Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise this evening. While I have had the honour of rising in the House to ask questions, make statements and participate in a take note debate on the BSE crisis, I do consider this my maiden speech in this chamber. It is indeed an honour to be here. It is an honour, too, as the member for Sault Ste. Marie, to be the first individual to represent my riding in northern Ontario in both the provincial legislature of Ontario and now here in the House of Commons.
I would like to recognize the contributions of my predecessors in this place, particularly the most recent, Carmen Provenzano, Ron Irwin, and a member of my own party, Steven Butland, some few years ago.
Today we are discussing what on the surface appears to be a housekeeping bill giving a legislative framework to the new ministry of social development that has been operating since last December. However, while the legislative framework may be housekeeping, the mandate of this department, which is social development and the social economy, is not housekeeping. Rather, it is about nation building. This mandate goes to the very heart of who we are as Canadians.
Today at the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills Development, Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, in estimates, the Minister of State for Families and Caregivers talked of this ministry as the heart of the government. I agree with him. What we can yet become again in building a nation where all are equal and all are included could be very much under consideration here as we debate this department in Parliament.
I must say that this mandate of social development and the social economy very much connects with my own journey, both personally and politically. I want to begin with the wisdom I have gained from that journey. I am one of seven children of parents who arrived in Canada in January 1960 from Ireland. My father Martin came nine months earlier than the rest of us to establish a home, ending up in Wawa in northern Ontario working in a mine in that small community. My mother, Rose Savage, also from County Louth, Ireland, on her own escorted her seven children across the Atlantic to a new life in this wonderful country.
It was very exciting for us as children. We took a train in the middle of January up through the hinterland, ice and snow hanging from the trees. We children thought that we had died and gone to Disneyland. My mother, of course, thought she was in Siberia and some suggest that perhaps she was. It was very exciting, though, for all of us. I am an immigrant from Ireland who for the first nine years of his life had no electricity and no running water. I think in that there is a lesson for all of us, particularly where the social economy is concerned.
We came to a country whose social policy then was inclusive and welcoming. It was my first taste of Canada, a country rich in diversity and resources, filled with hopes and dreams, people working hard and playing hard, as northerners do, supporting one another and building community. The only way to survive this challenge was in fact to do it together with neighbours and with fellow workers and to do it in community.
It was out of this collective experience, in fact, that this nation came to believe in the power of community and the necessity of working together through the hard times such as the weather, the geography and the distance, all of life's hardships for those of us who have lived in northern Canada or in rural Canada.
It was with this experience of community and family and the need to care for one another that I saw first-hand what led me to want to work to create a society that reflected those values.
Those Canadian and community values connect very well with my faith journey, which was anchored in the social gospels. My faith led me to politics and the New Democratic Party, to people like Tommy Douglas, who allowed us to concretely root this care for other people and to build other structures that are fair and just.
I was able to work with this in a very concrete way in my home community in Sault Ste. Marie where, with some like-minded people, we established a soup kitchen in 1983. Half of our major industry had just been laid off. I am talking about a drop in employment of 6,000 people in a community of 80,000. It was major and it had a major effect. It was in Sault Ste. Marie, surrounded by really good people, that I saw the need for government programs and interventions if we are going to provide opportunities for everyone.
It was in that capacity I discovered that not only could government be helpful when it chose, it could also be hurtful in the choices it made. It was there that I committed to changing the structures and attitudes that contributed to the pain and suffering of so many people. That was what I saw happen under the Conservative government over the last eight years in Ontario, for example, with it taking away 21.6% of the income of the most marginalized and at risk individuals and families, decimating a support structure that had been put in place over many years by different stripes of government, New Democrat, Liberal and Conservative, all in the interest of lowering taxes, and judging some people not worthy of government assistance.
It was in this period that my resolve was born to fight poverty and to help create a society that was supportive and helpful of our people. This fight is not won, by any stretch of the imagination. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, said recently that he believes that today poverty is not “central on the global agenda”. I would add that it is not central on this government's agenda. Wolfensohn believes that “today lip service is given to the question of poverty”.
