Pat Martin

[Back To Work Legislation, March 22nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, there is a number of goofy aspects about the back to work legislation the government wants to ram through today. For one thing, the corrections officers mentioned in the bill are not even on strike. Second, the proposed legislation does not tell us what their settlement is to be.

My question for the President of the Treasury Board is how do we order somebody back to work who is not even out on strike? How are we supposed to debate and vote on a pig in a poke, on a wage settlement that we have never seen?

[Back To Work Legislation, March 22nd, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the back to work legislation that was tabled today has a bunch of glaring omissions in it.

The government is asking us to debate and vote on this back to work legislation, and it does not even tell us what the offer is to the corrections officers that are part of the whole Public Service Alliance job dispute.

It seems odd to us. We cannot understand how we can be asked to enter into a prolonged debate today, to deal with something as critical as back to work legislation, and not have, as part of the package, the offer that will be made to the prison guards, to the corrections officers. Back to work legislation is offensive enough, but it is doubly offensive when the government is trying to shroud the whole thing in a veil of secrecy.

We would like to know, and we will be debating it later today, what the government hopes to achieve by this subterfuge, by this idea that it is not going to tell us the terms and conditions that are being offered to the prison guards. How can we order people back to work when we do not even know the terms?

[Criminal Code, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, as the seconder of Motion No. 265 I am very pleased to have the opportunity to rise and to lend my support to the motion.

Briefly, I would like to comment on the tone and the content of the debate in the House of Commons today. I would compliment all of the speakers for taking this issue in a very serious and respectful way.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice started her remarks by saying that this is an issue that the government is taking seriously and one in which it is interested. She herself has been seized of the issue for a good number of years, as has the current Minister of Justice.

The member for Yukon is to be doubly complimented for bringing this very timely issue forward now. From the debate we have heard in the House, there is a great level of interest. This is not something that came out of the blue or that stemmed out of one isolated incident in Yukon, although that is where the hon. member for Yukon started her remarks, speaking very passionately about the tragic death of a woman at the hands of her husband. We heard some of the detail. I am glad that we were spared some of the gruesome detail.

Too often in the House of Commons when we are dealing with tragic issues members fall into the sensationalism of the horrible deaths and other things which people went through. Surely the merits of the case can survive without dwelling on the gruesome and the gory.

The member from the Reform Party disappointed me, frankly. I was very surprised to hear the attitude of Reform members toward this motion. He prefaced his remarks by saying that gender should not be taken into consideration in this issue. He gave some statistics which indicated that in the tragic situation where a man killed a woman, 60% of the applications for taking this into consideration were rejected. Only 40% succeeded.

However, if it was the case of a woman killing a man and the lawyer for the defence wanted to use the defence of provocation, the numbers were reversed. The inverse was true. Forty per cent of the cases were rejected and 60% were accepted.

The member somehow used this as rationale or justification, suggesting that there is an imbalance and that women are treated more favourably in the application of the provocation rule than are men. I would like to take a moment to point out that it is the member from the Reform Party who fails to see the historic imbalance in the power relationship between men and women and who fails to recognize how such figures might come about, even given the fair application of the provocation rule.

Other members have spoken today of what a complex issue we are dealing with. It is true that lay people like me, frankly, have a hard time even getting our minds around when this rule should be used and when it should not. I do not envy the judges or whoever makes the determination as to whether a particular case should qualify under the provocation rule or whether it should be self-defence or spousal abuse syndrome arguments.

I can see this really getting to be a quagmire of minutia when someone is trying to determine when this works. The fact that it works at all and works even once in a rare blue moon is clearly too many. The member for Yukon made very good points indicating that this was an arcane leftover in our judicial laws. We do not need such a reference any more. It hearkens to a darker time when this kind of thing could be contemplated.

I do not like the idea that we can justify the use of violence in any situation, frankly, because it tends to condone it. Is it okay to lash out in the schoolyard if Joey pushes you down? We spend a long time teaching our children that is not okay. There are other ways of conflict resolution other than striking out. A black eye in the schoolyard was sort of a common incident when I was growing up certainly, but now hopefully we have moved beyond that and have matured.

In the same light and by the same token, why then do we accept that any level of violence is acceptable if one is insulted or provoked mercilessly to the point where one could not stand it any more? Really one is saying “I can't take it any more” and lashes out. This law deals with lashing out in the ultimate way, murder, killing someone.

