Pat Martin

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I wish I had more time to listen to what my colleague from Mississauga South had to say.

I understand that the premiums exceeded the need, but only because the benefits were ratcheted down so drastically. The guy that I beat, David Walker, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance at the time, devised a scheme where nobody qualified any more. It is not hard to show a surplus—

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, that money exists as a debt to Canadian workers and that debt is just as real as any other debt of the Government of Canada.

It was under the Conservatives in 1986 when the money was directed into the consolidated revenue fund. When workers were told the money would be deducted from their paycheques, there was an expectation, a promise made, that it was for the specific purpose of income maintenance should they become unemployed.

If the Conservatives were looking to roll back taxes, they could have rolled back some of the tax cuts they gave to corporate Canada, which does not need them by the way. The richest and most successful corporations in the country were the beneficiaries of most of the tax cuts. Why did the Conservatives not look there instead of unemployed workers? If the Conservatives wanted to harvest a few dollars out of the existing system, they could have asked Exxon or Shell for some of that money back. They were high-grading when they needed it the least.

I recognize that successive governments have used the EI fund as a cash cow since at least 1986. It has fallen into deficit and into arrears a couple of times over the years, but the cumulative total of deficit has been $11 billion and the cumulative total surplus has been $54 billion. No matter how we add it up, that is a lot of money owing to Canadian workers, either as improved benefits for when they are unemployed, or changing the eligibility rules so if someone becomes unemployed, they might actually qualify for some benefits, as most currently do not, or a premium holiday for both the employer and employee. That has been done. The government has ratcheted down the premiums a number of times.

The fact remains that over that period of time more money went into the fund than was paid out and it was not the government's money to use. It was morally and ethically wrong for the government to use it for anything else.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I think you should call the cops. I think you should ask the Sergeant-at-Arms to go and find the RCMP because there is a robbery in progress as we speak going on in the House of Commons while I am standing here and while we are sitting here. The robbery I am talking about is numerically the biggest robbery in Canadian history. It makes the great train robbery look like nothing. It makes the Grenkow boys who had the gold heist at the Winnipeg airport seem like peanuts. We are talking about $54 billion being swiped by legislative decree as we speak. If people in the country knew they would be horrified. I am not exaggerating.

The EI fund has been a cash cow for successive governments for as long as I have been a member of Parliament. They have been using this money for all the wrong purposes. A previous colleague of mine explained how fundamentally wrong it is to deduct money from people's paycheques for a specific purpose and tell them it is for income maintenance if they should happen to lose their jobs. Then, to use that money for something else completely is just fundamentally wrong. It is not the government's money. The government should start from that basic premise. That pool of money is not the government's.

It was the Mulroney Conservatives who withdrew from the EI fund. The unemployment insurance fund used to be made up of money from the employer, the employee and the Government of Canada. In 1986, the Mulroney Conservatives stopped doing that. The government no longer paid anything into it, so it was 100% funded by employer and employee contributions at a ratio of 1:1.4. It simply is not the government's money to use unless it passes a bill. It can do anything. The Government of Canada's Parliament can pass legislation to make this its money but it should not. Morally and ethically it would be fundamentally wrong.

It is fundamentally wrong to balance the books on the back of the unemployed. It is almost cowardly when we think about it, of all the places governments could look for additional revenue to fund their fiscal agenda is from the unemployed. Almost no one qualifies for EI any more, that is why it is showing such a great surplus. Fortunately, we are in buoyant economic times as fewer people are applying for employment insurance although that is about to change given the layoffs in the manufacturing sector.

Let me tell everyone how Liberals balanced the books and what is wrong with that, and then explain why it is wrong for the Conservatives to do the same. The Liberals came up with $100 billion worth of tax cuts and they brag about that. They say they cut more taxes than any government ever, $100 billion worth, but let us look at how they paid for it. They took $30 billion right out of the EI fund, so that is like an upside-down Robin Hood, robbing the poor to give tax cuts to the rich. Another $30 billion they took from the surplus in the public service pension plan.

Just before he left politics in late 1999 and early 2000, Marcel Masse, the former treasury board president, the last thing he did on his way out, knowing full well the hue and cry would be deafening, was to rob, and I deliberately use this term, the $30 billion surplus that was in the public service pension plan. The average beneficiary of the public service pension plan makes $9,000 a year and they are female. The government could have taken that $30 billion and doubled the annual pension of those beneficiaries currently, or improved the benefit package for future beneficiaries, or it could have shared it.

