Oct 7th
- MP
ndpOct 07, 2011 8:20 am | Quebec, OutremontMr. Speaker, the Conservatives have always boasted they would not download to the provinces. That is exactly what this is. No one believes them, especially not the highly credible Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is always right whenever they are trying to give false information.
Now they want Canadians to believe that their massive prison agenda will cost no more than their website. Nobody believes them. Canadians do not buy it, the PBO certainly does not and the government knows it is hiding the true cost to the provinces of the downloading of the prison expenses.
Provinces want more front-line police, not a bill for more prisons that the Conservatives dictated. When will the government come clean with the provinces on the true cost of its prison agenda?
- MPndpOct 07, 2011 8:15 am | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, the government is violating the rights of Parliament by forcing the passage of its omnibus crime bill without debate. In fact, a number of aspects of this bill are very debatable. According to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the government's estimates of the costs have no rhyme or reason. They are not based on any specific methodology or verifiable information, and they do not take provincial costs into account.
When will this government finally be honest with the provinces? When will it finally be honest with Canadians about the real cost of its so-called law and order agenda?
Oct 6th
- MPndpOct 06, 2011 12:05 pm | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my friend and colleague across the way for his concern, but I would also like to point out something that may have already been brought to your attention.
Contrary to the Standing Orders, the Minister of State for Agriculture used the name of an hon. member, in this case, mine. I understand that you did not hear him because I know you well enough to know that, if you had, you would have instantly risen to remedy the situation. We are not permitted to rise on a point of order during question period and so we count on you. I understand what happened but I would still like you to remind us of the rule that applies to everyone, particularly to ministers, who must set an example.
- MPndpOct 06, 2011 12:00 pm | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to ask the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons what his plans are for the rest of the week, as well as for when Parliament resumes following next week's recess, during which we will all be working in our ridings. In particular, I would like to know when the next opposition day is scheduled, for we have not yet been told.
Furthermore, my hon. colleagues know as well as I do that, for the second time in two weeks, the government is using a guillotine to cut off the normal debate process in our Parliament. We find this extremely worrisome, since it has become quite common with this government. Now that they have a majority, the Conservatives' contempt for Parliament is clear. I would also like the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons to tell us when, in his mind, there has been enough debate.
The government is using the term “enough debate”. For the second time in two weeks, it is using a guillotine to cut off the normal work of parliament that we were elected by Canadians to do.
Bill C-13 was cut off after exactly three hours of debate. That is a budget bill. It is one of the primary reasons we get elected to the House and after only three hours of debate, it is cutting it off.
I would like, on behalf of all Canadians and the House, to understand when, in the opinion of the majority Conservatives, there has been enough debate.
- MPndpOct 06, 2011 11:40 am | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, I will also try to build bridges.
The Champlain Bridge construction project contains no plans for public transit. The minister says that that is a provincial responsibility, but if this bridge is 100% federal, as he likes to remind everyone, why are there no plans for federal-provincial coordination of public transit? That is important. So, the federal government is going to spend $5 billion on the bridge, while, at the same time, further down the same road, the provincial government is spending $3 billion on the Turcot project.
Will the Conservatives work in partnership with Quebec for more public transit, or is $8 billion going to be spent to wind up with the same congestion problems? Talk about short-sightedness.
- MPndpOct 06, 2011 7:15 am | Quebec, Outremont
Madam Speaker, finally, some lucidity on the government side. We are in the middle of a world economic downturn. We are about to live the second Conservative recession since 2008. In three years, we will have lived through two consecutive Conservative recessions. Precisely because the world economic situation is degrading so rapidly, he does not realize the contradiction in his argument.
Last spring's budget no longer pertains in that context. We need vigorous, robust intervention to create jobs, to stimulate the economy and to hold on to what we have. Instead, we are being served these old bromides, doctrinaire Conservative approach. This is Herbert Hoover redux. This is the Conservative approach. That is not what Canada needs right now. We need stimulating expenditures on infrastructure. We need to keep the economy going. We need to create jobs. The situation has changed. That debate has to take place. The Conservatives are shutting down debate on the very subject that they do not want to hear about. It is the impending recession. It is what is over the horizon. They do not want Canadians to know that they are sitting on their hands like usual and they are using last year's remedies for this year's problems. We want to discuss that. Parliament exists to debate these issues. They are shutting down debate. That is what is going on here today.