In one of the cases cited by the member for Yukon, the B.C. case involving a man named Burt Stone, he stabbed his wife 47 times, put her body in a toolbox and then went to Mexico for a month. For this he got a sentence of four years in jail. He was able to prove that his wife had provoked his violent behaviour by verbal insults delivered over a four hour road trip. He had to suffer nagging, abuse or insults for a four hour period and the result was he stabbed her 47 times and stuffed her into a toolbox. The defence of provocation was allowed in this incident.

That one incident alone would motivate me to rise up and speak against ever allowing the defence of provocation to be used. I do not need other incidents, although, as I say, the reason the member for Yukon originally rose on this issue was to deal with the Klassen murder in Yukon.

One member spoke of the folly of letting special interest groups drive our legislative agenda when it comes to justice issues, as if to say that we cannot be so loose with our changing of laws that if we get 50,000 signatures and lobby the government aggressively it will have no choice but to chuck that section of the code. No one is advocating that. I do not think we could accuse the member for Yukon of acting in a frivolous way or asking government to act in a way that is not prudent.

There is a great history of the lobbying and studying that has gone on about this issue. The member walked us through some of the review and study by groups and by the Department of Justice, knowing full well that this set of rules and laws should be changed. It was reviewed by the Law Reform Commission of Canada in 1989. We had the report of the federal-provincial working group on homicide in 1991, the report of the bar association in 1992, a House of Commons subcommittee on the recodification of the Criminal Code in 1993, and on and on it has been reviewed. It is only fitting and only proper that we now have it where it should be, being debated in the House of Commons.

A member mentioned special interest groups. He tried to imply that this was somehow the women's movement or something. I do not know if that is what he was getting at, but to even say that is to trivialize the issue and not to show respect for the member for Yukon who clearly is following through on a progressive movement that has been going on for over a decade to try to have this aspect of the code altered and changed.

One murder which results in a charge of manslaughter as a result of the use of the provocation defence is too much. I take issue with one member who said earlier that one does not get acquitted, that one is reduced from murder to manslaughter and manslaughter can have a penalty of life.

That member failed to point out that manslaughter can also have no minimum sentence whatsoever. The person could in fact walk with a probation, without serving any jail time. It is a huge advantage if the lawyer manages to successful argue the provocation defence.

[Supply, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it appears that I am lucky enough to be the last speaker for the last few minutes on this debate. It is like being the hammer rock in curling; hopefully if one is witty enough maybe one can just clear house.

It has been far too broad and expansive a debate to even try to summarize things. I would like to use these last few moments to add a couple of points to what has already been put on the table.

Everybody here will agree that crime, punishment, safety and justice are issues we hear about in our ridings all the time. It does not matter what our political stripe is. Canadians are talking about them and Canadians want to talk about them.

I am always amazed at how with the same set of circumstances we can come up with two so different sets of conclusions.

What we have heard for most of the day from the majority of the Reform Party speakers is an ongoing barrage about tougher enforcement, more boot camps, more prisons, lock them up and hang them high. It hearkens back to the day when Spanky wanted to go to Singapore, buy a stick and learn how to beat children better.

We really have not heard anything innovative from the Reform Party, with the exception of the member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca who actually brought a very balanced approach to the whole day. I am glad he spoke toward the end because there are many parts of his remarks which I can certainly work with. The Reform Party has one view of the world by and large. The member for Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca is clearly in contrast with most of his political party. He smiles in front of it intellectually.

The Reform Party says one thing. The NDP would much rather talk about victims rights than increased levels of punishment. We have tabled documents in the province of Manitoba. The NDP was very well received in terms of taking care of victims rights but also in taking care of the root causes of crime.

I mentioned the aboriginal community when I rose for one of my interventions. There was the shocking, horrifying fact that the Kingston women's penitentiary was 100% aboriginal population, that every single woman there was aboriginal for a period of time in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The figure is still hugely disproportionate to the population. Three or four per cent of the population is aboriginal. Seventy or eighty or ninety per cent of the prison population are aboriginal. Something is clearly wrong when there are figures like that. This needs to be addressed.

In the province I come from it is a very real issue. I know that if I had been walking home instead of J. J. Harper one winter evening, I may have been stopped by the police but I probably would not have died that night. I know that if Helen Betty Osborne had been a white girl rather than an Indian girl, it would not have taken 16 years to solve her murder. It would have been a far more pressing issue. People would have seized themselves of the issue.

