1991-11-29

Mr. Speaker:: I wish to bring to the attention of the House that I have an application on privilege from the hon. member for Timiskaming. Another member who is involved in the application is not available at the moment.
I will be following our usual practice of bringing the matter back to the Chamber when our colleague from Timiskaming can contact the other member so that all members directly involved will be in the House when it is heard.


Mr. John A. MacDougall (Timiskaming):: Mr. Speaker, we have informed the member from Sudbury that we would be raising a point of privilege.
This question is not only of myself, integrity and honesty, but that of my riding. I would like to have this discussed as early as possible because accusations that have been made affect me personally, my family and the people I represent.


Mr. Speaker:: I think the House understands the hon. member's position. I hope arrangements can be made to bring it into the House at the very earliest opportunity.



CANADA LABOUR CODE


Hon. Gerry Weiner (for the Minister of Labour) moved: that Bill C-44, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (geographic certification) be read the second time and referred to Legislative Committee A.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: No.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Debate. The hon. member for Trois-Rivieres.


Mr. Cooper:: Madam Speaker, on a point of order.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: The parliamentary secretary on a point of order.


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, I believe I heard you say legislative committee. I think you would find that there would be consent of the House to do this in Committee of the Whole, because there is a desire on the part of the members to complete all stages of this bill today.


Mr. Dingwall:: Madam Speaker, there were no specific discussions with the Official Opposition and the parliamentary secretary to the government House leader with regard to going to Committee of the Whole. However, I have heard interventions from the hon. member opposite and we would be prepared to pursue Committee of the Whole.
However, perhaps in the future the parliamentary secretary might want to inform us beforehand.


Mr. Murphy:: Madam Speaker, it was certainly our understanding that this would be dealt with in Committee of the Whole today. I am glad that the parliamentary secretary is aware of that and woke up and raised the issue at the appropriate time.

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Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is that agreed?
Some lion, members: Agreed.


Mr. Pierre H. Vincent (Parliamentary Secretary to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: As you
may well imagine, Madam Speaker, it is a truly exceptional occasion when the member for Trois-Rivieres is given this opportunity to ensure that one of the laws of Canada is amended to deal with a problem that relates specifically to the riding of Trois-Rivieres.
I would like to start by thanking the Minister of Labour and his officials, who did an excellent job. I would also like to mention the Leader of the Opposition, the Leader of the New Democratic Party and their labour critics, all of whom were instrumental in making it possible for us to proceed as soon as the bill was ready and on relatively short notice, to deal with an unpardonable situation, both in our legislation and in the lives of the longshoremen of Trois-Rivieres.
Perhaps I may also give a short summary of this case which I have been working on for more two months, a case that is truly incredible, Madam Speaker, and I am sure you will agree.
Section 34, which the House is being asked to amend this morning, was adopted in 1973. The collective agreement of the longshoremen of Trois-Rivieres expired at the end of 1985. Since that time, Madam Speaker, the longshoremen of Trois-Rivieres have been without a collective agreement, which means they have had no wage increases and no increases in terms of their pension fund. They have had nothing since 1985, and they have been very' patient. They managed to get geographic certification so that people working in Trois-Rivieres, both in the port of Trois-Rivieres and the port of Becancour, could at last officially negotiate as one unit with the Maritime Employers Association.
The employees, or should I say longshoremen, who work in Trois-Rivieres and those who work in Becancour are both covered by the same certification.
The spirit of clause 34 was that, whether in Trois-Rivieres harbour, in Becancourt harbour or elsewhere, a marine employer was required to appoint a representative to bargain with the legitimate local union. For some years now, Madam Speaker, there has been strife between marine employers in Trois-Rivieres and Becancourt harbours resulting in proceedings after proceedings. They went to the Superior Court, the Federal Court, to all of them. They asked for injunctions and everything else. Meanwhile, the employees, the dockers in Trois-Rivieres and Becancourt, have no one to talk to across the bargaining table to reach a collective agreement. This is not about the employer and the employees disagreeing on the terms of the agreement, but about employees not even having a management representative to discuss their working conditions with. That is what this is about. The intent of clause 34, Madam Speaker, is not to allow employers to fight among themselves and not to settle with the employees across the table.
This explains the significance of this bill and why it is important that it be passed quickly. The dockers have run out of patience and are now on strike. They have been in a legal strike position for a year I think, but they only went on strike a couple of months ago, and rightly so. This is the only pressure tactic left to them to make their employers understand that they have to stop fighting among themselves and sit down and talk. You realize that once the legislation is passed forcing the employers to appoint a representative to bargain with the dockers, this will provide, to the employers at least, a way to solve the problem between these two harbours.
With your permission, Madam Speaker, I would like to read into the record of the House of Commons, the legal text to stress the importance of the Code and the spirit that had motivated those who drafted it originally, spirit which, unfortunately, as we can see today, was lost.
The proposed amendments provide that, when the Canadian Labour Relations Board certifies a local trade union, it may appoint an employer representative of its own choosing if the employer does not do it himself within the time frame specified by the Board. The representative thus named is deemed to be the employer of all the employees in the bargaining unit for the purposes of Part I of the Code and he is invested by law with all the powers needed to perform the duties and obligations of an employer, including-and most important-the power to conclude a collective agreement.
November 29, 1991

