Sheila Malcolmson

[Canada Pension Plan, November 29th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I, along with the New Democrats, intend to support the bill. It is important for the country. We have pushed for it much longer than the Liberals have.

My whole presentation is around us trying to work together to correct a flawed bill. We cannot believe that the government intends to leave out disabled workers and stay-at-home mothers in the future. This is why it is extremely discouraging not to talk this through and amend the bill now. Why would the government, when it has taken all this time, want to put forward a flawed bill?

The Liberals should be showing leadership with the provinces and territories. I certainly did not see any media that suggested our provincial and territorial leaders did not want to extend these benefits to stay-at-home mothers and the disabled. Again, the government has shut down debate, so we cannot discuss it.

I will quote the parliamentary secretary in 2015 on time allocation. He said:

The government, by once again relying on a time allocation motion to get its agenda passed, speaks of incompetence. It speaks of a genuine lack of respect for parliamentary procedure and ultimately for Canadians.

I agree with him.

[Canada Pension Plan, November 29th, 2016]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak somewhat in support of Bill C-26, though New Democrats have some serious concerns and amendments that we would like to once again raise. It is unfortunate that this debate is happening within the framework of the government once again invoking time allocation, which is shutting down debate. New Democrats have identified a serious error in this legislation. We wish the Liberals had acted on our suggestions to amend and that we had more time to discuss why they are reluctant. However, I will start with the positive.

Bill C-26 incorporates the recent agreement reached with the provinces to enhance Canada pension plan benefits. It is a very important step in improving retirement security for young Canadians and we congratulate everybody, especially our friends in the labour movement who worked very long and hard to lay the groundwork for this agreement. This is a success.

When fully implemented, the new CPP expansion would replace 33% of pre-retirement income. That is up from the current 25%. This action is needed. Retirement security is reaching crisis levels. Many Canadians do not have adequate financial security to maintain their lifestyles upon retirement, and this is particularly fuelled by the erosion of workplace pension plans, to the point that six in 10 working Canadians have no workplace pensions.

New Democrats have fought consistently for increases to the CPP, old age security, and the guaranteed income supplement. This bill would benefit a whole new generation of workers entering the workforce, but more is needed. This bill does little to alleviate the retirement income crisis of those now approaching retirement and the full effect of the changes would not be felt for 49 years.

Much more needs to be done right now to help lift seniors out of poverty and to help them live with the dignity they deserve. There are high housing costs, high drug costs, the clawback of the guaranteed income supplement, and the indexing of pensions. New Democrats want the Liberal government to keep its promise to introduce a new seniors price index, to make sure that old age security and the guaranteed income supplement keep up with rising costs and, in particular, to recognize that single elderly women are particularly living in poverty in this country, which is shameful.

Here is the big mistake in this bill. Bill C-26 does not contain the child-rearing dropout provisions that exist in the current CPP, so that parents, mostly women, are not penalized for time taken out of the workforce to raise children. The Liberal bill also fails to replicate a similar existing dropout provision for people who receive CPP disability benefits.

This is how the CPP already works in this regard. The benefits that people receive are based on an average of earnings from the time people are 18 until they retire. To accommodate periods where people may have low or zero incomes, the plan now allows for the lowest eight years of earnings to be dropped from the calculation, and that exemption is referred to as a dropout. That rule applies to everyone. Everyone who now qualifies for that will continue to. They should be assured that nothing will change for people already in this category.

Right now, on top of this basic exemption, there are two other specific dropouts. One is for disability, so that people receiving disability benefits are allowed to drop up to eight years out of their calculations. The other dropout is for child-rearing, where people can drop up to eight years, while they were bringing up their children and their income was reduced or zero, from the calculations of their benefits. However, in the new plan that we are debating today, these dropouts would simply apply to the calculation related to base benefits, not to the calculations of the additional or enhanced benefits.

The original dropout provision for child-rearing was introduced with much fanfare in 1977 by the government of Pierre Trudeau. The Liberal government of the day included this line in its 1977 throne speech:

You will be asked to consider amendments to the Canada Pension Plan which would further recognize the value of the contribution made to the family and society by both marriage partners, in the event that one remains at home to raise children while their partner works outside the home....

My friend, Iris Taylor, from Nanaimo described this. She said, “My sister Diane Wiebe along with her husband Art, raised three wonderful, hard-working, well-educated taxpayers. Diane was a stay-at-home mom until the youngest left home. Neither parents had jobs with pensions, so when they retired they solely lived on savings, CPP, and OAS. In fact, both worked part-time to cover living expenses until their passing at 70 years. My sister was always appreciative of CPP factoring in her years at home with children into her CPP pension payment.”