Obviously the issue of the aboriginal people and their presence in our penal institutions and our justice system needs to be addressed first and foremost. I am surprised that was not one of the main focuses of the Reform Party's motion today.

We have seen the U.S. model. We heard ideas about boot camps and other things that are clearly from the U.S. We saw what happened in the U.S. as it tried to lock up a whole generation of young black men. That was the solution to crime in the United States. The U.S. tried to lock up a whole generation.

The U.S. built more prisons and then privatized them, turning them into for profit ventures. Private prisons, what a concept. Locking people up for profit. I am surprised this did not come from the camp to my left because it is clearly in keeping with its ideology.

Prisons are big business in Canada too. The one thing I would like to use my last moment to comment on is the privatization of the education system within our Canadian prisons. Former Correctional Service Canada employees are quitting their jobs and contracting out the education of inmates on a for profit basis, and they are not the low bidder. In the prairie region, the contracting company's bid was millions of dollars higher than that of Evergreen School Division which used to deliver the service, quality service at a lower cost.

It makes one wonder. If we care about this kind of thing at all, why would we pay more money for less service? When I say less service, the contracting company owned by former Correctional Service Canada employees is not even licensed to give any kind of credit for the high school training given. More money is being paid for less service and the graduates do not even get any kind of credentials when they leave the system.

Penal institutions for profit and the privatization of the education system within the jails are things I wanted to point out.

[Supply, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I believe one of the biggest shortcomings that I have viewed in our justice system is the treatment of aboriginal people or the disproportionate representation of aboriginal people within the system.

I noted a startling figure recently. In 1969, in the Kingston Penitentiary for women, 100% of the population was aboriginal.

Recommendations were made by the aboriginal justice inquiry that came out of Manitoba and recommendations were made by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples which deal with aboriginal involvement in the justice system.

Would the Reform member and his party agree that we should be pushing for the implementation of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples as they pertain to the disproportionate representation in our penal system and in the justice system?

[Supply, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, coming from the same place as the hon. secretary of state, the province of Manitoba, I know he will agree that one of the biggest shortcomings that we see in the criminal justice system is its treatment of aboriginal people.

I read an alarming statistic that in 1969-70 the percentage of aboriginal people in the women's penitentiary in Kingston was 100%. To this day it is hugely disproportional to the rest of the population.

Having gone through and watched the aboriginal justice inquiry in Manitoba and given the recommendations of the royal commission on aboriginal people, would the member care to elaborate on how the justice system can better serve the aboriginal population, especially in the province of Manitoba?

[Supply, March 16th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the member opened by saying he would deal with an issue that scares a lot of people. Then he went on to build a whole case and to fuel the very point he was just making by trying to scare people in a very systematic and point by point way, painting the worst case situation in every possible point of view.

One of the quotes, which I would like the member to add substance to, was “put a bullet in the head of your husband and you get a reward by moving to beautiful B.C. to enjoy the mountains and the oceans”. I have to ask him, after I am finished my remarks, to comment on that and to flesh that out a little because it does not make any sense to me.

The whole issue of criminal justice and inner city safety is something I deal with every day. I represent a riding in the inner city of Winnipeg that is rife with many of the problems touched on by the member.

What strikes me is how there can be the same set of circumstances and two completely different views of how to deal with it. We have heard Reform over the years, even prior to my coming here, on caning in Singapore. That was one of my favourites. Spanky and his gang was the term going around at that time. I understand he is an expert on the subject. He even had a book on caning in Singapore.

During the 1997 election campaign when I was walking along the streets I could always tell when I was following the Reform candidate because people would be asking me about boot camps that would be introduced based on the American model. Reform is still advocating and promoting the whole idea of boot camps. This is unbelievable.

And longer prison sentences. All conventional wisdom dealing with criminal justice has indicated that longer prison sentences do not do anything to deter the incidence of crime. Reform members are dealing with an obsolete concept and fueling the fearmongering.

In the United States a whole generation of young black males were locked up because they were a nuisance. Yes, they got them off the streets and the Americans are showing a decrease in crime. I would argue that there is no connection between those two things. The reason there is a decrease in violent crime in many of the inner city communities is that they have the lowest unemployment rate since the second world war. That is a way to slow down property crimes. Crimes of that nature are a predictable consequence of poverty and unemployment and all of the other things we need to look at. There are two different views for the same set of circumstances. The NDP would rather deal with the root causes of crime.