- MPndpOct 06, 2011 7:10 am | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, a French philosopher once said that while once is philosophy, twice is perversion. That is what we have here today with the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons, who is demonstrating the majority Conservative government's utter contempt for Parliament and our democratic institutions.
We know that 39% of the Canadians who voted in the last election chose the Conservatives. That was 39% of 60% of the eligible voters, because 40% of the voters stayed home. This means that they were elected by less than 25% of eligible Canadians. We have very clear rules, and that is one reason why, since its creation, Canada has always enjoyed peace, order and good government. We must all defend our democratic institutions.
But instead of defending our democratic institutions, the government is ignoring them and treating them with contempt. It is telling us that since we made the mistake of giving them a majority, it will now do whatever it wants, gagging us and bringing out the guillotine every time we start to debate a bill. According to the Conservatives, no one has the right to question their priorities or to ask any questions about their bills.
Madam Speaker, you are here to enforce the regulations that we have set for ourselves, and I urge you to take note of the Conservative government's latest affront to Canadian democracy and to defend the rights of parliamentarians to deliberately, carefully and meticulously debate bills. That is why we were elected. This shows contempt not only for Parliament, but also for the voters of the Canadian electorate.
Oct 5th
- MPndpOct 05, 2011 2:25 pm | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, the member for La Pointe-de-l'Île raises a point she is very familiar with. The closure of the Shell refinery in Montreal has contributed to this massive loss of jobs. Regarding the Keystone project, the Conservatives are telling us that we do not need to do the refining here because we do not have the refining capacity, so we will send it to the United States, along with all of the associated jobs. That is utter nonsense.
In fact, we did have a refining capacity. Today they are saying that they want to invest in green energies, but where is their plan to protect the jobs at the Shell refinery in La Pointe-de-l'Île? They do not have one. They have no vision for clean and renewable energies, no vision for job creation, and certainly no vision for Canada's future energy security. Shame on the Conservatives.
- MPndpOct 05, 2011 2:15 pm | Quebec, Outremont
Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Bill C-13, An Act to implement certain provisions of the 2011 budget.
It is always interesting in a context to hear what the governing Conservatives have to say. The member who just spoke was quite interesting at the end. He said, “This is how we are going to get out of this economy”. I think he is quite right. We once had a balanced economy in Canada and the Conservatives have been taking us out of that balanced economy.
I believe what he was trying to say is that this is how we will get ourselves out of these economic problems. But in fact, what the Conservatives are doing with the Americans is a continuation of a series of mistakes that they have made in international trade over the years.
The North American Free Trade Agreement was supposed to set a certain standard for reciprocity. Instead, when the Americans came to rough times, they established for themselves buy America programs, which is a flagrant violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. However, the governing Conservatives have turned out to be a bunch of pushovers. They do not even stand up for what has already been signed that would have been in Canada's interests.
Last week, we had another example, with the Keystone pipeline. Instead of providing that we would apply the normal rules of sustainable developments, such as internalization of costs and polluter pay, they are going to export jobs without adding any value here. It hearkens back to a day when we used to export raw logs to the United States and then import furniture. That is the same kind of economy that they want us to have today. That is their lack of vision.
Governing is about vision. Governing is about establishing choices. We have heard them have a series of consultations over the past three years about pensions. We often hear them say that it is not fair that people in trade unions should have good pensions. It is what we call in French “le nivellement vers le bas”, we are going to bring everything down to the lowest common denominator instead of bringing everyone up.
A country as rich as Canada should not let people who have worked all their lives arrive at retirement age without a proper pension. Instead of removing the pensions, as they are now doing and fighting case by case to remove pensions as collective agreements come up for negotiation, we should, together, be fighting for a fair deal for all Canadians and a proper decent pension, because that is also part of sustainable development. Otherwise, the young generation of today is going to be stuck with that bill also.
The Conservatives, by their choices, are now leaving the largest environmental, economic and social debt in our history, and they are leaving it in the packsacks of the young people who are in university now and telling them that they do not have a choice, that they cannot do anything about it, and that is the only way things are going to be.
They have provided tens of billions of dollars in tax reductions to Canada's richest corporations, in particular, the chartered banks and the oil companies, and they have so little to show for it. They have this little piecemeal approach: they are going to announce this thing here and this thing there. Overall, their approach to the economy has been damaging.
What they have done, and it has been documented well by Statistics Canada, is the same mistake that has been done in other countries over the years. In Holland, in the 1960s, when large sources of gas were found off the coast, it was quite pleased. The Dutch said, “This is going to bring in a lot of money from other countries”. They were never so right. However, at the same time, the guilder went through the roof and their exports dropped because other countries could not afford to buy their products.
