Tony Martin

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, does the hon. member not find it rather interesting that the Liberals would bring forward this motion? When the Liberals were in government, they cut literally $25 billion out of spending in our country. It dramatically affected some of the most at risk and vulnerable of our citizens. The Liberals were responding to a huge deficit that the Brian Mulroney government had driven up.

Now we have a government that finds itself in a situation where it has a $13 billion surplus, mostly created on the backs of the poor and the most at risk by the previous government, which announced programs that were supposed to help, but it ended up not spending that money.

Does the member find the dialogue between the previous government and the current government interesting? Both do not seem to understand that the priority is to help communities and citizens participate and live with some dignity.

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I found that speech rather interesting, particularly the numerous references to low hanging fruit, as if there were programs out there that were easier to cut than others.

I was wondering if the hon. member might share with us, because we have not been able to get anything out of the ministries on this, what vehicle was used to determine which was low hanging fruit and which was not. What vehicle was used, what consultation was entered into by the government to determine which programs were expendable and which programs were not?

That would be helpful to us in this place as we assess the efficacy of these decisions and the impact that they will have, not only immediately but in the long term, on the citizens of my constituency and constituencies across the country.

I am particularly interested in what vehicle he used with literacy programs for adults in a changing economy when older workers particularly are being laid off. In my area of the country, in northern Ontario, forestry industry older worker need help shifting from one job to another to regain some of the skills that perhaps they had not retained.

What vehicles did you use? What consultation did you do to determine what was really low hanging fruit and how did you arrive at adult literacy--

[Business of Supply, October 19th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, when we listen to the member we would think that what the government has done is not make serious and significant cuts in some very important areas in this country.

I want to remind the member that the government has cut $25 million over three years from a training centre infrastructure fund. It has cut $30 million from the national literacy secretariat, something that is absolutely essential if we are going to help particularly older workers make the transition from job to job. The government has cut $25 million from the workplace skills strategy and $3.5 billion over six years for labour market partnership agreements with all the provinces and territories. This is only a short list of the cuts that the government has made.

My question for the member is in terms of his comments concerning the court challenges program. Was not some of the reason for cutting that program, as Linda McQuaig laid out in the Toronto Star, a bit of vindictiveness?

When the Prime Minister was head of the National Citizens Coalition, it was taken to court by Democracy Watch. The National Citizens Coalition wanted to spend literally millions and millions of dollars fighting government and fighting government programs. The coalition lost because Democracy Watch was funded by the court challenges program. That program has been cut so that no one can again challenge the Conservative government when it makes decisions that are not in keeping with the best interests of the people of this country.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 17th, 2006]

In adult literacy.

We had a committee meeting this morning. We brought in the literacy groups that have been impacted by the cuts made in the last two weeks. They spoke of the cuts they are experiencing. They spoke of the impact this will have on their ability to actually deliver literacy programs.

There will be more of them coming in. I invite you to actually come to the meeting, listen to those people and perhaps ask them questions. I invite you to sit in for one of your colleagues and ask them the question that you are asking me about how this is impacting on them.

There have been very real cuts. Those very real cuts are going to be a problem for older workers, particularly those in forestry centred communities across this country who are losing their jobs because of this terrible agreement.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 17th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the Conservative member for actually participating in this debate this afternoon. I will say to her that any investment in literacy is important and helpful good news, except that the government has cut the legs out from underneath all of the volunteer groups, the not for profit groups, and yes, the groups that deliver literacy across this country. They have been cut off at the knees. The member's government has cut millions and millions--

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 17th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, that is an excellent question. It is the kind of question that I was hoping the Conservatives would ask or maybe make a speech about. Everybody knows that in resource based communities, for every one job in the primary sector, there are three or four jobs in the support or service sector. The member is absolutely right when she says that when one of those jobs goes, those other jobs go as well. People then are left behind. They have no work or they have to leave town and leave their families behind, who then live in poverty.

We used to have a social safety net in this country. We used to have employment insurance that worked for people. We used to have social welfare that actually worked for people, but the incursion of this very cold right wing wind that has come into Canada and Ontario over the last 10 or 15 years has made it such that the safety net has been rent asunder. It is not there any more.

Only about 15% or 20% of people who have paid into EI all their lives now qualify for EI when it is their turn to collect for a little while when they are in between jobs. EI is not there. As well, in just the last couple of weeks, the government cut literacy programs, which would have been helpful for these workers as they try to shift gears and get into other work.

As for welfare, in 1995 Mike Harris cut welfare by 21.6% for the poorest of our families and our most at risk and marginalized citizens.

Let us put all of that together: this terrible agreement, plus the impact when plants close and people lose their jobs, plus the multiplier effect with the fact that we no longer have the social safety net that all of us worked so hard to put in place. Then we begin to understand the devastation and the poverty that now exist and will continue to exist.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 17th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased again to speak to this very important issue on behalf my constituents and people across Canada who are involved in the resource based economic sector of forestry, and to put some thoughts on the record and challenge the government to rethink this agreement, which does not do all the things it anticipates it will. We are already beginning to see some of the results of this play itself out in the thousands and thousands of jobs that are disappearing. Communities are being affected across the country, particularly my region of northern Ontario.