What does the member mean by stating that by putting a bullet in the head of her husband the woman gets rewarded by moving to beautiful British Columbia, which again is a subject of opinion, and enjoying the mountains and the ocean?

[Young Offenders Act, March 15th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I would also like to add my personal feelings as I open my remarks on Bill C-260. It is certainly the feeling of our caucus that we have great admiration and personal respect for the member for Surrey North for the work that he has done to champion this cause. There are not many issues that our caucuses will find any community of interest on, more than likely, but this is certainly one where I have the greatest admiration not only for the issue but for the way the issue has been put forward and handled over many months.

It is not easy to champion any cause, much less a cause of such great personal interest. It must have been that much more difficult for the member to deal with the issue. Our caucus feels strongly that he has handled it very well.

Bill C-260, as we have heard from previous speakers, will be covered under the new Bill C-68 so many of the merits of Bill C-260 will be incorporated into the new act. It is for that reason that our caucus will not be voting for Bill C-260. It has nothing to do with the content or the merits or the arguments that we are hearing today, and certainly nothing to do with the issue. It is simply the fact that we believe it is redundant at this point and is not necessary. Still, it gives us a valuable opportunity to speak to the issue and to raise the many merits Bill C-260 certainly brings forward for us.

My understanding is that under the current Young Offenders Act there is a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $2,000 fine for parents or guardians who fail to meet the requirements of the custody and supervision orders. Certainly it is not as though this issue has been left unaccounted for at all.

People have obviously contemplated the problems that come with releasing somebody into the custody of another person and holding that person accountable for doing what they promised to do or undertook to do, which is to keep the person in some form of custody until such time as a trial can relieve the issue.

Coming from Winnipeg and with the street gang problem it has, this issue comes up all the time. It is a very frequent occurrence. It certainly needed to be addressed so we are very pleased that Bill C-68 will put stiffer measures in place to try to give some satisfaction in that regard.

Our caucus has tried to wrestle with the issue and in doing so has tried to be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime. That is the best way I can put it briefly.

Looking at the issue in Winnipeg Centre, the riding I come from, the whole idea of releasing children to the custody of their parents and having parents act in a responsible manner is actually compounded by the aboriginal population there and the parenting skills of the middle aged group of aboriginal people who live in the inner city of Winnipeg due to the fact that they were lifted out of their homes as children and put into residential schools.

This is something we have finally come to grips with. We learn our parenting skills from our parents. When we remove a whole generation of people from their family homes where they would pick up those skills, they do not have the opportunity to learn how to be parents. I am not saying this in a critical way or a generalizing way, but that has come to be recognized as one of the issues we are facing with a generation of youth in various kinds of trouble with street gangs or whatever.

The parenting that normally goes on in any family home has not been going on properly because of the unnatural intervention in in the lives of that middle aged population when they were ripped from their family homes, dumped in a residential school and just did not have the opportunity to learn many of those skills.

Scratching deeper under the surface of the whole issue of youth crime and street crime, we have to look at how these youth gangs and street gangs are actually structured. A lot of the kids who are involved, the 10, 11 and 12 year old kids, did not actually seek out to be members of these gangs.

As more and more of them are finding refuge in safe houses and being interviewed by people, it turns out that they are getting muscled into taking part in these gangs. Quite often it is an 18 or 19 year old who comes to a 10 or 11 year old and says “If you do not do this B and E for us we will beat up your sister or bring harm to the rest of your family”. The kids literally have no choice. That is often how they get sucked into it.

I am not saying that should change the way we view crimes.

We have to take a dispassionate view of the impact on victims of crimes. We also have to take into consideration the fact that a lot of these youth involved in this stuff did not do it by choice, that they were often pulled or drawn into it from unnatural circumstances.

I have an issue in my own personal family that happened to us and made me wrestle with the issue to try to get a grip on how we feel about youth crime and the treatment of youth. In my own family we were broken into by two youths who were 15 and 16 years old. I actually caught them in the act of breaking into our house, which is a very nerve wracking thing. When I drove home one night there they were in the process of breaking into our home.

I managed to hold one of them down while my wife phoned the police, but my four year old boy was obviously curious about why I was fighting in the snowbank with these kids. He came outside. The other youth grabbed my four year old son by the hair and pulled him down the street and said “I'll trade with you. You let my friend go and you can have your kid back”. It was sort of a kidnapping incident in the middle of a dark, cold winter night in Winnipeg. It was very terrifying for my whole family.

