Wayne Marston

[Business of Supply, June 11th, 2009]

moved:

That, in the opinion of the House, in light of the legitimate concerns of Canadians that pensions and their retirement security may not be there for them in their retirement years, the Government of Canada should begin to work with the provinces and territories to ensure the sustainability of Canadians’ retirement incomes by bringing forward at the earliest opportunity, measures such as:

(a) expanding and increasing the CPP/QPP, OAS and GIS to ensure all Canadians can count on a dignified retirement;

(b) establishing a self-financing pension insurance program to ensure the viability of workplace sponsored plans in tough economic times;

(c) ensuring that workers’ pension funds go to the front of the line of creditors in the event of bankruptcy proceedings;

(d) in the interest of appropriate management of the CPP that the Government of Canada immediately protect the CPP from imprudent investment practices by ceasing the practice of awarding managers performance-based bonuses; and

(e) take all necessary steps to recover those bonuses for 2009, ensuring managers in the future are paid appropriate industry-competitive salaries.

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend from Outremont for seconding this important motion.

I am most pleased to rise today to speak to the NDP motion and the reforms needed to protect and enhance the lives of Canada's seniors as they live out their sunset years. I am, at the present time, crossing Canada on a listening to seniors tour, and Canadians have been quick to tell me accounts of their fears and their concerns for their futures.

While I was in St. Thomas, I heard from Vanda, who told me how she had to start paying $90 a month for a prescription that her husband, who had recently had a stroke, needed, because it had been delisted by the province of Ontario. As a result, they did not know where the money was going to come from. Especially when people are on fixed incomes, that can be almost a tragedy.

I also heard from Joyce in Elliot Lake, who related how hard her life had become due to the fact that on a yearly basis, she had to pay almost $2,100 a year for her hydro.

Today, far too many seniors are forced to live this way, just one crisis away from a financial catastrophe. Many seniors are also worried that their private pension plans will not be there for them when they retire, as in the case of Nortel. They wonder if they will have any pension at all.

Seniors are also quick to condemn the bonuses being paid to Canada pension plan executives. They have seen the media reports, such as the case of CEO David Denison, who saw his pay triple since 2005 by taking home bonuses amounting to $7.4 million. That is in addition to a $400,000-plus yearly salary.

Seniors are also quick to tell anyone who will listen how unforgivable those bonuses are when so many seniors across Canada are living near or in poverty. The bonuses during good times are already viewed by the public as symptomatic of financial industry greed. Today, given the frightful economic times that we are living through, the fact that the same managers, who lost $17.2 billion, are expecting and accepting massive bonuses is not only indefensible, it is obscene.

We in the NDP believe in removing bonuses from the administration of CPP and taking away the incentive plan for managers. The one they have now causes them to take potentially unacceptable risks in the investments they make. I do not quarrel with anyone who proposes appropriate industry standards for salaries, but having said this, the game afoot today across the corporate community is to load up salaries with performance bonuses, retention bonuses and other perks.

I recall in the 1970s, when I first joined Bell Canada, talking to a manager regarding our pay practices at Bell. He had a saying, and it is very true, “A fair day's work for a fair day's pay”. I agree with that notion and Canadians agree with that notion, but I would suggest the corporate community, especially the financial community, has forgotten just what fair is. Never mind that according to economist Toby Sanger, in the last 10 years, the CPP fund would have made $13 billion more than it did if it had been invested in government bonds, rather than in a diversified portfolio of equities, real estate and bonds.

These managers have not been producing value-added returns above risk-free bonds, and over the past four years, they have not achieved the returns required for the long-term sustainability of CPP.

These managers have repeatedly defended their bonuses by pointing out that their performance is graded according to a rolling four year average of the fund's performance. My reply to them goes like this. In the fiscal year 2009, the losses in the fund wiped out four years of contributions, and the fact that senior managers are still in line for bonuses is simply not acceptable.

Recently at the House finance committee, Phil Benson from the Teamsters Union said:

The performance bonus should be, “Guess what, folks? We're in a recession, tough times, but don't worry. Your pension is still there”. That's a performance bonus.