The effect of losing this could be significant, especially for women who are overwhelmingly the ones who applied for the child-rearing dropout and presently receive a much lower average CPP benefit. The NDP ask was that the government restore it for the new CPP enhancements and that it do it now. We have debated every day in the House, asking the government if it would work with us to get this fixed. My colleague from Hamilton Mountain basically laid out all the groundwork at committee. All the Liberals needed to do was pick it up and run with it, but they chose not to.

In the House, we invited the government to amend its own bill. At committee, the New Democrats moved two motions to include the dropout provisions for women and those living with disabilities. However, the Liberals were not reasonable in looking at our amendments and ruled them out of order. When we tried to make a motion to have the committee recommend to the House that the provisions be put into the bill, the Liberals moved to adjourn debate. They kind of cut and run. It was very strange.

In case the Liberals might try to cite cost as a factor in their decision to omit the dropout provisions from the new enhanced benefits, our very preliminary calculations show that the cost would be very low. Using available information, it looks like the dropouts might cost each employee and each employer 0.2% of a worker's average salary. That is a very cheap price to pay to provide such an important and significant benefit.

On the other hand, looking at the calculations on Service Canada's website, the failure to fix this program could cost parents significantly. A mother who spent six years raising children would get between $800 to $1,200 less each year than she would otherwise.

Again, we have time allocation on the bill so we are not able to debate this fully. Again, this is inconsistent with previous Liberal positions. Here is what the Minister of Transport was quoted in Hansard in 2012 as saying:

Slowly but surely, Canadians are beginning...to question what the government meant when it promised...to be open, transparent and, most of all, accountable. I believe Canadians are beginning to feel that there is a contradiction between what has been promised and what is actually being done by the government.

This is déjà vu. That was the Liberals talking about the Conservatives, but now this is just how the Liberals are acting. It is very disappointing.

Hammering home again how important this program has been for Canadian women, June Ross from Nanaimo wrote to me and said, “The credit for my child-rearing years was seven years. That credit helped my pension to increase. ln my view, the child-rearing credit should have also been applicable to the old age pension as well. The woman who did not work outside the home and therefore was eligible for only the old age pension is punished yet again. As you are no doubt aware...we women have lesser pensions than our male counterparts because our work outside the home had very little value placed on it. Our hourly wages were very low...therefore, our pensions are much lower”.

Again, the Prime Minister likes to call himself a feminist, but when we point out that the Liberals' legislation is penalizing young women workers who would qualify for this in the future, they suddenly have nothing to say. The Liberal government should immediately agree to our proposal and live up to its feminist rhetoric. It should amend the bill so future generations of stay-at-home mothers and the disabled are not penalized. Please do the right thing, amend your bill and I will vote in support of it.

[Petitions, November 29th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to present petitions opposed to the expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

The petitioners note that the pipeline would change oil tanker traffic from once a week to once a day, sending unrefined oil through the Salish Sea, sensitive waters in an area where local jobs are highly dependent on a clean environment and no oil spills.

The petitioners cite also that Kinder Morgan excavating the new pipeline will create only 50 permanent full-time jobs and it may, in fact, build the pipeline using temporary foreign workers.

I recommend the petition to members of the House and urge the government, for the sake of coastal ecology and economy, to deny the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion.

[Canada Business Corporations Act, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, we have a lot of examples around the world of using the “comply and explain” model, which has not really moved us to parity the way we need to be. There is always an explanation, I guess. There is a lot of work on the record here on the evidence of why that has not worked. The fact that we are even having this debate suggests that it has not worked.

The bill that I have proposed, again, was debated many times in the House. I am completely carrying on the work of my former NDP colleagues. It provides a program that would gradually move, within a six-year period, toward gender-balanced appointments. It sets absolutely hard targets for each of those years so if the appointments to federal commissions are not gender balanced along the percentages proposed in the bill each of those years, then that is a failure of leadership and a failure of responsibility.

Therefore, the bureaucrats and recruiters who are identifying candidates for board appointments, if they are not proposing to their minister and senior supervisors candidates who fall in line with the bill, then they are not taking their responsibility. This is a legislative response that would move us as fast as we need to go to get to the final answer.

[Canada Business Corporations Act, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, the conversations we are having on getting women into the seats of Parliament are quite equivalent to the conversations we are having on getting women onto corporate and federal commission boards. Once they get there, they do really good work.

On the parliamentary side, once women get onto the ballot, voters tend to choose them maybe a bit more often than they do men. However, we have some systemic barriers in place that prevent women from getting the nomination for their political parties in the same way there are systemic barriers that reduce the likelihood of them being nominated for these senior board appointments. This is why we have stalled on progress.