Naturally I dropped the one kid and went after the one that had my son and gave him a bit of a licking. The end of the story is that I wound in court for six months fighting charges that I had assaulted this kid who had broken into my house. It is fundamentally wrong. It made me a very angry guy for a long time. As I said, it made me wrestle with the issue of whether we get into a hang them high kind of punishment for 15 and 16 year old kids who break into our houses and threaten our families or we work harder to try to understand the root causes and try to deal with it in that way.

This was eight or nine years ago. I have had the fullness of time to try to wrestle with the issue. I believe that some of the measures undertaken in Bill C-68 address the right direction in which we should be going. I compliment the member for Surrey North that some of the issues dealt with in Bill C-68 had their origins in the issue the member brought to the House as the issue he wanted to promote. There should be some satisfaction there, I would hope, for the member.

The whole issue of inner city youth gangs and street gangs—and I do not want to harp on it—is an overwhelming problem in the inner city of Winnipeg. There are 1,500 kids actively involved in street gang activity. They actually have break and enter rings where they divide up neighbourhoods. One person will be in charge of a little crew of break and enter artists. They will have maybe a six block area that is their turf until they wear it out. Then they sell the rights to the area to another sub-gang leader.

It is actually structured to the point where it is beyond kids just doing random acts of violence. It is almost getting to be an organized crime ring of young people.

The reason I call them street gangs and not youth gangs is that they are not driven by young people. There is always an older ring of people managing the young people who are undertaking the actual crimes. It is incorrect and it is actually maligning young people to call them youth gangs.

Obviously as parents we know that most kids are not engaged in any illegal activity. It is only a very few when we look at the larger picture.

Families that can least afford decent affordable housing, education, sports and recreation for their youths, are the ones most likely to be affected by the tragedies of crime, violence, street activity and all the predictable consequences of those things. Not to draw too tenuous a connection, we can bring the issue down to one of socioeconomics. It is a natural fact that the have nots are more likely to have some kind of violent crime as a part of their daily life and more likely to experience some sort of violence or crime because the incidents are that much higher. Desperate people take desperate measures.

Last week I spoke about the issue of arson in my area of Winnipeg where the housing stock is so beat up, atrocious, and dominated by slum landlords that arson is getting to be almost epidemic. These properties are not worth rehabilitating or renovating in any way. We have had 85 arsons in a three month period in a 12 square block area. Sometimes two or three places a night are going up in smoke. It is like the big American inner cities during the race riots of the 1960s. These people are torching the whole community. It is burn baby, burn again. That is an indicator of the type of social unrest we are prompting through many of our social and economic policies.

[National Housing Act, March 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for those very thoughtful remarks. I can be quite brief in answer to the member's comments. The whole issue seems to be about the redistribution of wealth. That is as simple as I can state it. When we live in the richest and most powerful civilization in the history of the world, it is very difficult to excuse the huge division and the huge inconsistencies in the distribution of wealth.

The simplest and the best way I can put it is when I was visiting Washington, D.C., Reverend Jesse Jackson once spoke to a group of carpenters. He had a way of trying to articulate this difference. He said, I think it went this way: “If you have five children and only three pork chops, the solution is not to kill two of the children”. Right-wingers and people like the members opposite would probably tell us that the solution is to cut those three pork chops into five equal pieces. Then all the kids go to bed hungry because nobody has enough to eat.

The way that a socialist would review the problem would be to challenge the whole lie that there are only three pork chops and challenge the absolute baloney that there is not enough wealth to go around so that we can all enjoy a reasonable standard of living. It is not about the amount of wealth in the country; it is about the distribution of wealth. I thought Reverend Jackson had a very good way of pointing that out. He has a real gift for communication.

When it comes to housing it is not so much the distribution of wealth. We have other ways of dealing with that in terms of fair wages and the opportunity of workers to get a reasonable reward. Social housing should not be stripped down strictly to monetary terms. As I pointed out, most of the social housing programs, which were gutted by the Tories and then further gutted by the Liberals, did not require a huge cash outlay. Nor did they necessarily require grants.

They needed some enabling measures so the people involved could finance their own projects, friendly financing. Zero per cent down was the big thing. If one had a $2 million project to build a 40 unit social housing project, one had to come up with 25% down or a half million dollars. Those people do not have half a million dollars to put down.