One thing I am sure of is that Canadians will appreciate the section of today's NDP motion which demands that government secure the repayment of those bonuses.

The genesis of my seniors tour came about when I was visited by a prominent seniors group. One of my guests stated to me that seniors feel invisible to their government. This group was also wondering why their government has given $14 billion in yearly corporate tax breaks while doing nothing for them.

Last fall I told another story in this House that is worth repeating. It is the story of a senior who came into my office with a letter in his hand from the government saying that his pension had increased by 42¢. He was so upset he had tears in his eyes. He said that not only does the government not give a damn about seniors, but it goes out of its way to insult them.

As we face down the worst economic crisis in 70 years, Canadians have been vividly reminded why we have a social safety net in the first place. I say to members today, now is the most opportune time in our recent history to undertake a complete review of the benefits paid under OAS, GIS and CPP. This must be done with an eye to increasing benefits immediately to raise seniors out of poverty.

Recently an economist at the Canadian Labour Congress reported that an annual infusion of $1 billion would raise all seniors above the low-income cutoff. According to Statistics Canada's 2004 estimates, there were 219,000 Canadians living below the low-income cutoff, which is the way many organizations measure poverty in Canada. An even more sobering statistic is that of the 219,000 seniors living in poverty, more than 60% were single, unattached women. That is nothing short of a national disgrace.

It is clear that with the bailout of GM and our ballooning deficit, this is not a time of business as usual in Canada. I would suggest if the federal government can buy a serious stake in two auto plants, Canada can afford to invest in those plans designed to protect us all in our senior years. We could do so much more and we must do so much more for all Canadians.

Today only 38.5% of Canadian workers have workplace pensions and nearly one-third have no retirement savings at all. More than 3.5 million Canadians are not saving enough in RRSPs for what used to be called their golden years, and 75% of workers are not even participating in a registered pension plan. Clearly, the notion that retirement savings can be adequately accounted for through purchases of RRSPs does not work, and urgent government action is needed.

As a complement to today's motion, I am in the process of tabling other bills designed to promote transparency and responsible investment practices in the management of public related pension fund assets. My private member's bill, Bill C-361, would enhance public disclosure rules and severely curtail the ways in which the assets of public sector pension funds can be invested, with an eye to all but eliminating a fund manager's ability to invest in risky financial instruments.

Another bill I have drafted does the same for the remainder of the federally regulated pension funds. These are the public sector pension funds. I also have been drafting a bill to require federally regulated pension funds to over-fund themselves by 20%. We could think of it as a rainy day fund, so that in the better times we prepare for the downturns that will come eventually. The bill would also amend the Income Tax Act to permit the deductibility of contributions or an excess surplus of, for example, up to 30% of ongoing corporate liabilities.

The last bill I am preparing would amend the Income Tax Act to provide substantial tax incentives to employers who wish to create a defined benefit pension plan for their employees.

The next issue I would like to speak about is that Canada needs a pension benefits guarantee fund. There is a need for this. Federal leadership is urgently required to set about working with the provinces to develop a pension insurance regime to ensure workers actually receive the retirement benefits they have earned, even if their employer goes out of business. We insure our cars and homes and we have deposit insurance for our savings, so why not insure our pensions?

Such an insurance system could be comparable to what exists through the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation for bank deposits, RRSPs and tax-free savings accounts. The system could be funded by contributions from federal workplace pension plan sponsors administered by the federal government and designed to ensure efficiency and fairness to all parties.

Another notable model worth studying is the American Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Like the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is not financed through general tax revenues but through the following measures: insurance premiums paid by the sponsors of the defined benefit plans; assets from the pension plans it takes over; recoveries of unfunded pension liabilities from plan sponsors' bankruptcy estates; and investment income.

Canada may choose not to follow the American model but could create some form of pension insurance uniquely its own or a hybrid of other plans, like schemes from Switzerland, Sweden, Germany or Japan. The Netherlands has chosen to directly guarantee its pension plans with strict investment regulations and requiring that the pensions are fully funded at all times.

A recent OECD working paper put the matter succinctly when stating “no scheme to provide pension insurance can work without adequate funding rules”.

