the land titles are torn up, as well as other documents such as birth certificates and any reference that this family ever existed in the community. It will be very difficult for Kosovars to claim ownership of their own land in eight weeks, two years or whenever.

Second, those refugees who have been lucky enough to get access to telephones have been phoning their old phone numbers in Kosovo and the phones are being answered by Serbian families who have already moved into the homes that the refugees vacated only weeks ago. The Serbian families are getting firmly entrenched into the communities and are claiming squatters' rights or legal ownership of those homes.

I do not think it is will be possible for the 900,000 displaced people to simply reclaim their homes. This leads me to believe that if not now but in the very near future there will be a great demand for safe refuge, sanctuary and maybe even new homes for many of the displaced people. I know Canadians will be willing to do what they can because they have indicated that in very large numbers already.

[Kosovo, April 12th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Winnipeg—Transcona for sharing his time with me.

I would like to start by pointing out that history has shown us one thing that we should all be conscious of today, which is that federations are the hardest form of government in the world to try to keep together and to keep stable. By their very nature they are thrown together by a disparate bunch of states or provinces, often with very different and competing interests and points of view. They are usually thrown together voluntarily to form federations.

However, what many people do not realize is that there are less than 20 federations in the world. In fact there are far less. India would probably be the largest. The United States would be the wealthiest and the most powerful. But even the United States only lasted 75 years before blowing itself up into a massive civil war. We we can see the tensions that exist within federal states.

Currently, of those federal states that exist in the world, three of them are in the process of self-demolition. The U.S.S.R. is all but gone from its former incarnation. The former Yugoslavia has gone in recent years. The third is Canada, which is at risk of being split apart by disparate forces. There is a western separatist party pulling it in one direction and an eastern French separatist party pulling it in another.

As we review the turmoil in Kosovo it is good for us to pause to reflect on some of the lessons that can be learned: how fragile the institution of any federal state is; the collective will that it takes to hold it together, in spite of all the competing forces; and how violent and destructive it can be to all concerned if we weaken in our collective will to hold it together. It can shatter, dissolve or blow up like we are seeing in the current situation.

For some time now Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has pursued with vengeance his vision of a greater Serbia. He has ruthlessly suppressed the rights of the other former states within Yugoslavia. After Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia gained their independence, only Montenegro and Serbia remained, with Kosovo, a province within Serbia.

Kosovo's population is 90% ethnic Albanian, as we have been reminded by other speakers. In 1989 Milosevic ended their autonomy and tried to suppress their language and culture. The world stood by as over 200,000 people died in Bosnia. It was not until after the bombing in Sarajevo and the horrors of the concentration camp at Srebrenica that NATO finally intervened. It is significant to note that the United Nations did not intervene.

It is important to remember that before NATO struck its first bomb over 225,000 Kosovo Albanians had already been burned out of their homes. For the west not to have acted after so many final warnings to Milosevic would have sent him and other despots the signal that they could terrorize their own populations and commit crimes against humanity without the world taking action. The notion that national sovereignty and sovereign immunity can act as a shield to genocide and to crimes against humanity is finally under significant challenge by the international community.

It is significant to note again that Pinochet is now being tried. The international criminal court is being created, in spite of U.S. opposition. In this context it is most enlightening to read the words of the former leader of the NDP, Tommy Douglas, in 1945 in his disagreement with another former leader of the CCF, J.S. Woodsworth. Those two had a disagreement over Woodsworth's pacifist stand on world war two. At that time Tommy Douglas said that when a group of lawless men endeavour to destroy the fabric of law and order by which alone human society is possible, then we have a responsibility to discharge.

As the immigration critic for the NDP I will limit most of my remarks to the impact that the Kosovo tragedy is having on the refugees and the people who may end up taking refuge in this country. It is helpful to start with a list of some of the current numbers.

As I said, the population of Kosovo is 90% ethnic Albanian. Of a total of 1.956 million people in Kosovo, more than 1.6 million are ethnic Albanians. Displaced from Kosovo homes in the last year, by NATO's own numbers, were 912,000 people. Fled or expelled since NATO began its air attacks were 450,000 people. So of those 912,000, 450,000 have fled in the last 19 days. It is easily the largest movement of displaced people in Europe since the second world war, causing unbelievable challenges to the neighbouring states to which these people are fleeing.

As the immigration critic for the NDP I have maintained all along that the most significant contribution Canada could make in this whole tragedy is not to be adding our meagre contribution to the military effort. I really believe that the world's super powers which are involved with NATO can easily handle the physical bombing of Milosevic's army. I believe and have maintained all along that Canada's contribution should be concentrated solely on the humanitarian side of the effort. I have advocated since March 24 that we should be airlifting Kosovar refugees into this country. I called for that in a press release which I issued on March 27. Canada should respond to the enormous flood of Kosovo refugees with a massive airlift similar to that which brought Hungarians to this country in 1956.

I made the argument that with thousands of refugees literally flooding across the border into Albania, the neighbouring states simply cannot handle it and nobody on the ground is guaranteeing the safety of these people as they flee the conflict zones.

I wrote a letter to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration shortly thereafter, on March 31, asking her to allow, through special ministerial permit, Kosovar refugees to come to this country because the groundswell of interest was really gaining momentum in my community and in many others.

We called upon the minister to use whatever means necessary, even if it meant creating a special category for these people, to allow them to seek refuge here; not to make them Canadian citizens, but simply to allow them sanctuary and safe refuge until they are able to return to where they properly belong.

The critics of this idea said that we would be playing into Milosevic's hands by helping him to cleanse his area, although I am trying to avoid the term ethnic cleansing. As the member for Halifax West correctly pointed out, it is not a term we should be using.

I disagree with the argument that we would be playing into Milosevic's hands. I believe that one of Milosevic's strategies is to destabilize the neighbouring states by flooding them with refugees in order to expand a greater Serbia by causing instability in those neighbouring states so that he could undertake some type of coup. We would actually be undermining this nefarious scheme by relieving the pressure on those states.

The second thing that the critics pointed out was the cost. Certainly there is a cost, but what is the cost of undertaking the military intervention that we are taking part in now? The six CF-18s stationed in Italy alone cost $212 million a year. That is for six airplanes. We now have 12 over there. Every bomb costs $25,000. The cost is unbelievable. As well, money would be spent in this country if these people were brought here.

I believe that all the preparations that have been made to accommodate Kosovar refugees in this country will still be used. Now that the Easter ceasefire has ended we anticipate an escalation in the expulsion and a further flood of refugees crossing the border. I believe that we will still need all the hospitality that Canadians expressed and all the preparations that we have made on the military bases.

I fully anticipate that Canada will be able to show its generosity and its hospitality by welcoming these new Canadians to this country, for sanctuary at least, and with all the hope and optimism that some or many will choose to become Canadians citizens.