Peter Julian

[Agriculture, April 15th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, it is about time the government did something for B.C. It has been 13 years.

There is mounting evidence and concern that the United States has been hiding its cases of mad cow while keeping its border closed to Canadian beef. These concerns have been raised by the U.S. department of agriculture inspectors themselves.

Since we are importing American beef into our country and its safety is in question, will the minister close our borders to American beef, launch an investigation and stand up for Canada and the safety of Canadian food?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member talked about an ideal world. It is very clear that the ideal world is an ivory tower right now within the Liberal caucus.

We are talking about $5 billion that was given out to the corporate sector to reduce even further the corporation tax rates, and they are already much lower than in the United States. That was the priority, to shovel money out the door to the corporate sector rather than address these key issues.

There is no plan on child care. There is no plan on Kyoto. We are still waiting. Every week or so we hear, “Yes, tomorrow”, “it was yesterday”, “it was last week”. We keep hearing that eventually there will be some plan brought forward. We know that the last time the Liberal government brought forward a plan, the plan called for a reduction of 20%. It missed the mark by increasing greenhouse emissions by 20%.

The problem is the contradiction in the Liberal world between the rhetoric and the reality. It is certainly not by saying that eventually there will be a plan put forward, that eventually there will be some investment, while it shovels money out to the corporate sector, that we will address these problems. These are serious issues.

Longer food bank lineups is a serious issue. More and more homelessness is a serious issue. More and more child poverty is a serious issue. The serious issues are not being addressed by the budget nor by the government.

I would like to come back to post-secondary education because the hon. member mentioned that as well. The two provinces that are working the hardest at addressing issues of making post-secondary education affordable are Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Very clearly, NDP provinces have a very clear addressing of the issue of post-secondary education and the lack of accessibility.

The government has to show some leadership. The government has to step forward. Rather than spending billions of dollars for Bay Street, the government has to invest in communities across the country. This is not happening and it is a shame.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-43, the budget implementation bill.

I would like to start by flagging what is obvious to all of us. The games that were being played around this budget implementation bill have certainly changed in the few weeks since it was introduced. A few weeks ago we were being told that this bill had to be voted on and adopted by Parliament. If not, Liberals threatened to bring us into an election campaign.

We have seen with Gomery that things have changed quite markedly and that threat from Liberal members to bring down the House or to call an election has changed quite a bit now that we have seen the revelations of the continued misuse of public funds by the Liberal Party. As a result of that, it is very clear that the Liberals are approaching this whole question of the budget implementation bill a lot differently now than they were a few weeks ago.

I would like to talk a bit about the situation in Canada. The budget and budget implementation bill do not address the major issues that are out there on main streets across this country.

I would like to talk about 12 years of Liberal government and what that has meant to poverty and homelessness in this country. We have seen in the lower mainland of British Columbia, the area I am from, that homelessness has tripled over the past three years under policies of the federal Liberal Party and also policies of the B.C. Liberal party.

In my constituency of Burnaby—New Westminster we have seen more than 1,000 people a week having to rely on food banks. Food bank lineups are growing across the country as the crisis of poverty and homelessness increases.

We also know that 40% of aboriginal children live in poverty, 30% of children with disabilities now live in poverty, and that there are over 1.1 million poor children in this country. Fifteen years ago the member for Ottawa Centre actually brought forward a motion that was adopted by the House to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. Here we are in 2005 and over 1.1 million poor children attest to the fact that this government has done absolutely nothing to address child poverty.

We also have a crisis in credit card health care. We have seen, with the increasing privatization of health care, Canadians increasingly pay out of pocket for health care. That should be a right that the CCF and the NDP pushed forward as fundamental to building Canadian society. We have seen that nothing has been done about that as well.

In terms of post-secondary education, we know that average young adults going into post-secondary education receive a $20,000 debt, a mortgage on their future, when they come out of post-secondary studies. That does not count the thousands of young Canadians who decide that they will not go into post-secondary studies because they simply cannot afford the cost. From the campaign last June, having knocked on over 6,000 doors in Burnaby and New Westminster, there were literally dozens of young people who told me that they could not afford to go to school. Their family could not afford it; they could not afford it. Their dreams and their future were cut off because of a lack of action by the government in the post-secondary sector.

There is also the environment. We had a plan 12 years ago to cut greenhouse gas emissions. We now find, even though the plan called for a cut of 20% in greenhouse gas emissions, in 2005 that we have actually seen an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The budget does very little to address that.

We have seen the number of people with disabilities living in poverty growing. Many people with disabilities have no access to employment programs in order to further enrich their lives.