That is the same thing that we are doing now. We are bringing in an artificially high number of U.S. dollars into Canada. Why artificially high? Simply because we have never internalized the environmental costs; a basic principle of sustainable development.
By doing that, we have brought the Canadian dollar to heights that it has not seen in decades, and that has killed off our manufacturing sector. Just in Ontario, over 250,000 good paying manufacturing jobs have been killed by the choices of the Conservatives. In Canada, the total number is closer to 500,000 manufacturing jobs lost.
That is why we say that they have destabilized the balanced economy that Canada had built up since the second world war, with the different sectors: the primary sector, with our forests and our mines, the manufacturing and processing secondary sector, and of course an important service sector.
However, as those good paying manufacturing jobs are being killed off, not only are we leaving, because of the errors of the Conservatives, the biggest debt in our history, in terms of the ecology and the environment, we are also leaving year by year, now, the largest economic debt.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to be splitting my time with my friend and colleague, the member for London—Fanshawe.
That is the essential error that the Conservatives have committed since they came to power nigh six years ago. They have had nothing but concern for how quickly they could exploit the tar sands.
Let us not make the mistake of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. No one who realizes the importance of that industry in our economy would say we should ever shut it down outright. People who are calling for that are not thinking any further than the end of their noses. We cannot say we will stop an industry that represents such an important part of our GDP.
What we can do is apply basic principles of sustainable development to that industry. It would have a salutary effect on what we just described, in other words, this artificially high Canadian dollar because of the large number of U.S. greenbacks that we have taken in. That is artificially high, as I say, because we have not included the real costs. We are leaving the costs for cleaning up the soil, the water and the air to future generations. That is the environmental debt, and the tar sands is but one example.
When we realize that Keystone is but one of several pipelines that have been rapidly approved by the Conservatives, others would be the Alberta Clipper, Southern Lights, there are several that have been approved, each of those pipelines is exporting at the same time tens of thousands of jobs. We are in such a rush to get the raw bitumen into the pipeline that we do not even realize that all the processing, manufacturing and transformation will take place south of the border. They will be making more money and getting more jobs from our raw resources than we are ourselves.
That is a fundamental economic error that the current government is making and one that shows where the its priorities are. The concrete result of that is a little bill like Bill C-13, where we have a sprinkling here and a sprinkling there. It is trying to show that there is some activity.
The real world is that an existing infrastructure, a federal obligation, a federal infrastructure like the Champlain Bridge in Montreal, we learned today, will now be a toll bridge. This is the same bridge that is used in an agglomeration of over four million people. It is not just important as part of the lifeblood of the island of Montreal and the greater Montreal area, it is extremely important for all of eastern Canada. When trucks come through from Toronto or points west going to the Maritimes, they all go through Montreal, through the island and over the Champlain Bridge. That infrastructure is a crucial economic infrastructure for all of Canada.
We found out today that because the Conservatives have given away tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to the banks and the oil companies, hard-strapped families who have trouble making ends meet, who have trouble getting to the end of the month with what they have, will now have a new bill, a bill that will be slapped on them by the Conservatives because there is no money left. They will have to pay for something that was a public infrastructure that will become a private property. It will become for profit and the public will again be stuck with the bill. Again, the result of choices by the Conservatives.
This is a clear illustration of the errors committed by the Conservatives. They have been committing the same error for six years. The failure to apply basic principles of sustainable development has caused us to import an artificially high number of U.S. dollars. As a result, the value of the Canadian dollar has increased and it is more difficult for our manufacturing companies to export because our exports have become too expensive.
We are in the process of committing a well-documented error made in the Netherlands in the 1960s, when they discovered large gas deposits. The term “Dutch disease” is used to describe what happened.
The Conservatives preferred—it was their choice, their priority—to give tens of billions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations and the clear result of that is that families who are already unable to make ends meet are being taxed again in the form of a royalty that would be paid to the private partners who are going to build the new Champlain Bridge, when that infrastructure, which is vital to the economy in eastern Canada, is currently being used free of charge by the people who live on Montreal's south shore.
That is the Conservative approach at work. The Conservatives can stand up and pat themselves on the back and claim that their Minister of Finance—just listen to what the Conservative member who spoke before me said—was voted the greatest minister. Get real. That does not exist.
We believe that the Conservatives have made serious mistakes in the choices they have made and their choices are having an adverse effect on the Canadian economy.
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