He states:
There are safe statements made by just about everybody about the issues of the Millennial goals and about poverty. But the real issues today that seem to be on the mind of the world, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, strains in the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, budget deficits, and parochial problems...while attention is given less to the equally inevitable and equally dangerous problems that come with poverty.
Wolfensohn says that “poverty and the environment in which we live are the real challenges for peace and that we need to give them priority.”
This global fight against poverty has a human face, a face that all of us here see on a daily basis if we are going back to our communities and listening to and looking at what is happening there.
I remember like it was yesterday learning during my people's parliament on poverty hearings of the news about the death of Kimberly Rogers, a story that more than any other painted the picture or told the story about what happens when government actually abandons people or chooses to abandon people.
For those who do not know, Kimberly Rogers was a young pregnant woman who was on social assistance and chose to go back to college and better herself. She became caught in a legal wrangle; in Ontario it was deemed to be illegal to collect student assistance and social assistance at the same time. She was found guilty and assigned to house arrest. In the heat of a very hot summer, she passed away in her apartment.
That is what can happen when governments put in place policies that have not been fully thought out and will ultimately come back to haunt them and all of us.
Being here in Parliament now allows me the opportunity to take this fight to a higher national level. When I announced my intention to seek a seat in the House of Commons, I spoke of the two kinds of politics in our country: the politics of access and influence and the politics of building a better society that includes everybody.
What matters to me is a politics of inclusion, politics as if people and communities matter. Among our New Democratic priorities for this new ministry will be, among other things, fighting the clawback of the national child tax benefit supplement and fighting child and family poverty, which is getting worse, according to news stories today reporting on tomorrow's Campaign 2000 report card, which says that family poverty is getting worse in our country.
This is shameful at any time, but intolerable when in our country the surplus currently stands at $9.1 billion and we have an EI surplus that sits at $44 billion.
New Democrats also pledge to work for a credible national child care plan.
I believe that splitting the former Human Resources Development Canada ministry into two ministries and creating a Ministry of Social Development gives us a wonderful opportunity to revisit what we can do as government and as members to ensure that every citizen at a very basic level lives a life reflective of the dignity inherent in every person and is able to participate fully in the life of their community.
I believe that government has a pivotal role to play in stabilizing our economy so that we all have a chance at good, secure, safe and well-paid jobs.
From my experience of fighting poverty in the community, it seems to me that the government needs to take a different, more fundamental track in its program development and approach. It needs to begin with a respect for the inherent value in each human being and the potential in each person to contribute to their own livelihood and the life of their community in a way that is often unique and particular.
We have fundamental questions to ask about social policy in our country and communities. When someone stands before us as legislators or as public servants to access a government program, for example, who do we see? Do we see someone who is valuable, someone who is worthy or do we see someone inherently lazy or bad, someone that some parties and policies would blame for their very own situation? The social development question is, how do we build a community around that person and for that person?
For our party, the essential difference is that we need to break out of a notion that sees society only as a collection of individuals, all in competition with each other, and to build a society that is supportive and cooperative, a society seen through community eyes as a community of communities. This is the social democracy we New Democrats offer this country. I am convinced that the more progressive social agenda from the throne speech we heard a couple of weeks ago is in good part there because New Democrats have a central role in this minority government.
I am proud to be affiliated with the party of Tommy Douglas. I make an unabashed plea in this place to anybody who is listening to vote for Tommy Douglas as our greatest Canadian. I know that there will be some out there who will want to make a plug for perhaps Mr. Trudeau or Mr. Pearson, but if we look at the contribution that Tommy Douglas made, particularly at a time when we had a minority government in this place, and the introduction of national programs like our health care and the role that he played in that, we will understand why some of us feel so strongly about his contribution. He introduced the last really national program to this country, a program that we now hold up as that which identifies us as Canadians.
My passion in coming to politics, as I said before, is to wipe out poverty. It is the reason I am in politics. The just released National Council of Welfare's poverty profile for 2001 reported that about 240,000 Canadian families with two working parents lived below the poverty line in 2001. Low paying jobs continue to fall short in providing workers a living wage. Almost 60% of poor single mothers, 128,000 women, reported earnings that could not lift them above the poverty line.
