Tony Martin

[Economic Recovery Act (stimulus), October 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. Even though the amendments, which we support, will go a distance to help those seniors find decent work to help them pay for the increasing costs of energy, food and the many other things they need when they get to that age in life, my concern, as is his, is what do we do for the larger majority of seniors who have finished their work, who will not get other jobs except perhaps some part-time minimum-wage jobs? How will we reward our seniors who have done their work, built their communities, fought the wars and are looking for a dignified life and some comfort?

I agree, we need to be looking at an overhaul of the pension and retirement system. Our caucus member from Hamilton has tabled a very comprehensive package of reforms to pension and retirement income. Everybody in this place should look at that.

[Economic Recovery Act (stimulus), October 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I always appreciate and enjoy my interaction with the member from Prince Edward Island, and his passion about agriculture and agricultural issues.

Some in my community will benefit from the changes to EI but not many. There is a lot more to do.

I could not in all conscience, given that this difficult economy is affecting so many people, say no to the $1 billion for the people who will benefit from it. I appreciate that coming from his part of the country, it is going to be even worse, which is unfortunate.

He raises one of the million dollar questions, and there are a lot of questions to which we are not getting answers, about what we do as we move forward. How are we going to deal with the deficit that we are running up and what are we going to do about it? How are we going to fight it?

He suggests, as we have detected in some of the material and conversation with the government, that perhaps a payroll tax is forthcoming. My concern is it will be similar to what previous governments have done to deal with deficits, and that is programs will be cut, particularly programs that support those who are most at risk and vulnerable in our society. That will be absolutely and totally unacceptable.

[Economic Recovery Act (stimulus), October 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased and privileged to be sharing my time this morning with the member for Halifax, a new member of the House of Commons who has proven herself over the last couple of years as a capable, well-researched and hard-working member. She was actually recognized by Maclean's magazine and named best rookie of the year for the year 2009.

Maclean's states:

In less than six months in the House, she has attracted an unusual amount of notice—enough to win her the best rookie MP title in the Maclean’s poll of her peers.

I congratulate her very publicly for that.

However, it is not just since she has been here. I think people need to recognize this and, because of it, be willing to listen very closely to the advice that she gives in this place and to the voice that she brings to the House of Commons on behalf of so many who have no voice and cannot find the place to have their voice heard. For example, when she was back home in the wonderful city of Halifax, she was part of the Community Coalition to End Poverty. She was part of the Metro Immigrant Settlement Association's legal workshops for newcomers. She also participated in the Dalhousie Association of Women and the Law.

She also was the developer of a very unique and helpful project in Halifax called the “Tenant Rights Project” . She was also awarded for her excellent community development work and her social justice activism in Halifax.

People can get all this information if they google the member. I would suggest that anybody who wants to understand how this place works and the voices that are here, they might want to do that.

She was awarded the Muriel Duckworth award for raising consciousness of women's issues and feminism in the legal community and also the CBA Law Day award for encouraging and promoting access to justice.

As I said, I am very pleased to be sharing my time with such an accomplished, effective and now recognized member of this chamber.

I want to put a couple of thoughts on the record today on Bill C-51 that we are debating.

First, for all the reasons articulated by the member for Halifax, I also will be supporting Bill C-51 but I must say that I do it with a heavy heart. Even though there are some things in this bill that would be helpful to some people, I have some real concern about the overall agenda of the government and whether it understands fully how we got ourselves into this very difficult economic circumstance in the first place and if in fact it has a program to get us out of it.

I will use a couple of the initiatives that the government has brought forward to show the shortcomings and how it is that even though it may make a difference for some people it would not go that full distance to make it better for everybody.

For example, the renovation tax credit, which was announced to great applause in this place and across the country, it turns out that at the end of the day it will probably not benefit those at the low end of the income scale because it is a non-refundable tax credit. Therefore, if people do not get anything back on their taxes or if they do not pay taxes because their income is so low but they have already done the renovations that they thought they were going to get a tax credit back for, at the end of the day they may end up not getting a tax credit at all.