Before I get to that, I want to share this with the folks who are watching. What we are involved with this afternoon is really a process of closure, or ending debate in the House. The government saw that we, as a party, were very concerned about the impact of the agreement on our constituents. It knew we would to speak to it for as long as it took to get all our thoughts on the record and to challenge the government as effectively as we could. This place is all about that. We are here to ask the government to consider amendments to a bill that might improve it and make it better.

However, the government brought in closure. It forced votes in the House on an amendment we brought forward. It forced votes in the House on an amendment the Liberals brought forward. Now we are at a point where there will be no further amendments or opportunities for us, as elected members of the House, to bring forward suggestions that might make the bill, or agreement, better, if that is possible, or to speak on behalf of our constituents in that way.

We are here in this place on Tuesday afternoon, speaking to a bill which the government wants to ram it through. That has been the government's approach to this from the very beginning. The minister was brought across the floor from the Liberals, I suppose because he had some history and some experience with this, to find a way to put together a deal with the Americans, a deal which ignores all the legal decisions made over a number of months and years in our favour. I guess it has been done to curry favour with the Americans. When the governing party was in opposition, there was a sense that the relationship with that country was not as good as it would like it to have been.

I served for 13 years in the Ontario provincial legislature at Queen's Park. I remember this very same closure procedure being used over and over again. From 1995 to 2003, the Conservative government introduced motion after motion. This changed the landscape of that province. The current government is beside itself now on how it can recover some of the wonderful programs that had been put in place, over a number of years, by varying political stripes. These programs improved the lot of communities, families and people. They were put in place to protect industry and the economy of various regions and to turn the province into an industrial heartland, which was the envy of the rest of the country. The Conservatives turned it into a province that is now struggling from one day to the next to support education, health care and all those programs that we know are necessary if we are meet the challenge of participating in the new global economy.

I remember Thursday afternoons because I was usually on duty. Some of my colleagues and I would spend a couple of hours in the legislature debating a closure motion. We are not debating a closure motion here, but the process that we are engaged in is in fact a process of closure.

One cannot be anything but disappointed that the members of the Conservative Party are not standing to speak on behalf of their constituents. They know as well as we do the impact this is having on them.

Since a lot of them come from rural and northern Canada, within their constituencies, they must have small communities that are being affected dramatically and negatively by this agreement. They must be affected by the government's unwillingness to support the industry in its legal challenges, challenges that were successful and within a whisker of forcing the issue of making the free trade agreement work. Many of us had some concerns about the free trade agreement when it was first brought in, but we learned to work with it in the interests of our industry and jurisdictions.

The Conservatives have not taken the time in this place to get up and speak to this agreement. They are not taking the time to talk on behalf of their constituents and communities that are being hammered. Even if it does not affect people directly, it sets a precedent. It creates a pattern. It sends a message on how the government will stand up and fight for other interests for a region that is resource based.

I do not have to look any further than what is going in western Canada right now with regard to the Canadian Wheat Board. This is a vehicle that farmers themselves decided to put together, fund and run in order to get the best value for their investments, for the work they put in and for the products they produced. The Wheat Board has been a successful vehicle over a number of years now. Literally thousands of farmers, who are behind the Wheat Board and support it, are aghast that the government is being so aggressive in doing away with it. They are surprised.

I attended a meeting in Saskatoon this summer of some 250 to 300 farmers. It was held across the street from a very secretive closed door meeting, by invitation only, of supporters of the government who saw this as their opportunity to do in a vehicle that they had ideological differences with for quite some time. The farmers I met with said that nobody was speaking for them. Nobody was bringing their voice to this place to challenge the government on doing away with the very vehicle they put in place to protect their interests, investments and products and to be able sell them for highest value in the marketplace.

I am disappointed that Conservatives are not standing up to speak on behalf of the communities involved in forestry. I am disappointed they do not recognize the impact of this on those communities. In my own area of Algoma in northern Ontario, people pick up the newspaper every day to see that another mill has closed down somewhere, whether it is Nairn Centre, Espanola, Dubreuilville, White River. The list goes on and on. That is just northeastern Ontario.

In northwestern Ontario it is even worse. NDP members met with the leaders of northwestern Ontario a couple of weeks ago when we were in Thunder Bay for our caucus retreat. They shared with us the very devastating reality that confronts them every day. The forestry coalition and leaderships of those communities talked about mill closings. They said that when a mill closed, they would lose population, the value of property would go down and nobody wanted to set up shop. There is instability and no confidence any more in those communities. People do not want to invest in a small business because they do not know what the future will be. It is up in the air.

I hear from people in the communities in my area and in northwestern Ontario. I am surprised Conservative members are not speaking on behalf of their regions, communities or people because they have to be experiencing the same thing. It cannot be just in northern Ontario, northeastern Ontario or northwestern Ontario. I know it is happening in other areas. Members of my caucus, who have spoken on behalf of their constituents and communities, have said that this is already having a devastating effect.