Some of the programs that the government has introduced to reduce poverty has turned out to be an exercise in simply moving people from one state of poverty to another. The working poor in this country find themselves still unable to pay for and have those things that are basic to a decent standard of living to support them, their families and their children.
I have been touching on the social justice and community themes that are an inherent part of the Ministry of Social Development. Let me use my remaining time to briefly elaborate on those priorities at this time for our party in that context.
The government is finally, after years and years of promises, saying it will put in place a national child care system. Our party wants to support this national system if, and it is a very big if, we get it right on crucial issues, such as child care being publicly funded and publicly delivered.
As we talk more about a national plan, we need the stark reminder that by the time a truly national child care system is operating, today's toddlers will be finishing university. As I have said on a number of occasions over the last couple of weeks, we do not have more time on this file. As a matter of fact, we are into overtime. Our party believes that a national child care system must be sustainable, well past the five years promised by the government.
It will be important to ensure that provinces spend this money for child care. We need enabling legislation sooner rather than later to lay the foundation for this plan. This legislation would be part of the growing confidence of citizens in a national child care and early learning system.
There are some positive conditions, I must say, at the moment that give me confidence that the government may actually deliver this time on its promise of a national child care system, the most important being that we have a minority government at play here with a central role for the New Democratic Party.
Our commitment is to work with those people in this place who sincerely want to put in place a national child care system based on the principles that have been studied and developed over a long period of time now, that have a commitment from all those out there who understand and have worked, and are looking forward to a national child care system that is enshrined in legislation and that is publicly funded and publicly delivered.
We have here the kind of Parliament that produced our health care program, something put together by the New Democratic Party, government and the CCF government in Saskatchewan. Our party's priorities for a national child care system include building a not for profit system.
There has been a trend to privatization in health care under Liberal and Conservative governments. Governments de-fund or underfund a system and then say that they cannot afford a universal plan. We have already seen a creeping Americanization of our health care system. We must not allow an Americanization of the child care system.
Supporters of for profit child care say providers can create child care spaces more quickly than the not for profit sector and at a lower cost. They argue that giving private providers public child care funds maximizes choices available for parents. The OECD report, which was delivered here a week ago, is clear that quality suffers with private child care. For example, it becomes more costly and it becomes, in time, mediocre.
In an era of free trade and global trade agreements that exert wide influence on domestic social policy, Ottawa's money must be restricted to non profit programs or we risk falling into the hands of foreign big bucks child care.
Let us not forget that quality child care is about the social and economic development of a community and of our country. A national child care system would be a place of employment for thousands of people. It would constitute an essential resource which would enable parents to participate in the labour market, study, and pursue professional development opportunities. It could nurture better self-esteem for the child and the parent, and better economic development for both the child, the family and the community.
I want to speak for a few minutes on the national child benefit and the clawback. The national child benefit and its supplement was supposed to fight child and family poverty. The rationale was to reduce child poverty, promote labour force attachment, and reduce overlap of government services and benefits, but we know that the clawback robs the poor in very real ways. Only in families where an adult has a job is one allowed to keep the national child benefit supplement of a $126 for the first child and decreasing amounts for subsequent children. Parents on social assistance or a disability pension are out of luck. When the rent is $775 and total income is $1,334, the extra couple of hundred dollars for a family with two children would make a huge difference.
Research from the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto documents how ending the clawback would reduce the number of families with children that have to turn to a food bank to put food on the table. Daily Bread Food Bank estimates that 13,500 children in the greater Toronto area alone would not need to rely on the food bank if the clawback were stopped.
Finally, I would like to comment on the social transfer. The government has a wonderful opportunity, with the empowerment of this new ministry, to go to the people of this country and ask them what they think we should be doing in terms of delivering social programs, where the money that is flowed to the provinces through the social transfer should go, what the priorities should be, and how we should be tackling this terrible blight on our society of so much poverty in such a rich country.
I would urge the government, in my support for the development of this ministry, to take that task on, and to take this opportunity at this time and go to the people of Canada and ask them what they think about the social transfer, and where they think it should be spent and what the priorities should be.