In my view, the renovation tax credit is very short-sighted. It should have been a refundable tax credit and perhaps could have been done differently. It could have focused on those who really needed it in these difficult times to renovate their homes, particularly from an energy efficiency perspective so they could change their windows and doors, put more insulation in or buy more efficient furnaces. That would have gone a long way toward helping people on fixed incomes who are trying to stay in the little homes they have been able to purchase over the years and are struggling now to pay the bills on. That is just one of the initiatives in this bill that I would suggest the government take another look at.

On the other end of the age spectrum, the initiatives in the bill that my colleague from Halifax has spoken to, such as the improvements to the CPP program, will help some seniors but for other seniors who have worked all of their lives, many very hard in workplaces that were very challenging, the government is saying that instead of increasing the CPP or OAS or giving a little bump to GIS that would cover the increasing cost of energy to heat their homes, as the member for Halifax suggested, the government has come up with a plan that actually makes it easier for seniors to continue to work.

It has been said that McDonald's was from birth to the grave work for people. That in fact will be what we will see in this country.

I understand that some seniors will appreciate this but for my money it would have been better had we focused on how it is that we might help seniors who have already done their life's work, raised families and helped build their communities. We need to allow them to enjoy some comfort and dignity in their senior years and those senior years should start earlier rather than later if for no other reason than it creates space for younger people to pick up good well-paying jobs.

Those are just two examples of why it is that even though we will support this, in a very unique and particular time with the economy still falling apart and many people being affected more and more every day we should, as a House of Commons and as different parties, be working together to support things that will be helpful, we think this does not go near far enough.

In my office in Sault Ste. Marie I am beginning to hear the voices of those who have been on employment insurance for a significant period of time and who are looking at it ending. There will be no new jobs for them so they will have very few choices to make. One choice will be to go on welfare, which we know is not nearly sufficient. EI in the first place is not sufficient, but when people fall onto welfare it becomes a different world altogether. People who will fall onto welfare will find that it is a difficult challenge to make ends meet, to keep body and soul together and to look after their families.

The other option they have will be to take on part time jobs. We already know that people working full time in many of those part time jobs that nearly always pay minimum wage are already living in poverty. If people are working part time at one of those minimum wage jobs, they will be falling even further into poverty. The government has no comprehensive program or role to play in eliminating poverty or dealing with poverty, particularly in these very difficult times for hundreds of thousands of people across the country. I find it unconscionable that we would not be putting our minds to that and moving quickly here in this place as we debate initiatives that could be helpful to those most as risk and the most vulnerable.

[Economic Recovery Act (stimulus), October 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I know from the hon. member's participation in the human resources, skills and social development and the status of persons with disabilities committee that he has a very sincere interest in ensuring that we are doing things as a Parliament for those who are vulnerable and most at risk.

Some of the feedback I am getting with regard to the home renovation tax credit is that there are many people who pay a small amount of taxes or already get back the maximum in terms of rebate on the taxes that they pay. They claim that even though they have already gone ahead and done these renovations, many of them seniors on fixed incomes and people on disability programs, they have begun to see the roll-out and determined that it is actually a non-refundable tax credit that they may not benefit at all.

Is there any truth to that? Can the member clarify that and what do we say to those folks who have already gone ahead on goodwill and were excited about this initiative that they thought would be helpful to them as they tried to fix up their houses, particularly where energy efficiency was concerned, and now they are finding that they may not benefit from it at all?

[Petitions, October 6th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I have the pleasure this morning of presenting a petition on behalf of 53 signatories from across Canada from places like Ottawa; New Westminster and Surrey, British Columbia; Kitchener; Orillia; Toronto; Saskatoon; and other communities across Canada. The petitioners are very concerned about the plight of the poor in this country and those who are both out of work and continue to have work but who are working for minimum wage or at part-time jobs, and are not able to put enough money on the table to pay for their rent and cover food and clothing for themselves and their children.