The OECD document stated:

Strict funding and investment rules should be seen as complements to any pension guarantee scheme.

Good funding rules can achieve almost all of what a guarantee scheme is striving for, are arguably easier to design and manage and, especially when combined with other measures.... If a guarantee scheme is successfully combined with funding rules or other protection measures it can effectively perform its task as a 'last resort' benefit protection measure.

Another clause in the motion calls for “ensuring that workers' pension funds go to the front of the line of creditors in the event of bankruptcy proceedings”.

Ken Georgetti of the Canadian Labour Congress recently stated before the finance committee:

Critically, for the sake of genuine fairness, we need to ensure that the full value of workers' pensions is protected in bankruptcy proceedings. If Canadians shouldn't be in the front of the line when it comes to protecting them, who should be?

I would take a moment to remind the House that if the current government were to only enact certain clauses of a bill that is already the law of this land, the clause would be unnecessary. The Wage Earner Protection Program Act, which enacts changes to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, was given royal assent in December 2007. The purpose of that act is to ensure that workers' pension funds go to the front of the line of creditors in the event of bankruptcy proceedings. The Wage Earner Protection Program Act sets out provisions to ensure that unpaid wages in the event of bankruptcy are paid to workers and sets up super-creditor status for the unpaid pension contributions.

Elements of the amendments to the above pieces of legislation were enacted by the governor-in-council in the summer of 2008. However, not all aspects of the changes were implemented, leaving some glaring loopholes.

The NDP leader, the member for Toronto—Danforth, has raised this on occasion in the House. He stated:

Mr. Speaker, the truth is that the government will not act even when it is the law.

In December 2007, Parliament took action to protect Canadian pensions by adopting Bill C-12 to amend bankruptcy laws. Section 39(2) prioritizes unpaid pension contributions in the case of bankruptcy. Sections 44 and 131 ensures that the court cannot unilaterally overturn a collective agreement. Section 126 prohibits a court from sanctioning restructuring plans unless all unpaid wage claims and pension obligations have been met. It is the law but the government has refused to put it into force. Why?

As I was considering my remarks for today, it was during that time that we were marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day, the Normandy invasion. We as a grateful nation marked that occasion as we should to show our veterans, their families and the following generations the importance of the sacrifice that generation made for us all. Successive Canadian governments claim to support the generation of sacrifice that we honoured this past week, but this year we heard stories of veterans who are now living in poverty and living in the streets. That is not acceptable for the veterans of Canada, nor any senior in Canada.

This Parliament must find a way to build up and fortify OAS, CPP and GIS so that they better serve the needs of those for whom they were designed. Today's NDP motion is intended to start, in a very public way, a national discussion on the future of our retirement security system. Whether it is CPP, OAS, GIS or private pensions, Canadians know these plans must be looked into to ensure that they are available for them when they retire.

Canadians need to know there will be a level of pension income for their retirement to ensure that they will spend their final years in financial security and with the dignity they deserve.

Before I am even asked, I would like to address the issue of cost. Will this motion not require billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to implement? My response is this: How expensive will inaction be?

The government is already indirectly bailing out pension plans, not to mention that it will soon have to do something for all of those people who have no pension plans. Seventy-five per cent of private sector workers who are not participating in a registered pension plan today have not been able to save for their retirement. Today 3.5 million Canadians are not saving enough in RRSPs. This situation, if unaddressed, will cost taxpayers heavily in the years to come. I would suggest the price of inaction is simply not an acceptable option.

The Conservative government can choose to continue to respond to the developing crisis in a piecemeal ad hoc fashion, or together we can devise a comprehensive long-term strategy that will put Canadian seniors on a more solid fiscal footing.

Over time, with adequate pension funding rules in place, the cost of the guarantee fund would actually be negligible as it would not be needed as pensions would be adequately funded. In the near and interim period it will be potentially expensive, yet failure to act will also cost both in terms of dollars and in terms of lives. There is no escaping the fact the government will have to come up with massive amounts of money one way or the other.