The government would underwrite them, giving 100% financing and a longer period of amortization, another thing we strongly recommend. Seeing that the lifespan of a brand new project with modern technology is 50 to 70 years, it is not a risky business move to let these people have a 35 year mortgage rather than a 25 year conventional mortgage. Those two things alone made the numbers crunch in both situations. Having that ability is what made a deal viable. That is how most of the ethnic based seniors' homes such as the Filipino seniors home in my riding, groups of otherwise powerless individuals, people with no money and no resources, manage to build good quality housing, a really fine place that they can be proud of and in which to raise their kids.

It does not take a huge redistribution of wealth to embrace the idea of a national housing program. We are not talking about anything radical or innovative. We are just talking about catching up to where the rest of the world is already in terms of embracing the idea of clean, affordable housing as one of the rights of citizenship. No one is talking about giving it free but about making it accessible.

[National Housing Act, March 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to be involved in the debate on Bill C-66 which deals with the very critical issue of housing, something that we believe has been left behind in national debates and has not had the attention it truly deserves.

Canada is probably the only developed nation in the world that does not have a national housing strategy. This is shameful. We are feeling the impact of it now in our cities, in our rural communities and in our northern communities. We are seeing the predictable consequences of not having any strong national standards or strong national plan in terms of providing clean, affordable housing for Canadians who cannot take part in the mainstream of the real estate market.

We have just heard the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan advocating strongly that this matter should be left to the free market, that if we let industry take care of it without government interference the market will take care of itself and provide an adequate number of units to meet the needs of people all over the country. If we take a serious look around, I would argue that is clearly not the case. We have failed the people waiting for clean, affordable housing by leaving it up to the market.

I am not blaming the private sector. I am merely pointing out that in some marketplaces, like my own riding of Winnipeg Centre, it is simply not economically viable to get involved in low income housing as a private landlord.

Landlords have been making representation to provincial governments and the federal government saying that this is so, that they simply cannot make a buck on it because of aging housing stock and the amount of rents they can charge. It just does not add up. Frankly they have been letting it go.

What we have is a ghettoization in the inner city of Winnipeg. I am not proud of this but the riding I represent has terrible aging, crumbling housing stock with landlords who no longer want it. One of our biggest problems is that these landlords cannot turn a buck on it. They cannot afford to pay for the necessary renovations so the houses are catching fire. There have been 85 fires in the last 3 months in a 12 square block area, 85 arsons in the last 3 months. This is an urgent situation. It is not a safe situation.

One reason we know it is arson and not some coincidence is when the firemen come to put the fire out, they find big holes cut in the first and second floors to allow the convection of the smoke and the flames in order to more seriously level the house rather than just damage it. It is a real hazard for the firemen who walk in and cannot see their hands in front of their faces for the smoke and who are then faced with four square foot holes cut in the floors. It is my feeling landlords are giving kids $50 and an address on a piece of paper and saying torch this house because it is a burden and a liability to them.

That is the desperation the private sector has found itself in in terms of trying to provide affordable housing in that market. As a result we have thousands of families that would happily move into some kind of social housing project within the city of Winnipeg. We have literally thousands on the registry looking for housing. It is not being built. It is not going up anymore.

This is another issue on which I think we are missing the boat. As a carpenter by trade I have built a lot of houses. I have built a lot of houses in the riding of Nanaimo—Cowichan, the riding of the last speaker. We all know what an engine for economic growth it is to have a healthy construction industry. There is a pent up demand for thousands and thousands of units. I do not have to go through the details of how many jobs that would entail, not just the actual trades people but all the building materials that go into it.

During the 1980s under Mulroney the Tory government pulled the rug out from underneath what we used to think of as the co-op housing program and other social housing initiatives. Had we not allowed that to happen and had the Liberals not allowed it to carry on, we would have built 75,000 more units in the country. That is the prediction. That is the pent up deficit. We got shortchanged by the 75,000 units of clean affordable housing that would have been built in our inner cities.

I will talk more about the need in my riding of Winnipeg Centre. A group of neighbours formed a housing co-op to try to take care of my own street. This was not because we needed housing since we all owned our own homes. We wanted to buy up some of the slum properties on my street and either tear them down or renovate them and put them back into the hands of families that needed them. We called ourselves the Ruby Housing Co-Op since we were on Ruby Street.