They are also concerned about the inequality that is beginning to arise, particularly in terms of exclusion. The fact that so many people now cannot participate in their communities in the way that they used to because of this very debilitating reality in their life of poverty. I present this to the House for its consideration this morning.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, this independent review has still not been taken up by the government, which has the ability to actually launch such a review and make that happen.

I would suggest that the fact that Amnesty International does not want to participate should tell us a lot about the potential of such a review and what that says in terms of our going ahead with this free trade agreement with Colombia.

[Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, September 29th, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity this afternoon to put a few thoughts on the record about this important piece of public business before us, the proposed free trade agreement with Colombia.

Members may remember that a couple of weeks ago I was here asking questions and debating with members who spoke at that time. I focused my comments on the very terrible human rights record of this country with which we now propose to enter into an arrangement regarding our economic future. I talked about the hundreds of people who have been summarily killed: trade unionists, social activists and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of that terrible reality.

We heard from the daughter of a trade unionist who spoke with some of us in our offices about her father who was killed by the government forces of Colombia as he tried to do what we take for granted in Canada as ordinary. We go about trying to keep a balance between labour and management in our workplaces, to organize people, and to demand fair wages and benefit packages and health and safety conditions in workplaces.

However, I do not want to focus my comments today on that, although it is of pre-eminent importance and something we need to continually keep in front of us as we debate this public policy.

I want to talk about why this is the wrong thing for us to be doing at this particular point in our history, particularly when we consider the economy at the moment and what got us here. The chasing after free trade agreements and arrangements with mostly multinational corporations that literally dictated to countries what they could and should not do with their resources and their workplaces in an unfettered, unregulated way, driven by greed, got us to a place where we lost control and the financial system collapsed.

For a time, and I suggest it continued for quite some time, we really did not fully appreciate nor understand how we got there, the dynamic that was in place and what we needed to do to get us out of it.

I suggest that we have had a wonderful track record and history in this country, particularly in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and some of the 1990s, of managing our domestic economy in a way that recognized the communal ownership of natural resources we had some stake in, and that we needed to make the economy work for everybody, that we needed to be acting in this country in the best interests of all people, that we left nobody behind.

I remember when my parents, in the late 1950s, sold everything they had in the wonderful country of Ireland, which at the time was struggling economically, and they bet the resources they generated on a dream for their family. They came to Canada, and we arrived in the wonderful little pristine town of Wawa, in northern Ontario. There were about 5,000 people in the town at that time, and 1,200 of those people were working in the mines. They were working in the sinter plant, mining ore and turning it into a product they then shipped to Sault Ste. Marie, where 12,000 people in a community of around 80,000 turned that sinter into steel.

They then sent that steel off to communities across this country, to every end of the country, to Vancouver, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and southern Ontario, to make boats, airplanes, cars and trains. Literally hundreds of thousands of other Canadians were kept working in good jobs, making good money, belonging to unions where they got good benefit packages, and in their retirement years they were able to live on the pensions that were negotiated.

That was not all that we did as a country at that time, and since then, to have us become the envy of many economic jurisdictions around the world.

The market did not create Canada, which is why today I say that we should not be allowing our future to continue to be driven by this trolling in the world for further trade agreements with countries and jurisdictions in which human rights are in question.

The market did not create Canada. Our history is one of interventions by national and provincial governments to ensure that the market did not dictate or limit our choices: Sir John A.'s transcontinental railroad, the Wheat Board, public health care, wartime buy Canada policies, unemployment insurance, the CPP, Hydro-Québec, the Canada-U.S. auto pact and efforts to foster a domestic aerospace industry, to name just a few examples.

Such interventions reduced the Canadian economy's dependence on exports of largely unprocessed resources and agricultural products by growing a significant manufacturing sector, providing good, well paid, often unionized jobs that guaranteed a comfortable family living, plus a tax base to pay for high quality public services across this country. That is what my family came to experience over the years after making their home in this country in the late 1950s.