That is what is done in the private sector. When Bell Canada had a big surplus, union and management sat down and negotiated. Some went to benefits, some went to donation holidays and some went to the company. But no, the Government of Canada took it all. With the other $40 billion, the Liberals engaged in program spending, the most ruthless, cutting, hacking and slashing of social programs in this country's history. That is how they came up with their $100 billion in tax cuts.

Taking a page from the same book, the Conservatives find themselves wanting to spend money, trying to endear themselves by buying their way into the hearts of Canadians. Where do they look for money? They do not look at offshore tax havens. They do not look at perhaps having a tax on excess profits in the oil sector. They do not look at the tax fugitives who take $7 billion a year of tax revenue out of our country, something they promised they would do when they were in opposition. They have left those tax havens alone and they have left the very rich able to expatriate their family fortunes and family trusts offshore. Not only the millionaires themselves never pay taxes in Canada again, but none of their progeny ever pay taxes in Canada again. These things have been exposed in the newspaper this past couple of weeks by Diane Francis, a right-wing Conservative journalist. She has condemned the government, to which I presume she sends money, for not acting on these tax havens, these tax fugitives.

It really begs the question why, now that they are in a position to do so, the Conservatives would have three budgets and one economic update and never touch this atrocious situation, leaving $7 billion a year untouched? Instead, where do they look for revenue? They are taking it off of the backs of the unemployed. It is almost a cowardly thing to do.

I will tell members the impact the changes in employment insurance has had in my inner city riding of Winnipeg Centre, by some standards the lowest income riding in all of Canada.

When the government changed the system to the existing hour based system, it took $20.9 million a year out of my low income riding of Winnipeg Centre. That would be like taking the payroll of four pretty major companies, a $20.9 million payroll, from the poorest of the poor. It would be different if it took that from high income earners and they lost a couple of grand a year each.

However, the people who miss out on the income maintenance benefits of employment insurance are in desperate circumstances. They went from being marginalized and poor and getting by on EI, to abject poverty. The government has offloaded the income maintenance burden onto the province and these people on welfare.

That has been the experience with the brilliant social policy initiative of the management of the EI fund to day.

For years, we said EI should be a separate fund. I guess we have to be careful what we wish for because we were not specific enough as to what we wanted. The Conservatives are creating that separate fund. They are taking it out of consolidated revenue, as we have always maintained they should. They are putting it into this crown corporation. I do not disagree with that. However, they are taking $54 billion of surplus that exists now and using it for whatever general consolidated revenue spending they wish to spend it on. That is fundamentally wrong. It is morally and ethically wrong. I call it robbery, and I do not hesitate to put it in those terms.

We need a $15 billion operating surplus, according to the Auditor General, to be safe. Otherwise we will fall into deficit with that fund if we have any kind of an economic downturn. Judging from the job losses in Ontario in the last 18 months and what could happen elsewhere in the country, as we turn our back on the manufacturing sector, we will need a robust employment insurance fund to provide income maintenance and bridge training to retrain the workers affected by that. The $2 billion left in the fund would be gone in a minute.

The Conservatives are showing a surplus of $750 million a month and they are only going to leave a $2 billion surplus. They are taking the rest. That is not a per year surplus; it is a per month surplus. It is a cash cow. It is a licence to print money. It is a dream come true for a finance minister. It is like catnip for a finance minister. They cannot stay away from it, but they should because it is not their money. That is the most fundamental basic element the Conservatives seem to forget: it is not their money. They have no proprietary right to that fund. That is our money. It is not even the employers' money. It is all the workers' money because it is put in there for the benefit of the employees if they should be unfortunate to find themselves out of a job.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I have a comment and a question to put to my colleague from Ottawa Centre.

I was interested in the way he illustrated the fact that there are EI changes in the budget implementation bill that do not properly belong there and there are immigration changes in the budget implementation bill, which I view as a further Americanization of Canadian politics when all these extra things are stuffed into a budget bill. He called it a Trojan Horse. That is a good, graphic illustration to which Canadians could probably relate.

However, in the context of passing a budget implementation bill, which has a few goodies that the Conservatives are throwing out there to try to endear themselves to Canadians, in the same context, they are sneaking in these major policy changes. I would like to ask the hon. member about that from a process point of view.

I would also like to ask him about the Canadian Labour Congress analysis of the impact of the changes to EI, the most recent changes by the Liberals when they changed the number of hours needed to qualify, et cetera. What was the impact on his riding?

In my riding alone, those changes accounted for a loss of $20.9 million a year worth of federal money that used to come into my low income riding that no longer comes in. I am asking if his riding, which is similar to mine in many ways, experienced a similar impact when the EI rules were changed?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, June 2nd, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for outlining some of the problems associated with part seven of Bill C-50.