We did the research on one of the units we were trying to tear down and found out who the people really were and what kind of business it really was. The guy who owned this property owned 250 other units all through numbered companies and all through rings of other slum landlords to the point where one landlord might subcontract 10 units from the parent slum landlord. The landlord might owe the parent landlord $1,000 per month per unit and be able to keep the rest. The onus is on the landlord to stuff that slum unit full of so many welfare people that the landlord will get more than $1,000 and the profit is the difference.

We had a house on our street zoned R2T. You are allowed to have a duplex or transition, but a duplex at best. There were 17 units stuffed into a house rated R2T. To get to one person's bedroom you would have to walk through another person's bedroom. City welfare is paying for all these rooms. At $237 a month for each room times 17 rooms, he would be giving the slum landlord $1,000 and keeping the rest. His main interest is just stuffing that place full of the most disreputable people you would ever want to meet, people who were our neighbours.

That is what motivated us to start doing some research and finding out who these people were. I will not use the individual's name here but he is one of the wealthiest, well known businessman in the city and I have every reason to believe that when he is at a cocktail party and someone asks him what he does for a living he says he is in real estate. He does not say he is a slum landlord which is what he should say because we know how he makes his living.

I was not pointing at anybody in particular on the other bench.

There are some bright lights. People are reacting to and dealing with the pent up shortage of housing in the inner city of Winnipeg. The Lion's Club, to its credit, is buying up gang houses and crack houses in the inner city and putting training programs on for inner city welfare kids who then renovate these homes and put them back on the market at low interest loans. It has been a good project. We are dealing with one or two units at a time.

That is also my criticism of Habitat for Humanity. Frankly, as much as I appreciate the volunteerism and all the goodwill, it is dealing with five or ten units at a time in a city that needs thousands of units. If we put the same amount of energy and volunteerism into lobbying for a social housing program through the federal government maybe we would be putting 500 units a year into the city, or 2,000 units a year, somewhere at least reasonably close to the actual need.

The issue is not just limited to the inner city of Winnipeg, although, as I say this, donut shaped city phenomenon is certainly happening to us as it is happening to other major cities. They are building good quality homes in the suburbs and going through all the cost of delivering services to those high end homes while letting the inner city rot.

The inner city is burning, frankly. It looks like the late 1960s in American cities. It is like burn baby, burn. These people are torching their homes out of desperation. It is Watts, Detroit or something. That is what it looks like. Every night these people are voicing their discontent by torching houses.

It is interesting to hear the Reform Party member say that government has no role to play here. In this example one would have to be ideologically driven with blinders on to even intimate that government has no role to play in at least setting the stage to provide for clean affordable housing for people who live in this country. It is a basic right. We have just heard the member for Vancouver East speak very passionately about the United Nations declarations while recognizing the plight of homeless people as a national disaster.

I am very proud that our housing critic, the member for Vancouver East, toured the country recently and went to just about every major city and wrote a very good report on her findings on homelessness and substandard housing. That was the theme and it was not just people with no homes whatsoever, it was clearly about people living in inadequate housing.

From the front page of the report I will read a brief quote. I think she made reference to it in her remarks. It was written by the finance minister when he was in opposition. It was the way he felt when he was lambasting the Tory government for its woeful inadequacy in addressing this problem: “The government sits there and does nothing. It refuses to apply the urgent measures that are required to reverse this situation. The lack of affordable housing contributes to and accelerates the cycle of poverty, which is reprehensible in a society as rich as ours”.

It is an excellent quote. I could not have said it better myself because a lack of adequate housing is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. It is one of those things that comes at us from both ends. We do not have to go through all the social aspects of adequate housing but we can imagine a young family trying to get on its feet or trying to keep kids on a straight and narrow direction if they grow up in absolute desperation in terms of their housing situation.

I have raised this in the past. There is a group in Winnipeg called Rossbrooke House. It is a safe house for inner city street kids. They can drop in and have some place to hang out where they are not at risk or getting into trouble. It is run by two catholic nuns, Sister Leslie and Sister Bernadette. They do a wonderful job. The member for Vancouver East and I visited the safe house as part of the study.

One of the things pointed out to us was that the people who live in that area in often terribly substandard housing will not sleep in the outer rooms of their house. They will sleep only in the inner rooms of their house like the den or the living room because of the gunfire every night. They will not sleep next to an outside wall. These two sisters pointed this out to us as being the reality people in that neighbourhood live with.

The reason I raise this is the biggest challenge they have in trying to deal with the problem youth who come through their doors is making them feel safe somewhere. One cannot work with a kid if that kid does not feel safe and trusting.