Policies to boost the value-added component of the Canadian economy cut the unprocessed or barely processed proportion of Canada's exports from more than 90% in the late 1950s to under 45% in the late 1990s. An undervalued dollar at the time and the country's public health care system helped to add to Canada's appeal for investors in job rich manufacturing.

By the mid 1990s, Canada had a sophisticated mix of high value export industries, including automotive products, aerospace, telecommunications equipment, machinery, high tech applications and computer software.

Alas, the lessons of history are too soon ignored. The diversified economy that placed Canada among the most envied of nations has come undone. Of the 600,000 manufacturing jobs lost in this country since 2002, half of them disappeared since mid-2008. Our manufacturing trade balance is once again in deficit: $32 billion in 2007 and growing. The proportion of unprocessed or slightly processed resource exports is growing again, reaching almost 60% in 2007 from its low point of under 45% in 1999. The rise in commodity prices, especially that of oil, has boosted the value of our resources exports but done little for employment, with new jobs in the oil and gas industry offsetting only one-fifteenth of lost manufacturing jobs.

All one needs to do is look at that track record to see this almost obsessive compulsive attention and attraction to free trade agreements here, there and everywhere. Not considering the human rights records of any of the countries that we enter into agreements with is taking us down a road that will not produce, protect or grow the kind of country that we have the potential to be and, in fact, we were heading toward before free trade agreements and free trade arrived in this land.

Today, I suggest to everyone in the House and to the people out there watching that this is not the right time nor the right thing to be doing. This will not get us out of the difficult financial situation that we are in right now, nor will it help the people of Colombia.

[Employment Insurance Act, September 17th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, again, just as I did not impugn motive on the Liberals, I am not going to impugn motive on the Conservatives.

I will say that it is not enough, and it really is not enough, and there is a lot more that can be done. I spoke in my speech about the tons of work and ideas that have been brought before this House through the various bills that have been tabled to reform EI. We really need to sit down and look at that and do something with it.

This is an opening to bring forward our best ideas, without cynicism, with great hope. and to spend at least $1 billion on the unemployed in this country rather than $300 million on an election that would not give us anything at the end day, or at least would not give it to us quickly enough. It may give us more if the makeup of this place were different after the election, which we can all only hope for.

At this point the question is whether we take advantage, at this moment, of $1 billion to spend on unemployed workers with the possibility of some improvements when we consider this bill in committee, or whether we simply say we will go to an election and spend $300 million, which, at the end of the day, would not help those who are unemployed in our communities.

[Employment Insurance Act, September 17th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am not going to impugn motive on the Liberal Party.

I will say that even though the government has put in place some initiatives, and I give the Conservatives credit for putting this bill on the table because it certainly is a door we can all walk through and hopefully make some changes and improvements, it will only help, I think by the government's figures, 190,000 people.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people right now who do not qualify for EI and there are more to come. We need to do more. We are not doing enough. That is my message to the House this afternoon.

[Employment Insurance Act, September 17th, 2009]

Madam Speaker, this past summer I was one of those people who was quite disappointed in two things. One was that there was a very important discussion in Ottawa between the Conservatives and the Liberals on EI that two duly elected parties to this House were not privy to. We were not invited. We were not included. It was not a complete and inclusive process.

With that in mind, I am pleased we are having this conversation, however limited, about an issue that affects so many across this country. It will continue to affect many people as the recession we are in continues to roll on and more and more people find themselves unemployed.

It was unfortunate that more of us were not engaged in that conservation this summer. I think if more of us had been engaged, there might have been more potential for an agreement.

I have been privy to, and part of, many negotiations, discussions and efforts to bridge gaps and bring people together. I have always found that when there are two people it is difficult, particularly when the divide is obvious and the reason for coming together in the first place is so political, not really looking directly at those who would benefit most.