I remind members that CPP and QPP are self-financing. It then becomes a question of whether Canadians are prepared to pay more for security in their senior years and to do so as part of a secure public plan. Canadians certainly face insecurity today in the context where private options, such as RRSPs or defined contribution plans, leave Canadians uncovered and victimized by the market, that is, if they are those who can afford to contribute in the first place. Quite simply OAS and GIS are for those who cannot afford to contribute to the CPP, and that is where the cost may lie.

We accept the fact that as a result of increasing the benefits and increasing eligibility to include currently excluded groups the cost will rise. However, as I said earlier, in an age when the government is spending more than $100 billion to relieve banks of mortgages, that does not seem like much to relieve our deserving senior citizens.

We would also suggest a beefed up CPP is the cheapest way for working Canadians to pool risks, take the burden off individuals and secure their senior years.

Regarding private plan insurance, the proposal in the motion is defined as self-financing. It would require a small increment on top of the contributions to cover insurance premiums. Once we have brought them into the plan, they would remain fully financed by employers and employees but would have the security of CPP.

Never again should Canada's seniors feel invisible to their government. We can take our valued retirement income support system and make it better. Today's seniors have worked hard all of their lives and in my view they have already lived through far too much turmoil and grief.

The worldwide economic crisis has certainly made it clear that it is critical for this Parliament and for the government to adopt a coordinated national plan of action to protect seniors. This is the NDP's call to this Parliament to rise to the occasion of a great national need. Let us roll up our sleeves and come together as Canadians and do the work necessary to confront this critical need.

Here today I say to the opposition parties, to the Prime Minister and to the government, the NDP is here to work for the benefit of all Canadians, especially seniors. Join us. This is the time and place to enhance Stanley Knowles' dream of sustaining and maintaining the dignity of all Canadians in their old age.

[Questions Passed as Orders for Returns, June 4th, 2009]

With regards to the New Horizons for Seniors program: (a) to which projects and to which organizations has funding been allocated from this program; (b) what is the amount pledged for each project; (c) on which dates were the funding decisions made for each project funded by the program; (d) what are the names of each federal riding that received funding from the program; and (e) what is the total for each project?

[Employment Insurance Act, June 3rd, 2009]

Madam Speaker, I am pleased to speak today to Bill C-280, which was introduced by the NDP member for Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing. I want to thank her for putting this bill forward. There is some controversy around it, as we have heard from the Speaker, about the cost factor.

In the midst of this recession, where so many workers who have, through no fault of their own, found themselves unemployed and today quite desperate, Bill C-280 would begin the process of setting right those aspects of Canada's employment insurance system that have been shut down for so many Canadians since the 1990s, as we heard from the previous speaker.

On first examination, Bill C-280 appears to be relatively simple legislation, but I will remind members present that it has two significant objectives. The bill would create a uniform level entry for every person who made a claim for EI benefits by lowering the threshold hours for qualification to 360 hours for people in every region of Canada.

We hear from various media outlets that the Liberal leader is proposing the same 360 hours for qualification for EI benefits, but I would point out that the Liberal leader is in fact proposing only a temporary fix to the qualifying hours for just one year.

I want to be clear. This NDP member's bill, Bill C-280, proposes a permanent change to 360 hours for qualifying for benefits. In addition, Bill C-280 would ensure benefits to people based on their best 12 weeks of earnings in the year prior to their claim. You will know, Madam Speaker, that this would be a marked improvement over the current 14 weeks that are considered to set benefit levels today.

It appears from the comments of the Leader of the Opposition that current Liberals are actually interested in reforming employment insurance. We in the NDP have called for this for years. In fact, I would say the Liberals have a particular understanding of the current EI rules because much of what we need to repair today comes from the damage that they themselves inflicted on the system in the 1990s.

We will also recall it was during that period that the Liberal finance minister, later prime minister, the former member for LaSalle—Émard, not only changed the eligibility rules for employment insurance but the very name of unemployment insurance was changed to employment insurance. Those changes included a change of philosophical view regarding the contributions of workers and employers, that they now be viewed not as premiums for insurance but as being payroll taxes. The contribution/premiums acquired then could be directed to general revenues and debt reduction.