My colleague pointed out how fundamentally wrong it is to deduct something from a person's paycheque for a specific purpose and then to use it for something completely different and for which the government was never authorized to use it. That goes beyond misrepresentation. It builds an expectation that workers will be covered for income maintenance should they be unfortunate enough to be laid off.

Would my colleague agree that this is a double insult? First, it is fundamentally wrong to take money off a worker's paycheque every week, and there is no choice because it is compulsory, and then use it for purposes the worker may not have ever authorized or approved. Second, it is a misrepresentation to say that a worker has insurance against unemployment and then when the worker becomes unemployed, in some cases, the worker has a less than 40% chance of being eligible for any benefits. A youth has only a 25% chance and a female youth has a 15% chance of qualifying for any benefits at all. What kind of an insurance policy is that? I would ask my colleague to expand on these two big lies associated with the EI fund in recent years.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, May 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, yes, the Canadian Bar Association did not pull any punches whatsoever in expressing its displeasure and dissatisfaction with the government's initiatives regarding immigration today.

I should point out that I have a letter from the YWCA. Civil society, generally, is taken aback that the government would try to implement these changes without the usual prerequisite consultation. For a social policy change of this significance, it is unprecedented that the government would try to slam it through and give further discretionary powers to the minister and not go through the ordinary channels of consultation.

We also have a letter here from one of the largest--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, May 30th, 2008]

As my colleagues says, and the Canadian people are missing any opportunity for input. If that Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration were dealing with these issues, we might be touring the country, going from coast to coast, to get input from Canadians as to whether they would approve of this massive fundamental overhaul, this huge policy shift in how we welcome newcomers to this country.

The only thing that I can think of is, and I have talked with my colleagues, it reminds us of the further indication of the Americanization of Canadian politics. This is very much an American phenomena that we see in the American Congress. Its budget bills, its appropriation bills, are often stuffed full of a hundred other little bits and pieces that an individual senator or congressman might want in, in exchange for passing that piece of legislation. It looks like the Manhattan phone book by the time its budget bills get passed.

This is sort of what the Conservatives have done here. They have taken a budget implementation bill that has to be passed by the time we recess Parliament. It would give the spending authority for the government to go through with its fiscal plan. It is completely inappropriate and unfair to slip this heavy piece of immigration legislation into the budget implementation bill.

Let me tell members what we should be debating right now, just as an aside. I was hoping that in this federal budget this Conservative government would undertake some of the things it promised to do, such as plug some of the outrageous tax haven loopholes that still exist today.

I remember when the Conservatives were in opposition. I used to sit with them on this side of the House, berating the Liberal finance minister, saying, “Why do you allow people like the former prime minister to put all of their holdings offshore as tax fugitives to avoid paying their fair share of taxes?”, and the Conservatives used to agree with us. That used to meet the old nod test.

Now that the Conservatives have had three budgets and one fiscal economic update, which we could call a third mini budget, they have not chosen to plug those loopholes. One of their own right-wing columnists, actually, Diane Francis, who calls herself a practising Conservative, has written five articles in a row in the last month in the Financial Post, slamming corporate Canada for shielding its money offshore.

She calls it economic treason, I believe that is the term she used, when Canadians willingly avoid paying taxes in the country that allowed them to profit and become healthy, wealthy and wise. Yet, this government repeatedly refuses to address that fiscal concern that could have been an element of this budget that we could be debating here today.

Another thing she pointed out is there is a tax haven option for family trust funds where Canadians can expatriate all of their family trust holdings and allow their kids to live as trust fund kids in Canada, never paying a penny of income tax. Because once they expatriate that money, it is tax free; they pay a one-time 25% exit tax. They set it up in a tax fugitive country where we have a tax treaty and their kids and their kids's kids, generations of Canadians, can be living off of that trust fund never paying any taxes in this country.

She says it is quite frequent and that is appalling. Why we willingly forgo that amount of tax revenue should be debated in the House of Commons. Canadians, I find, do not mind paying their fair share of taxes as long as everyone is paying their fair share of taxes.

Those things should be debated today. Instead, we are put in the awkward position of having to debate immigration policy during a budget implementation bill.

On that line, I come from the building trades. I used to be the head of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners of America and we used to deal with this issue of temporary foreign workers all the time. I can tell members that this is an issue of our immigration laws that we have to have a look at because there is a tendency to rely more and more on temporary foreign workers.

Let me just say right from the start that it is not a human resources labour market strategy to bring in foreign workers to fill job vacancies. That is not a strategy at all. There is no future in that and it undermines local wage scales. It causes social unrest and social problems in the community where these influxes of foreign workers come in. Often the foreign workers do not receive the same benefits and rights that local workers do.