We talked this week about the situation in Canada and also talked about our fiscal projections. The IMF mentioned just a few weeks ago in its study that we were the least accurate of any of the major countries in the western world. The IMF study showed that Canadian fiscal projections were so far off under the Liberal government that they were the least accurate of any of the western countries studied.

We also have this week a crisis in rural Canada. We have communities struggling across the country due to the lack of support by the government to the agricultural sector and the lack of action by the government in reducing or trying to address some of the crises we face in getting our cattle or our softwood lumber across the border.

Rather than taking a strong line with the Americans to try to address, in tough negotiations, those issues, we have taken a very soft line that has led absolutely nowhere and has led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs as a result of the lack of access of our cattle industry. In British Columbia where I come from, 20,000 jobs in the softwood lumber industry have been lost because of this inaction.

We also see a crisis in our cities. We have seen more boil water alerts. We have seen the underfunding of cities that has led to the lack of renewal of our infrastructure that is so important to the future of our country. We see increasing difficulties for our senior citizens.

We have seen cutbacks to home care in many provinces. For example, in British Columbia home care has been severely slashed and many senior citizens who would love to live independent lives with some support are forced to go into nursing homes, which costs more for the taxpayer and leaves them with a lower quality of life. If we had a home care program and that were effective, those seniors could continue to live independent, quality lives at home.

We also have seen increasing concerns about big box child care. We have had repeated promises over 12 years for a national child care system. What we have seen so far from the government is absolutely no response to the concern and fear about big box companies. Rather than have the money go to quality child care in our neighbourhoods, it will go to profits for big box foreign operators coming into the country.

With jobs, we have also seen a 60¢ loss in real wages per hour for the average Canadian worker over the last 10 years and fewer jobs with benefits and pensions. It used to be most jobs had pensions. The Statistics Canada study that came out in January showed less than 40%.

The government has encouraged more and more outsourcing. I recall getting off the plane in Washington to lobby members of Congress to support quality Canadian products. I was given a T-shirt by the government made in Mexico and a Canadian flag pin made in the People's Republic of China. I was supposed to take these to the members of Congress to say that we did good quality work. Outsourcing has been encouraged by the government and nothing in the budget addresses that.

What we have is a lower and lower quality of life for 90% of Canadians. That is the reality this week, when we look at the budget.

What did we get? The Leader of the Opposition certainly got what he wanted. He said that the major priorities in the budget implementation bill were Conservative priorities. We know the Leader of the Opposition got what he wanted in the budget, despite the fact that the Liberals campaigned saying that NDP values were close to Liberal values. The Liberal budget is a Conservative budget. What that means is the fat cats in the corporate sector got almost $5 billion in corporate tax gifts, a corporate sector that is at its most profitable level in its history.

We see that the wealthy got additional tax cuts of half a billion dollars.

There is nothing in the budget that addresses poverty, homelessness, post-secondary education and the crisis for seniors except for a buck a day that is given to address eroding pensions. There is nothing in it to deal substantially with the environment. The budget does nothing to address the substantive issues that people are having to deal with across the country.

This budget is billions for Bay Street and pennies for Main Streets across the country. For that reason and for so many others, we will vote against it.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, clearly it is not a budget of hope; it is a budget of despair and it creates an economy of despair. When we look across the country, we see homelessness numbers growing day by day. We see increasing child poverty which is shameful after 12 years of Liberal government. There are 1.1 million children in the country who live in poverty. That is 40% of aboriginal children and 30% who are children with disabilities.

We are seeing across the country increasing despair, poverty, homelessness, and longer and longer food bank lines. Rather than addressing any of the issues such as housing and the increasing despair on the main streets across the country, the budget injects nearly $5 billion in corporate tax gifts to Bay Street.

We have so much poverty, homelessness and despair across the country. There is a fall in real wages, fewer full time jobs, and more families having to make do with part time or temporary work. Why does the member feel it is appropriate to give billions of dollars to Bay Street when our main streets are suffering?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member mentioned that he thought this budget was balanced, so I have a series of questions for him.

How can he say the budget is balanced when we have increasing homelessness across this country?

How can he say this budget is balanced when poverty is growing, particularly child poverty, which we were supposed to eliminate by 2000? There are now 1.1 million children across this country living in poverty and those numbers are growing.

How can he call this budget balanced when it does nothing to address the crisis in post-secondary education that is afflicting students and youth across this country? The average debt load now is over $20,000 because tuition fees have doubled over these past few years during the Liberal reign.