Turning EI into a tax on working people, fed Liberal surplus budgets and helped the Liberals justify implementing corporate tax breaks. Of course this was a passion shared by their friends of the day, the Progressive Conservatives. However, in fairness, I am pleased that the Liberals have done a 180° turn and now, apparently, at least as a temporary measure, share the our goal to see the threshold for benefits lowered to 360 hours.

Bill C-280 would put an end to the regional disparity in the qualifying period. This NDP bill would ensure the flow of EI dollars to more Canadians, who so desperately need them right now.

The existing EI rules set nine different sets of criteria in terms of hours worked for nine different ranges of regional unemployment rates. Workers in Canada may be required to have anywhere from 420 to 700 hours of eligible work to become a claimant for this benefit. This inequity is not suited for the kinds of job losses we see in Canada today. Regional unemployment rates are in flux and shift from day to day and week to week. EI must be better able to respond to this challenge. Common sense should dictate this, but I find common sense just is not common in the halls of the current government, or the preceding one, for that matter.

We are hearing support for changes to EI from some non-traditional places, such as the TD Bank and the Caledon Institute, both of which are saying that lowering the number of hours needed to qualify for employment insurance is the right thing to do to further combat the global recession.

These two particular groups clearly understand that EI not only serves the individual, but serves the communities' well-being and that of our nation as a whole. They understand very well that if we hang our workers and communities out to dry, it is not only bad for business but bad for the future of our country as a whole.

Across this country, Canadians will tell us very quickly there is much more to an economy than balance sheets and mathematical equations. For instance, Canadians know that the economy is only as secure as the lives of the people who make up our country.

The TD Bank and the Caledon Institute have taken a view of our economy that is both one for the long term, as well as for the short term. They recognize that one important economic measure that will help support a hurting economy in an almost immediate way is an employment insurance system that catches more people in a safety net, not fewer.

There will be those, and even some in this place, who will contend that we cannot afford to make employment insurance more accessible.

After years of building up a $54 billion EI surplus, the Conservative government wrote it off the books last year. The government owes Canadians the EI protection that they have paid into for years. Canadians have played by the rules, and now the federal government must set EI rules that protect them.

I can hear it now, like an echo in this place, how the government has already expanded the number of weeks a person can remain as a claimant. Yes, this is certainly true. However, those five weeks mean nothing to a person, to a family, when the person does not even qualify for benefits in the first place. And those extra weeks are only a temporary stopgap added to the end of a benefit period, where statistically people are even less likely to claim them.

The NDP has told the Conservative government repeatedly how it is critically important to remove the two-week waiting period for new claimants at the front end if we want to help a majority of claimants right now.

What is clear is that we have the opportunity to not only do the right thing at a time of national need, but we clearly cannot afford to miss this opportunity to fix a discriminatory and close to dysfunctional system.

The current Conservative government often looks to the U.S. to see its experience in any given matter. I offer the chief economist for Moody's credit rating service as an example. He testified before the U.S. House Committee on Small Business last July that apart from U.S. food stamps, the best bang for the government buck was to ensure that unemployed workers had access to employment insurance benefits.

To determine the effectiveness of differing stimulus measures, he compared their multipliers, an equation that gives a dollar amount to the economic activity created by a government dollar spent to stimulate the economy. His conclusions, for some, will be shocking.

A typical right-wing solution, such as a permanent tax cut, came in as a loss, a negative equation, that saw the dollar spent fizzle to half of its value. His opinion was that they were drains on the economy.

Infrastructure spending was quite good, with a multiplier of $1.59 for every dollar spent. In his view, again, the problem with infrastructure spending is in the amount of time it takes to have the money flow to the economy, which is exactly what we are living in Canada today.

His suggestion was that the better way to get money into the community immediately was through increases in spending on unemployment insurance. With a multiplier of $1.64, that would get the job done.