If others are brought in who can water that down a bit and bring a different perspective to the table, we often find agreement where otherwise it might not be possible.

I was disappointed that we were not invited. There are many in the House, the member for Chambly—Borduas who spoke earlier today and the member from New Brunswick, who have led the fight on EI for so many years. I, and others, have tremendous interest in this, and we have a lot of experience and knowledge. We have been around this issue a number of times. We could have contributed in a significant and important way to that discussion and to the end result, which I think would have gone a long way to assist all our constituents who are struggling with unemployment.

I was disappointed that we were not invited, and I was disappointed that the two parties who came together, as we got reports through the media, seemed to choose to play politics as opposed to getting down to work, rolling up their sleeves and getting something done for unemployed workers and their families in this country.

It was unfortunate and sad that given the amount of time from the middle of June until the middle of September that we were not able to get to where we could say to the people of Canada that we have come together with goodwill, worked hard and this is what we think we can provide, what we think is necessary for the people of the country.

That is why it is important that we have this opportunity, all of us together in this place, and hopefully at committee, to sit down and seriously discuss what has been put in front of us so we might assess its value. Then, in assessing its value, if it falls short, all of us can come to the table with our best game, bring our best ideas forward.

There are a lot of good ideas out there. There have been a number of EI bills brought forward to the House by individual members, their staff and caucuses, who have worked hard to improve the lot for workers and their families in this country. There is no shortage of good ideas and ways forward that would be helpful to the workers, particularly the unemployed workers of this country.

That is why it is so important that we take full advantage of this moment, that we do not continue, as happened this summer between the Conservatives and the Liberals, to play politics at a time when that is not what is needed--as a matter of fact at a time when it is needed least--and that we do something that will be helpful for those hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers and their families.

That is why members of the New Democratic Party want this work done before considering the possibility of an election at some later date. Getting to the meat of the matter, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are unemployed and will continue to be unemployed, and there are more to come. The economists who are looking at this recession as it moves forward are saying on one hand there are signs that perhaps the recession is over, but it is not over for the workers of the country and it will not be over for a number of years.

There will not be a stalling of the rising unemployment we have experienced over the last number months. They are telling us that actually the number of unemployed is going to increase substantially. It is incumbent upon all of us to make sure that those supports and resources are in place so that those people and their families are looked after, in order to allow them to participate in the economy in a way will that will stimulate the economy. If we do not do that, we will be failing those who will not qualify for the unemployment supports that they need to look after themselves and their families, and we will be contributing to the worsening of this recession.

In June I was at a breakfast meeting in Sault Ste. Marie and listened to an economist from the Export Development Corporation. He told us that this recession is coming at us in waves. He described three of the waves we had already been through. He knew what he was talking about. He said that the third and perhaps most damaging and difficult wave for us to manage as a society and as an economy, is the wave that will see hundreds of thousands of people who have been unemployed fall off the unemployment rolls and on to welfare. Those hundreds of thousands of people would then begin to default on their mortgage payments, car payments, student loan payments, and many other things. Many men and women who have children, families and homes are trying to keep body and soul together, who are working to make their communities well will find themselves in a position where they will have little or nothing. Anyone in this country who has ever had to live on welfare will understand that it is not a happy situation.

I ran a soup kitchen in my community for about seven years before I got into politics. I say in all sincerity that there is no one in this country who of their own will would want to be on welfare. It is a debilitating, mind-numbing, paralyzing experience for anyone who has been forced to be on it. It alienates people from the workplace and eventually from their family and friends. In order to get back into the workforce and participate as they previously had would cost society, government and the community in which they live millions of dollars more than it would if we had simply made employment insurance available to them in the amount necessary for them to provide the basics for themselves, to pay the rent, feed their children, send their kids to school, participate in their community.

Because of the very difficult economy we are in, today in this place we speak about that which is of most importance to the people we represent. I ask all members in this place to work together to do the right thing on behalf of their constituents.