These kids all exhibit physical characteristics that are common among people who never feel safe wherever they are. If they are at home with a substance abuse parent they never know if they will get hugged or swatted on the head. They are insecure about that. When they are on the street they are not safe so they are always spinning around looking to see if someone is going to jump them.

These kids have nervous ticks. It is hyper acuteness and they are fearful of their environment. I say this is largely due to the fact that even when they are at home, if it is not a secure setting, they can never relax. It could be a 10 year old kid on pins and needles all the time. These women work with these street kids who have these nervous characteristics that we see so often. Their argument again is that housing is the second biggest problem in terms of rehabilitation of these kids.

I have been involved in this issue for quite some time, first as a carpenter building houses. I know the value of the industry. I know a great deal about the technical side of housing, whether it is multifamily or single family units. As the president of a housing co-op I have been actively engaged in trying to get the resources together to build clean, affordable housing.

What we should point out is nobody is asking for any handouts in this regard. When social housing used to be built the numbers still had to crunch. A business plan had to be put together to prove that the revenue coming in would meet the debt service to the loan. The only favour the government would do was provide 0% down or 100% financing and it would be amortized over a longer period of time, maybe 35 years rather than 25 years. That is not some kind of handout.

That is not to say here is $2 million, build 40 units of social housing. The applicant group, usually an ethnic group or a group of like minded people who come together and put together a proposal to build social housing, has to sit down and crunch the numbers. It has to figure out the bridge financing, the hard costs of the construction, the soft costs and the debt servicing on the loan, add all those things together in a total package and find a rent people can afford and be able to meet the debt service.

It all gets paid back. This was the beauty of CMHC's many housing programs that have been gutted and cut and offloaded to the provinces. There was no kind of handout. It was an empowering kind of thing where citizens were taking their housing needs into their own hands and learning about running a business plan and executing the actual building of this project and then managing it for many years afterwards with some kind of tenant association.

It is a very positive thing. It is a very community building thing. It is not any type of government handout. When I listen to the member for Nanaimo—Cowichan trying to make it sound that any kind of social housing is some kind of government handout, he clearly does not know a great deal about the programs that have been cut.

We are very concerned that Bill C-66 will put the final nail in the coffin of any hope to have a national housing strategy. We are very concerned that this pushes it just that much further to privatization of social housing. Who knows what kind of free marketers will swoop in and take this over.

We have seen what happens when things turn bad, when profit motive is the only reason for doing something. As soon as it is a little less than profitable, they turn their backs on it. These units are torched or they erode to the point where nobody should be living in these units. It is a time honoured expression where I come from that capital has no conscience.

Let us face it. It is the government's job to inject some conscience into the whole picture of providing social housing. Other countries such as Chile are leaps and bounds ahead of Canada.

I do not usually blow Chile's horn. It is not my favourite place because of its checkered history, although it seems to have cleared that up. It is building 200,000 units of social housing. It is nice that a Canadian company is signing contracts to build the first ones now. It will move a whole plant down to Chile and use Canadian building materials such as drywall and shingles, the whole shooting match, as well as Canadian expertise and technology.

The reason for that market for Canadian housing technology is that Chile has the vision to upgrade building stock. It realizes that over the years it has let it slide. Free marketers were not providing the necessary units. There will be a couple of thousand now and many more thousands next year, for a total of 200,000 units of social housing for Chile. In Canada it is zero. Since 1993 there has been nothing.

In an earlier intervention I mentioned the member of parliament I defeated in the riding of Winnipeg Centre. He joined my housing co-op just to demonstrate that he was sensitive to the issue. He was elected in 1988 and fought the Tories in their gutting and dismantling of the social housing system. In 1993 when it became a campaign promise he was a little taken aback, to be fair, that his government would not reintroduce any social housing. That became abundantly clear as 1993-94 went by and nothing was being done. From 1995-96 to this date all we have seen is a downward slide in this regard. He was probably as disappointed as we were.

My biggest insight into the condition of social housing in my riding was while knocking on doors for other candidates during the 1988, 1990 and 1993 federal elections and then in 1997 for my own campaign. I could walk down the same streets and knock on the same doors and see the dramatic slide in the condition of the building stock. There was no hope for property in that area. One could buy a pretty good little house for $10,000 to $15,000. It had no real value.

When a community is in decline like that it is very hard to pull it back up. That is why no private sector housing initiative will be viable without social housing being introduced and managed by the federal government.