I will close by saying that our first best chance to help Canadians directly and in a tangible way is through Bill C-280. I ask members to join the NDP and support this bill.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I could not help but notice that when the member for Halifax was speaking, she seemed to be emotionally charged, and that she needed to go to her water from time to time. It struck me that when people from so many countries in the 20th century came to Canada to get away from human rights violations, pier 21 in Halifax would have been one of the very first places they would have seen. This member represents the very area where that pier is located and where we have memorialized those trips. Today we are debating human rights and labour rights, and the violations that have gone on in Peru and the situation there today. Seeing that passion is very touching.

However, the reality is that when we talk about labour rights, there is a tendency, to which I am to some degree guilty of because I came from the labour movement of Hamilton, with such a proud history, to focus and frame many arguments from the perspective of organized labour and the people who have been fortunate enough to have a union. What does the member see as the situation for non-union workers in Peru?

[Seniors, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, recently a gentleman from a prominent seniors organization came up to me and said that seniors “feel invisible to this government”.

In my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, almost 17% of our seniors live in poverty, well over twice the national average of about 7%.

As reported in The Globe and Mail today, 75% of private sector workers have no pension plan at all and many of the existing defined benefit plans are facing significant shortfalls.

That is why I have been touring the country, listening to the stories of seniors, and finding out what they need from their representatives in Ottawa. After my tour I will report their stories and their concerns to our leader, Jack Layton, and they will form the basis of the NDP's national seniors strategy.

I want all Canadian seniors to know that we are here. We see them and hear them. We will not stop fighting for seniors until each and every one of them is able to live in the dignity that all of them deserve.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I heard the member speak about the Canadian mining companies in Peru. In my earlier remarks, I talked about the corporate social responsibility report that was never tabled in the House. A year has passed since that report was completed. It is very concerning to civil society and those of us who are concerned about the approach Canadian companies take in different countries.

Last week, Yessika Hoyos Morales was next door. Her father was a trade unionist who was assassinated in Colombia. I understand she was scheduled to speak before the trade committee and the door was closed to her. I have to wonder why in the world that would happen in Canada, a place that champions human rights.

We were very fortunate, and I want to give credit to all members of the Subcommittee on Human Rights, because, by consensus, this woman was added to our agenda at the last minute. However, it strikes me as strange that one of our committees would do such a thing.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, a tragedy is unfolding in South America in regard to the displacement of people and the disappearance of trade unionists. It is interesting how we hear that they were not murdered but that they have disappeared. It happens to tens of thousands of them across South America. The tragedy is that when a dominant nation, such as Canada, goes into negotiations with a particular country, a lot of things start happening in preparation for that agreement.

The people on the farms are quelled by leaders saying that they should be moved off and out of the way before the agreement is signed. Trade unionists disappear. I used the example earlier of Yessika Hoyos Morales' father who disappeared in 2001. Four years later, a colonel quietly told her that his death squad had killed him. This is horrific.

As a nation, in any trade agreement we have a responsibility and our government has a responsibility to enhance human rights wherever we travel, to set that example worldwide and to live it every day in the protection of our own human rights, labour rights and environmental rights and those of any nation with which we do business.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, in regard to the bill we debated here this morning about a buy Canadian strategy, I indicated in my remarks that the U.S. started such a strategy in 1927. Americans buy locally and are proud to buy American products. We should be proud to buy Canadian products.

In my riding of Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, we have been decimated on the manufacturing front. It is tragic at times to see the flow of vehicles crossing the border into the United States to purchase there and then come back. All my life I have spoken to my friends about buying Canadian. Hamilton used to be the textile capital of Canada but it is no longer there. Steel is at risk in Hamilton, although at this point indications are that it is because of the market downturn, but still, all in all it is a major concern.

I am not opposed to having a free trade agreement with any nation so long as we set a standard in that agreement and that we ensure the agreement enhances environmental regulation and human rights. Where human rights are in question, we should never be signing the agreement until we are satisfied that there is a basic fundamental set of human rights in any given country.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, as I indicated in my remarks, I have a history in the labour movement with negotiations. The very failure of having a letter of intent in a collective agreement is worse than not having something in the agreement that states what is needed. It is masking over the fact. These side agreements are doing something very similar. They are not addressing the issues in a substantive way to move the mark forward on the environment, human rights or labour rights in this case.