Let me give one example in the province of British Columbia that was a disastrous thing because the applicants for foreign workers are often disingenuous in their applications.

The Gold River pulp mill in Tahsis shut down. The whole town was out of work. Eighty millwrights were required to tear the old plant down to sell it to China, where it was going to be rebuilt. There were 80 unemployed millwrights in town who built that mill. The millwrights in Gold River knew every nut and bolt in that pulp mill because they were the ones who put it together, but when the company official that bought the mill wanted foreign workers to come in, he filled out all the necessary forms and where it said, “Did you try to find Canadian workers to do this job?”, he ticked off, “Yes”. On the question, “What was the reason you did not use Canadian workers?”, he put down, and we have a copy of this, “The cost was too high”.

This foreign owner who scooped up the pulp and paper mill to move it offshore would not hire Canadian workers to even dismantle the plant because the cost was too high, so he brought in a bunch of South Asian workers from India, sleeping 12 to a hotel room, to tear down the plant, while the unemployed men and women in Tahsis, B.C. were on the other side of the gate looking in while somebody else was eating their lunch. That is a recent example of the temporary foreign worker phenomenon that is sweeping the country. The company got away with doing that.

In another example on the other coast, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald was building a new printing press, a very high tech precision operation. It is a machine that is twice as long as this room and it has to be levelled off to one-one-thousandths of an inch, to the micron, so the paper rollers are running accurately. The Swiss company that manufactures the mill said it could not find any qualified Canadian workers to do it, so the Government of Canada let it bring in its own workers to install it.

We are talking a couple of years worth of highly skilled work for Canadian workers. Guess what? There were 800 unemployed Canadian millwrights in the Atlantic region alone. I know because they were members of my union on the job board, on the dispatch board, from St. John's, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Saint John, New Brunswick. They were all sitting there unemployed while somebody else was allowed in to eat their lunch because the Government of Canada accepted the word of these applicants that would say they could not find any skilled Canadians, that it was far too complex for the Canadian workers.

One guy actually pulled a hair out of his head when he was arguing this to the government, saying, “We have to set these machines thinner than the thickness of this hair”. What does he think Canadian workers do every day of the week? What does he think skilled millwrights do in this country? If they have any hair on their head, they are measuring the tolerances of paper mills right across the country, because we build printing presses in every city in Canada, and we could have built the one in Halifax, Nova Scotia too if the Government of Canada would have just said no and let Canadian workers have those jobs. What is this zeal we have for giving away Canadian jobs?

I will say one last thing on the subject. If there are labour market shortages in the skilled trades, some of the aboriginal communities have chronic unemployment situations. We have--

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, May 30th, 2008]

Mr. Speaker, I will take what few minutes are left. I understand I will probably be the last speaker of the day on this particular subject, so I think I should preface my remarks by speaking to Canadians who may be tuned in and watching, and try to explain why it is that the House of Commons today is seized with the issue of debating the budget implementation bill.

Yet, virtually all of the speakers have been rising to speak about immigration and how Canada's immigration act is being altered by this bill. It does warrant some explanation. I have to apologize to Canadians because I, for the life of me, cannot give a plausible explanation as to why the government would have slipped in a bunch of serious amendments to the immigration act into the budget implementation bill.

It is beyond me. It is beyond most people. It is underhanded. It is a back-door approach. It undermines democracy, in a sense, because the people who have been assigned to reviewing Canada's immigration laws from all parties at the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration are being denied the opportunity to have their fair say. In fact, the House of Commons is being denied the ability to have a fulsome debate on the subject of immigration reform.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2008, May 30th, 2008]

No, Mr. Speaker.

[Open Government Act, May 29th, 2008]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-554, An Act to amend the Access to Information Act (open government).

Mr. Speaker, I thank my seconder, my colleague from Trinity—Spadina.

Today, on the 25th anniversary of the Access to Information Act, I am pleased to present a bill that would change the name of the Access to Information Act to the open government act. It would have a comprehensive reform to many clauses. It would impose the duty to create records. It would introduce a public interest override in the application of the Access to Information Act and would create the situation where cabinet confidences would no longer be excluded automatically from the scrutiny of the Access to Information Act.

I should point out that every clause in the bill was written by the former information commissioner, Mr. John Reid, and his staff. It has been endorsed by Justice Gomery and by the Conservative Party of Canada because every clause in the bill was in the campaign literature in the 2006 federal election campaign where the Conservatives promised specifically to introduce every aspect of John Reid's open government act.

This is reform that is long overdue and absolutely necessary to lay the foundation for the transparency and accountability that Canadians expect.

(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)