How can he say that this budget is balanced when people with disabilities are living harder and harder lives because there is no support from the government? In fact, the government has cut one of the major employment programs that addressed the issue of integrating people with disabilities back into employment.

How can he say the budget is balanced when we have a crisis in rural Canada? The government has done nothing to address the border issues that are hurting our rural communities across the country.

How can he say the budget is balanced when seniors are living tougher lives and their quality of life is eroding? This budget offered nothing but a buck a day to help seniors when they have seen their real incomes eroding because pensions are actually eroding due to real cuts.

How can he say this budget is balanced when average Canadians are earning 60¢ an hour less in real terms than they were a decade ago when this government came to power? We are seeing fewer and fewer jobs with pension benefits, fewer and fewer jobs that actually carry benefits, more and more temporary jobs and more and more part time jobs, and the average Canadian family has seen a real erosion in their quality of life.

Given all these facts, how can the member opposite possibly say this budget is balanced?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2005, April 12th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the speech from the member opposite, particularly when he referred to the ad scam scandal as being the biggest one since the railway scandal. I imagine he was talking about the previous century.

However, as I am sure he is aware, the biggest scandal that we have had until ad scam, which I agree is a deplorable abuse of taxpayer money, was in the 1980s with the Mulroney government. I would ask the hon. member to re-read On the Take by Stevie Cameron about the continual misuse of public funds in the way to further private fundraising for party coffers. In the same way the Liberals did with ad scam, we saw that with the PC Canada fund, which became very notorious in the 1980s. In a sense, what we have seen is both parties, same old same old, acting the same way, the Liberals taking their example from the Mulroney Conservatives. We see today the result.

The other comment I would like to make is in regard the record deficits that we saw in the 1980s. We have seen, under the Prime Minister, the fiscal projections being the worst among countries studied. In other words, the government misses the mark by the greatest amount of western countries studied. In the 1980s, under the Mulroney Conservatives again, we saw record deficits that were unprecedented, before or since.

Given the track record of his own party, the Mulroney Conservatives and their deplorable scandals, which were just as bad as the Liberal scandals, and the deplorable lack of financial management, the same as the Liberals missing the mark on fiscal projections, how can he say that his party is any better?

[Criminal Code, April 12th, 2005]

moved for leave to introduce Bill C-361, an act to amend the Criminal Code (criminal interest rate).

Mr. Speaker, more than 1 million Canadians each year regularly use payday lenders and another 1.4 million use high interest rate lenders at a great cost to their families and to their standard of living. Once hidden charges are accounted for, the effective rates on those payday loans exceed 50% despite much lower interest rates in the mainstream financial sector.

Banks have abandoned the small loans business on the grounds that it is not profitable enough, so many of these individuals who take these loans have no alternative.

I am very pleased to table today this private member's bill with the objective to protect consumers and their families from abusive and usurious lending practices by amending section 347 of the Criminal Code to reduce the definition of criminal interest rates in half from 60% to 35% above the official Bank of Canada rate.

The bill would also broaden the definition of interest to include the calculation of hidden charges paid by a person to obtain insurance coverage.

The bill addresses an important issue that affects families in many parts of Canada and I hope that it will receive broad support from the House.

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

[Petitions, April 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the second petition is signed by several hundred people from Burnaby—New Westminster and throughout Canada and focuses on the Copyright Act.

Petitioners want the House to maintain the balance between the rights of the public and the rights of the creators. They demand that the government not extend the term of copyright and preserve all existing users' rights to ensure a vibrant public domain.

The petitioners also call upon Parliament to ensure that users are recognized as interested parties and are meaningfully consulted about any proposed changes to the Copyright Act.

[Petitions, April 7th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to present, on behalf of my constituents and Canadians, two petitions.

In the first petition, Canadians from a number of regions of Canada call upon the House to protect the rights of children with autism, who are among the most vulnerable members of our community.

They petition the government to amend the Canada Health Act to include the treatment of autism and ensure that the highly effective IBI and ABA method of treatment of autism is provided in Canada to support these children to live full and complete lives.

[Civil Marriage Act, April 5th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I rise proudly in support of Bill C-38. It addresses the issue of equality of gay and lesbian Canadians in our country by entrenching the right to civil marriage.

The courts have consistently and repeatedly found that laws which excluded same sex marriage were in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For this reason seven Canadian provinces and one Canadian territory have already legislated same sex marriages for gay and lesbian Canadians. The provinces of British Columbia, my native province; Saskatchewan; Manitoba; Ontario; Quebec; Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as the Yukon Territory have already addressed this issue through the courts. Now it is up to our country's highest political body, the House of Commons, to end discrimination in marriage against gay and lesbian Canadians.