[Canada-Peru Free Trade Agreement Act, June 1st, 2009]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise this morning to voice my opposition to Bill C-24.

One of the things I was reminded of as I sat here is that in the early to mid 1980s we started a free trade agreement with the United States. I recall that a certain Conservative member said it was like sleeping with an elephant and if the elephant rolled over we would be in some difficulty.

That particular debate went on, and ultimately the free trade agreement was signed. Then the elephant rolled over and from 1988 to 1990 Canada lost 524,000 manufacturing jobs. We have progressed, some people might say, to NAFTA, and the repercussions are still being felt.

What I see as a change in this proposed agreement is that we are somewhat of a dominant partner in this one. With that dominant partner status comes a responsibility. As a nation, we could have been taking the lead on the environment and labour rights in this particular country. We know that many of the South American countries have some tremendous problems in the area of human rights. The records are disastrous down there.

Bill C-24 is a bill to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the Republic of Peru, the Agreement on the Environment between Canada and the Republic of Peru and the Agreement on Labour Cooperation between Canada and the Republic of Peru. With regard to labour cooperation, we had an opportunity to enhance the labour standards in this country by setting benchmarks that should have been in the agreement.

Nobody in this place will dispute the necessity of trade. We all understand that Canada is a trading nation. Canada has taken a leadership role in human rights in the world for many generations now, and it is highly regarded and respected. This is a lost opportunity. We had an opportunity to similarly move the benchmark forward in the negotiations around the free trade agreement with Colombia. As we know, Colombia has the worst human rights record on the face of the earth. Some will say, and I am sure they are sincere, that by having trade and having an agreement with Colombia, Peru and other countries, that this will enhance and bring forward their human rights. Personally, I believe we should have been pressing for human rights prior to even entering into negotiations.

Members may recall that there was a report prepared on the corporate and social responsibility. In fact I believe the member from Sherbrooke commented on it in his remarks. Well, that particular report never made it to this House. That report was returned to the government a year ago last November. It was talking about situations, particularly of Canadian enterprises operating in South America and other countries.

There has been a question in our communities as to why that was never tabled in this House. Why was that document not brought forward? The NGOs, the civil society and other people came together across this country to prepare it. I think the evidence is now here as to why the government would not want the corporate and social responsibility document tabled; it is because it would directly impact on these two agreements.

From time to time in our offices we are visited by guests from other countries. Just last week we had a young woman, Yessika Morales, who visited us from Colombia. Yessika's father was shot and killed by the paramilitaries in 2001. She came to us with her concerns about that particular trade agreement with Colombia.

They have a great fear in that part of the world. In no way am I suggesting Canadian companies are directly complicit, but in South America, if a corporation from any part of the world working there were to be something like King Henry when he said, “Will nobody rid me of this troublesome monk?” and Thomas Becket died, in a similar fashion, if the executive board or the executives of a mining corporation or other enterprise were to suggest that there is any kind of problem with a labour leader, that labour leader would be gone.

The example is Colombia, where 2,690 trade unionists have died since 1986. Some people ask how I know that is part of that; it's because in the same period about 17,000 people died. Amnesty International's Human Rights Watch and others have documented these cases.

We had a great opportunity with this dominant position that I referred to before to take our place as an international leader on human rights, to sustain that position and to move forward to help countries like Peru. We failed to do it.

In the particular agreement, once again, labour rights and environment rights are side agreements. I come from the labour movement, and in my time I was part of the negotiations between Bell Canada and the union, on the union side. During negotiations in 1988, and then again in 1990, we went to the employer with our list of our proposals and the employer would have a list of their proposals. It is interesting that ours were called demands and theirs were called proposals, but that is another issue. At some point in the negotiations we reached a place where we said we could not resolve this. But we had to have something. In that case, the employer wrote a letter of intent.

That was all well and good. When the collective agreement was signed and we were back in the workplace and workers' rights seemed to be impinged, we went to the union and said we wanted to grieve. The union said it was sorry it could not because that was only a letter of intent; it was not binding.