The House of Commons has only 26% women. We now rank 62nd in the world on gender parity, which is embarrassing. As well, the rate of progress has stalled. The extrapolation is that it will take us 89 years to get gender parity in the House if we just go along with the status quo.

In the previous government, crown appointments were 36% female under the Conservative government. Again, that comes nowhere close to the 51% of the population. We have to recognize that there are networks that reinforce themselves. If we are part of the old boys' club, then we will get the nod.

It is accidental. I do not think it is an intentional oversight. However, we have the power and should show the leadership to make that change. We will make better decisions if our decision-making bodies better reflect our country.

[Canada Business Corporations Act, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I will start by indicating that I will be splitting my time with my colleague, the member for Regina—Lewvan.

We just went through an American election that disparaged women's leadership. I would like to see Canada and all Canadian parliamentarians send a strong message about the important role of women in leadership.

Last week I was really proud when the New Democratic caucus arranged an all-women's question period lineup the first day after the U.S. election. We wanted to promote women in politics and make sure that we were showing that women who are elected take their voice and are given a voice and fight back against the sexist notions we heard throughout the U.S. election.

Women are still under-represented within our country's decision-making bodies in every area. We have a lot of work to do in that regard.

Talking today about board of director appointments, only 27% of members of boards of directors of crown corporations, agencies, and commissions across our country are women. Those are appointments the federal government has an exclusive responsibility to make, and it is not providing appointments to those boards of directors that actually reflect the diversity and gender makeup of our country.

New Democrats are proposing concrete action to ensure the equality of men and women in many areas, but in this case on crown corporation and federal commission boards. My private member's bill, Bill C-220, is an act to amend the Financial Administration Act with respect to balanced representation. It aims for gender parity in crown corporation and federal commission appointments within six years of its adoption.

This bill has been introduced by a number of New Democrat members of Parliament over the years, such as the member for London—Fanshawe, and most recently, former MP Anne-Marie Day. It was defeated by the Conservatives but supported by both the Liberals and New Democrats when it was debated and voted on in 2014.

When we have appointed women to crown agencies, we have had some great successes. Last night we were meeting with the board of directors of VIA Rail, which has gender parity on its board. Its chair is a woman who is a fantastic proponent of this very important public service. Very recently, in my own community in Nanaimo, Erralyn Thomas was appointed to a local government commission, the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation. Erralyn Thomas is an elected Snuneymuxw First Nation councillor. I am very glad to see her take that leadership role in my community.

The Nanaimo Port Authority has a majority of female board members. I love telling the story of how this happened, because it is a bit outside the norm. We have the Laurentian Pilotage Authority, which I believe has zero women. That is another federal agency. However, the Nanaimo Port Authority has a majority of women.

I asked the, at the time, male chair of the board how this came to be. He said that the transport minister of the day, who sits in this House but now on the Conservative side, refused to approve any of the appointments being proposed by the Nanaimo Port Authority for its board of directors until it had some women in its pile of recommendations. It finally got the message. It proposed strong women in our community—engineers, accountants, community leaders—and I would argue that as a result of having appointed a gender-balanced board, the Nanaimo Port Authority meshes much better with the community of Nanaimo. It has better community relations. It is actually prioritizing relations with area first nations in a way it has not before.

We do well when our federal boards and commissions actually reflect the diversity of our country. When we prioritize gender-balanced appointments, we find those good candidates who have not been appointed up to that point.

The problem with this approach is that it relies singularly on the good intentions of the responsible person of the day, in this case a former Conservative transport minister, who asked me not to name her, because she thought she would sound like a New Democrat. I think I just did.

The same goes for the Liberal appointment of a gender-balanced cabinet. I applaud that, but that was at one point in time. There is nothing that actually benefits women on the ground. There is nothing that sets in stone that appointments in the future, at any level, will actually be gender balanced.

A significant failing of this bill we are now debating is that it makes no reference to federal crown appointments.

I am going to try to convince this House that the federal government would be more effective telling co-ops, corporate boards, and the business community to appoint gender-balanced boards of directors if it actually got its own house in order first and did its own homework on the decisions being made right at home.

This was a Liberal government commitment. They are expected to do their part to fulfill the “government's commitment to transparent, merit-based appointments, to help ensure gender parity”. That is in the mandate letter to the Minister of Status of Women. The Prime Minister asked for support for the Privy Council Office “as it develops monitoring and reporting processes to ensure that the government's senior appointments are merit-based and demonstrate gender parity”.