I say never mind looking at the past in terms of this, which is bad enough; let us look for a second at the future. If this agreement continues and the Americans continue to have the kind of control they have and we keep shipping product into the United States at a cost that makes it uncompetitive, how will we ever add value to anything we do? How will we have a future?

That is my concern. That is why I am so disappointed this afternoon that we find ourselves in this process of closure on this important agreement and piece of public business.

[Business of Supply, October 5th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, at the outset I want to thank to the member for Chambly—Borduas for bringing the motion forward, and I know that he and my colleague from Acadie—Bathurst have worked in this House for quite some years now to try to better the situation for working people across this country.

Today he brings to the House a very pertinent and relevant issue, which is the way we deal with our older workers and support them in their efforts, and the way we make sure that if they have to go back to work in order to support themselves, or perhaps to enhance a meagre pension, we look after their needs and make sure they are healthy, and, if they are out of work, that they get access to the supports and training or retraining they need to continue to contribute in the excellent way they have over their lifetimes.

I first want to say that I find it shocking and alarming that we are discussing the issues in such a way here today. The way that our economy has evolved, we are now very dependent on people who should be enjoying retirement. They are having to go back to work.

First is the fact that the economy needs them in the way it does. For the most part, they end up in low paying, dead-end jobs. Certainly that has been my experience. The fact is that we have not done anything as a society and as a government over the last number of years, when the economy has been well, to enhance the situation for our retired workers in this country.

They are the people who actually built the plants and communities that we all work in and live in now. They are the people who gave of their blood, sweat and tears, who fought in wars and came back, rolled up their sleeves and got down to work. They put those of us who are here today through school so that we could participate. They now find themselves in a situation where their pensions are not enough, neither the Canada pension nor the workplace pension that, if they were lucky enough to have one, is now beginning to pay out. It is not enough. It does not keep them in the dignified life that they should expect in a country that is as well off as Canada.

We have not found a way to make sure that absolutely everybody who works in this country has a pension above and beyond the Canada pension, a pension that will be there for them when they retire. Even with the pensions that do exist, we have not done that which needs to be done, and that is the indexing of pensions, as I have heard from so many seniors who say this needs to be done. Indexing needs to be done so that older people do not have to go back to work and be put through the grinder in the way that we have heard described here today. It needs to be done so they do not have to go on bended knee to government to look for a little help, for a little extra in order to improve their skills or whatever so they can make a few more dollars to buy a bit more food and perhaps pay the rent.

It is shameful that we have not found a way in this country to make sure that every worker has a pension that is indexed. It is probably something that we need to be looking at in the House in the future.

Also shameful are the kinds of cuts made by the previous Liberal government and which the present government partakes in as it tries to manage its financial affairs at a time when we have burgeoning surpluses in this country. Those cuts will have impacts on older workers in our country. As well, the government has cut literacy programs.

Particularly in northern Ontario in the resource based sector, we have workers who have worked for many years. They got up in the morning at five o'clock, got into the plant, made the paper or the steel or the boards that we all use to build our homes and our highways, and at the end of their career, at the age of 55 or 60, they end up having to take another job.

With the way the economy is evolving, a lot of those jobs now require a level of literacy that these workers were never able to pay attention to while working 24-7, some of them, to feed their kids and keep body and soul together. They now have found out that under the Conservative government those adult literacy programs are going to be cut.

These people find themselves living in homes that are sometimes a bit too big, yet they do not want to leave them because the alternative is unacceptable. They cannot afford the rent. They cannot afford the taxes. They cannot afford to pay for the electricity and their heat in those homes. So they have to go out and get another job.

Since the early 1990s, the government has not been able to find the wherewithal to come forward with an affordable housing strategy so that those seniors, our mothers and fathers, can move into accommodation that is more appropriate to their station in life at this time. We need housing that is more affordable for them so that they then perhaps will not have to go out and get another job at the age of 60 or 70 and have to go through the rigmarole or the wringer of--

[Volunteerism, October 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians value the importance of the non-profit and voluntary sector in providing social, cultural and recreational benefits. The size of its contribution to Canada's economy and job market is enormous at 6.8% of the nation's GDP, more than the mining, oil and gas sectors combined.

In Sault Ste. Marie, the non-profit sector is valued at $78 million and employs more than 1,400 people, but the Conservative government does not get it. It says volunteers are a “non-core priority”, with $200 million in cuts, including the national volunteer initiative serving 161,000 non-profit agencies.

The Muttart Foundation from Alberta says that the cuts hurt the vulnerable and create social deficits that will cost more than $1 billion to repair.

If the Conservatives keep this up, it will not be long before the Conservative government is deemed “non-core” by the people of Canada.

[Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, October 3rd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, yes, we were that close in a legal process that actually should not have involved politics and this government. If the government had left the industry alone to work out its concerns through the legal process that was available to them through NAFTA, yes, we would have had a different deal.

Obviously, it sounds as though the Liberals still have not learned a lesson from that election. That election was about corruption and a culture of entitlement that the Liberal government seemed to have no difficulty with, and obviously it still has not backed away and turned its back on that.