Peggy Nash

[Jobs and Growth Act, 2012, November 29th, 2012]

moved:

Motion No. 1

That Bill C-45 be amended by deleting Clause 1.

Motion No. 3

That Bill C-45 be amended by deleting Clause 2.

[The Economy, November 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative platform seems to have gone the way of the minister's contingency plan: out the door to be forgotten forevermore. However, the reality is that compared to the platform of the Conservatives, they are off by $5.9 billion next year, $8.8 billion the year after that, $11.4 billion off the next year and, finally, $6.9 billion the year after that.

Does the minister really consider this massive $33 billion in cumulative bad projections to be a small sum of money?

[The Economy, November 28th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this has been hard week for the Minister of Finance. Yesterday, he made a mistake when he said that the Conservatives would keep their promise to balance the budget.

Their election platform projected a $2.8 billion surplus in 2014, but in his economic update, the finance minister said that there will be an $8.6 billion deficit, a discrepancy of over $11 billion.

What services will be cut in order to keep the Prime Minister's election promise?

[Finance, November 27th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative platform promised a surplus of $2.8 billion in 2014, and yet the finance minister's most recent projection shows there will be a deficit of $8.6 billion. That is a difference of $11.4 billion.

The finance minister cannot get rid of this with a wave of a hand. The Prime Minister and the finance minister disagree about the size of the deficit and whether more cuts are coming. Why can they not keep their story straight?

[Finance, November 27th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister and his Minister of Finance should get their stories straight.

The Minister of Finance is saying that there will be a deficit in 2014. The Prime Minister is saying the opposite. The finance minister is promising that there will not be any more cuts. The Prime Minister is saying the opposite.

Who is telling the truth about the government's intentions?

Why are the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister out of step on such fundamental issues?

[Holodomor, November 23rd, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to mark Holodomor Awareness Week. An essential tool in preventing genocide is education. I am proud that this House gave its unanimous support to create Holodomor Awareness Day, a special day to remember the millions of Ukrainians who died in the horrific famine engineered by Stalin's regime in the 1930s. I have also written to the Ontario minister of education to ask that information about the Holodomor be included in the curriculum for Ontario schools.

I would like to take this opportunity to call on my colleagues, on both sides of the House, to reach out to our provincial and territorial partners in an effort to ensure that school children from coast to coast to coast learn about the Holodomor and other acts of genocide. It is measures like these that can help foster understanding of the atrocities of the past so that we might prevent them in the future.

[Securities, November 21st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, in fact his attitude so far has been to make future cuts to transfer payments without any consultation. Is that what he means by working with the provinces?

He attacks the finance ministers for not implementing his own vision while he is mismanaging an economy that will now grow at a slower rate than the United States, with 350,000 more unemployed in Canada today than when the recession hit in 2008.

Is this why he and the Prime Minister refuse to meet with the premiers?

[Securities, November 21st, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, what we are expecting this time around is that the Minister of Finance has learned his lesson. He did try to force the provinces to agree to his demands and he was shut down by the Supreme Court. His approach was nothing short of unconstitutional.

Therefore. the finance minister's bully tactics will not work. Neither he nor the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, understand that their role is to work with the provinces. Will he change his attitude and will he listen?

[Intergovernmental Affairs, November 20th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, addressing serious problems means engaging in serious discussion. It means give and take. Co-operative federalism means listening to ideas that are not necessarily one's own. Why is the Prime Minister refusing to meet with the premiers?

[Intergovernmental Affairs, November 20th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the fact is that the premiers of this country are getting together to discuss, among other things, the economy, but the Prime Minister is refusing to join them.

According to the IMF, we will have fallen behind the U.S. in growth by 2015. Greece's economy is expected to grow faster than ours. Addressing serious problems—