In a late show debate last week, the Parliamentary Secretary for Status of Women said that there are 4,000 Governor in Council and ministerial appointments to commissions, boards, crown corporations, agencies, and tribunals across the country coming up. However, although we were in a debate about gender equality, she said nothing about whether they actually were making those appointments in a gender-balanced way.

We asked the Library of Parliament. There were no stats at all on whether those appointments are being made in a gender-balanced way. I have asked the Minister of Status of Women in correspondence and have not had any answer.

We know this is a direction and a commitment of the government. We want to see it realized. It is badly needed. We have a number of crown agencies that have either no women or hardly any women.

There has been great reporting by Metro News on this recently here in Ottawa. They named, for example, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian Dairy Commission, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the National Capital Commission, and the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority as having none or few women on their boards. That is an embarrassment in 2016, or actually in any year.

Bill C-25 purports to address issues of gender parity and shareholder democracy, but it does not get its own house in order first. It makes no reference to federal appointments. There is a Senate bill, Bill S-207, the boards of directors modernization act , which is actually much more in line with the New Democrat approach. It does propose a direction and legislation on crown appointments being gender balanced. We applaud the Senate for going further than the government is.

I will finish with some criticism of the Bill C-25 approach. The “comply or explain” model, which is being relied on in this legislation, has been described by the Canadian Board Diversity Council as “not leading to meaningful disclosure and a consistent improved pace of change”. It notes “a growing sentiment that quotas may be necessary to bring about the desired change”.

Canada continues to lag behind other countries when it comes to women in leadership positions. The Liberal government, we are sad to see, seems content to apply the same aspirational targets and models that have not worked that the Conservative government had. I am dismayed to see the similarity of an approach that did not work under the Conservative government. Why would it be any different under the Liberal government?

This is only the second time in 40 years that Canada has addressed the issue of corporate governance. This is not a bill, in my view, that represents #realchange. It falls short in many respects.

In closing, we will be better as a country, our governance will be better, if our decision-making bodies better reflect the diversity and strength of our country. We would very much like to see this bill amended to incorporate the elements of my private member's bill, Bill C-220, which would get at the requirement to have gender-balanced federal commission appointments. The government should take the power it has and make the appointments it has the sole responsibility for. This should be a priority. It would be a true action that would implement the government's feminist rhetoric.

[Petitions, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present today petitions signed by residents of my riding of Nanaimo--Ladysmith.

The petitioners are opposed to the establishment of new bulk commercial anchorages in a sensitive area of Gabriola Island, five anchorages up to 300 metres long. The petitioners cite concerns about herring habitat, the risk of oil spills, the impact on sport fisheries and tourism, and an overall concern that the anchorages are meant to facilitate the export of thermal coal from Wyoming to China and will have no benefit for people in the community. It is all downside for our coast. There is no upside.

The petitioners urge the Prime Minister to reject the proposal on the basis that it is inconsistent with his commitments on climate change and innovation.

[The Environment, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, real leadership would be fixing it now.

One hundred and thirty first nations, the Province of British Columbia, and the Union of BC Municipalities all said no to the northern gateway pipeline. A Federal Court overturned the Conservative approval and the Liberals made multiple promises to stop it. It sounds like an easy promise to keep, even for the Liberals.

However, they are waffling on other promises to protect our coasts.

Would the Liberals commit today to introduce legislation to permanently ban crude oil tankers on B.C.'s north coast, yes or no?

[Violence Against Women, November 25th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, on any given night in Canada, more than 350 women and children fleeing violence are turned away from help, because domestic violence shelters are underfunded and bursting at the seams.

Imagine the strength it takes to flee abuse. Imagine the heartbreak of shelter operators having to tell women there is a six-month waiting list for counselling. That is unacceptable.

Violence against women costs $12 billion a year. One in four women will be victims in their lifetime. Disabled and Indigenous women and girls face a much higher level of violence than anyone else in Canada.

Today, on the United Nations international day to end violence against women, we give our deepest thanks to shelter operators like Haven Society in Nanaimo. We condemn violence in every form.

We will press the Liberal government to turn its feminist words into real action, and recommit that Canada's goal must be the eradication of violence against women. We will not stop until that is done.

[Status of Women, November 24th, 2016]

Mr. Speaker, last week, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women released its report on Canada. It denounced the closure of 12 of 16 Status of Women regional offices.

These Conservative cuts limited women's access to services, especially in rural and remote areas. The UN has now asked the current government to reopen the regional offices.

Does the minister agree with the Untied Nations? Will she reopen the 12 Status of Women offices to better serve women, no matter where they live, yes or no?