There are those in the House who will not support this legislation. I was shocked to hear that the Leader of the Opposition will not only oppose the bill, but is also eager to repeal Bill C-38 should he form the next government. In this way he intends to perpetuate discrimination against gay and lesbian Canadians.

By the same token, despite the refusal to accept equality by the Leader of the Opposition, I see a small glimmer of hope for that party, as a small number of moderates such as the member for Port Moody—Westwood—Port Coquitlam, the member for Calgary Centre-North and the member for Newmarket—Aurora have all indicated with great courage that they will stand up for equality of gay and lesbian Canadians. Those few Conservative members are showing great courage and deserve our recognition.

I also want to recognize the many members of the Liberal Party and the Bloc Québécois who are supporting this important step for equality.

The Leader of the Opposition will end the protection and equality afforded by this bill if he comes to power. Just how will he do that? How will he make invalid that fundamental right? What other fundamental rights will he withdraw from Canadians? He speaks of separate but equal being the tenet of his party in this case.

I would like to talk about the proposal of separate but equal that those members of the House are talking about in an effort to shield the fundamental discriminatory stand that they are taking.

We have not heard much about this doctrine since the days of the great civil rights struggles for the African-American community in the United States. The appalling segregation of the Black community in the southern United States was based on that same doctrine which somehow purports that separate treatment allows for a measure of equality.

I would like to paraphrase Martin Luther King when he talked to an end of the doctrine of separate but equal. He said that now was the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of separation to the sunlit path of justice.

I believe in uncompromised equality. It is important to remember that the courts in the United States progressively demolished this fundamentally flawed doctrine of separate but equal in the case of segregation.

Now similar court decisions in Canada have brought us to the debate that we are having today, to ratify an end to discrimination against gay and lesbian Canadians in marriage. Separate but equal is not going to address this fundamental notion of equality.

We in the New Democratic Party have taken a clear stand to end discrimination against gay and lesbian Canadians. It is a stand based on our fundamental belief that discrimination is not to be tolerated. The NDP will not perpetuate or condone discrimination. That has been the courageous history of our party.

As our leader, the member for Toronto--Danforth, said so eloquently earlier today, the New Democratic Party has stood up in the past for equality for Canadians of Chinese origin, first nations peoples, women, and all Canadians. We have stood up for equality in all those areas and we have also been committed throughout the history of our existence to preserving religious freedoms.

I would like to say a few words on the balance that this bill affords to religious freedoms. It is important I believe that religious freedoms be protected while we end discrimination against gay and lesbian Canadians in civil marriage legislation. We believe that this bill achieves that protection.

When Bill C-38 becomes law, will the status of marriage be any less? Will people in heterosexual marriages lose any of the financial, legal or social benefits of marriage? Will people who are already married feel less married? Will various religious institutions be forced to perform same sex marriages? The answer to all of these questions is unequivocally no.

I have a very clear answer for hon. members who are opposed to the bill and who fear that the bill, although it is not clear how, would somehow hurt Canadian families.

We will help Canadian families, not by opposing Bill C-38 but by fighting for the dignity and respect of all Canadians. We will help Canadian families, not by opposing Bill C-38 but by creating opportunities and good jobs. We will help Canadian families to preserve and protect our environment.

We will help Canadian families, not by opposing Bill C-38 but by improving public health care, by making life more affordable and secure for Canadian families, by ensuring access to affordable education, and by restoring integrity and accountability in government that has been sorely impacted by the ongoing revelations of gross financial misconduct by the Liberal government, as has been revealed by the Gomery commission.

We will help Canadian families most of all by taking firm and decisive action to fight the growing child poverty, the growing insecurity and the growing homelessness that is a national disgrace for all Canadians. Homelessness and child poverty is coming at a time of record corporate profits, record bank profits and record corporate tax gifts for the wealthy, as we saw in the budget.

We will help Canadian families and families the world over by strengthening Canada's independent voice for peace, for human rights and for fair trade on the world stage.

Those are the issues that matter most to Canadian families and those are the issues on which we will continue to fight in the House of Commons.

During last year's election campaign I knocked on over 6,000 doors in Burnaby and New Westminster and spoke to Canadians throughout my community. On doorsteps, in public meetings, in media interviews, any time the issue came up, I pledged to support marriage legislation that would bring equality to gay and lesbian Canadians. I will keep my commitment to my constituents and to all Canadians.

For all those reasons I will be supporting the bill and the many gay and lesbian Canadians who are striving for equality and an end to discrimination.