These side agreements are exactly the same thing as this letter of intent. It is a nice way of masking that we do not have any powerful, sustainable actions we can take to protect the environment in Peru, or protect the workers' rights, or the workers' lives, in many cases. It is very troubling when we look at an agreement of this nature.

I will give some credit to the government, because it has moved somewhat away from the Bush agreements of the past. We would probably find that some of those have been getting a very rough ride in the Congress of the United States, but it has moved somewhat past that. Still, it does not do what is needed to protect the workers of this country. As we demean or lower the rights of any nation in the world, it takes the rights of all nations and lowers them.

It is important to consider who will benefit from trade agreements of this nature. I will give an example of one company, the Bank of Nova Scotia, that will be moving to higher investments in Peru. I am sure that on the investment front there will be some reciprocal trade that happens, and it is to the benefit of the countries involved.

I must point out, Peru is not a major trading partner with Canada to begin with. Our two-way merchandise trade between the two countries only reached $2.8 billion in 2008, and Canadian imports were over $2 billion, of which 50% was from Canadian gold companies operating in Peru.

I go back again for a moment to corporate social responsibility. That highlights the importance of having a framework of the responsibilities we expect of Canadian companies when they operate in a nation like Peru, whether we have a trade deal or not.

With that initial trade deal, the negotiations were started as far back as 2002, under Mr. Chrétien and the Liberals at the time. They first held discussions with Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. Our trade minister in 2007 launched the formal trade talks with Peru, and the government signed in May 2008.

There are critics around the world on trade issues and trade agreements. Mary Tharin, from the COHA, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, was talking about the U.S.-Peru free trade agreement, and she suggested the agreement has given the president of Peru the excuse to start dismantling labour rights and what regulations they do have on the environment in Peru.

From my perspective, the good news is that since the president started doing that, his approval rating has dropped or has almost vanished. However, we are not talking about a democracy like Canada when we are talking about the impact that would have on him and how that might sway him not to proceed to a greater degree of damaging those particular rights.

In the United States in 2007, there was a considerable debate and, as indicated, some compromise was made and it approved a free trade agreement with Peru designed to drastically reduce import-export tariffs, hypothetically putting an end to protectionism on both sides.

We hear the government saying that we cannot have a buy Canadian strategy because that would be protectionist in this worst of times. As the member from Winnipeg pointed out earlier in his remarks, in 1927 the United States undertook protectionism, if we want to call it that, but it was buy American where procurements of local governments and state governments were intended to spend their taxpayer money on, heaven forbid, American goods, which is, in my opinion, precisely what we should be doing in this country.

The approval for that free trade agreement in the United States has been delayed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives due to concerns, mostly on the part of the congressional democrats, I would say, about Peru's environmental and labour standards. It took quite a while for that to ultimately get resolved.

Despite the free trade agreement's conditions, which state that labour standards must not be lowered, a number of President Garcia's recent decrees have put the country's public service workers in jeopardy. In May, the Federation of State Employees got to the point where they felt desperate enough to organize a strike.

The whole problem is that these agreements are about trade at all costs. We should think about that for a moment. Yes, I said in my opening remarks that trade is important, and we all accept the necessity of trade, but Canada as a country has always been a country that took principled stands, a country that stood up for human rights and for the values that are necessary to sustain a healthy country.

Tomorrow there will be a demonstration outside of this place by a group of labour unions and labour activists. As we close in on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day, we are reminded how the veterans of this country fought in the war against Nazi Germany to have Canadians sustained and have the right to demonstrate outside of this place.

Canada has gone far and wide to protect the rights of citizens in other countries and in our own country and has done a wonderful job in doing so. However, when we move to agreements with nations with questionable human rights records and questionable records on the environment and we fail, as the dominant partner in those negotiations, to improve areas of the environment, environmental regulation, labour laws and rights, then we fail as a nation.

I am really troubled that in the two agreements, the agreement with Peru and, more particularly, the agreement with Colombia, I think our government has failed us. In the particular case of the free trade agreement with Colombia, I am quite ashamed of the fact that we would even negotiate with a government that is as tied to the drug trade as that nation is.