The amendments being considered will give the Canada Labour Relations Board the authority, once geographic certification is granted, to hear and decide any question arising from the application of section 34 and in particular concerning the selection and designation of a management representative.
Under the bill, the management representative is required to represent fairly the employers on whose behalf he acts. This obligation is similar to the one that unions have under section 37 towards employees in the bargaining unit.
If an employer believes that the management representative acted in an arbitrary or discriminatory way or in bad faith in the performance of his duties and responsibilities, he can complain to the CLRB. In case of improper representation, the CLRB can order the management representative to perform his duties properly or make any order that it sees fit to correct the infraction.
This provision imposing a duty of fair representation on the management representative protects the interests of individual employers operating in the ports covered by the geographic certification and at the same time respects the integrity of a regime that has contributed greatly to stable labour relations in the docking industry since it was introduced in 1973.
Under the transitional provisions, the agents appointed pursuant to the provisions of the present section 34 will be deemed to be the designated management representatives in accordance with the provisions of this bill as of the date that it takes effect.
You will understand, Madam Speaker, that these transitional provisions ensure the continuity of geographic certification in ports across the country and will, I hope, enable the parties in the ports of Trois-Rivieres and Becancour to settle the conflict that has gone on, as I said, for six years because no collective agreement has been signed.
The purpose of the law is simply to correct the defective wording identified by the courts, by clarifying the scope of section 34, as I pointed out, which had been considered by Parliament when it passed the law in 1973. The proposed changes will fully implement the geographic certification regime.
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I will conclude, Madam Speaker, by asking the opposition parties to continue the excellent co-operation that they have given us for the past two days so that the employees, the dockers in the ports of Trois-Rivieres and Becancour, will have what any employee is entitled to, namely an employer with whom to negotiate a proper collective agreement.


Mr. Don Boudria (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell):: Madam Speaker, I am pleased this morning to participate in this debate and I would like to indicate to my colleague opposite, the parliamentary secretary, that we will be happy to co-operate with the government to avoid any unnecessary delays in the passage of this legislation.
The purpose of this bill is to correct certain flaws in the wording of section 34 of the Canada Labour Code. These flaws were identified by the courts with the result that the present act is, to all intents and purposes, at least in the case with which we are concerned this morning, inapplicable. The fact of the matter is that an injunction was handed down by the courts against the appointment of an agent. The injunction bars the agent from reaching a collective agreement for the ports in question.

I would like to indicate to the House that we on our side, along with my colleague from Kenora-Rainy River and others, feel that it is high time that the government came forward with this legislation. We recognize that it does require time to analyse what the court has said, determine how to react and how to ensure that the proposed piece of legislation will then stand up in the courts in the future.
I want to remind the House that the employees in question have been without a collective agreement for somewhere between six and seven years.
Working without a collective agreement, particularly in that kind of work, is not an easy thing to live with.
Employees in any sector, whose collective agreement has been terminated, are not afforded the protections they would want and cannot get redress for some of those grievances they have. It is not an easy situation.
First, employees are many times denied the benefits that they should be getting. Second, it tends to sour relations between the employer and the employee, even when nothing is wrong, simply because there is that kind of a vacuum, and that is most unfortunate.

November 29, 1991
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Heaven knows, there are always plenty of things wrong, particularly when we deal with an operation the size of the one that we are referring to. As a matter of fact, I would venture to say that it is amazing there has not been a strike well before this.


Pierre H. Vincent: There are good people in Trois-Rivieres.


Don Boudria: I am sure that is so. They are almost as nice as the people of Glengarry-Prescott-Russell, might I add in my usual non-parochial way.
Perhaps we should be looking at the large number of employees within the association in question. This is something that we would be talking about some other time, I am sure. We contend that it is virtually impossible for 60 to 70 companies to choose one person to represent them all. If it is not impossible it is certainly very difficult. Having a representative appointed for you by the board is not necessarily the best situation either.
I would like to conclude by reiterating to the parliamentary secretary-I know that he is very concerned about this issue-that we are talking about his constituents, to a great extent. We want to ensure that the legislation receives passage as quickly as possible.
Again, I want to commend my colleague from Kenora for his good work in that area and for his indication of support to aid this piece of legislation go ahead as expeditiously as possible.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Speaker, we in the New Democratic Party indicated earlier that we would support this legislation.
It is important for those people who might be listening to understand that this is not back-to-work legislation. We are dealing with legislation which basically puts in place a mechanism to ensure that employers get together and, through their employer's association, actually negotiate with the employees affected.
Under the present provisions of the Canada Labour Code there is a procedure for the employers to get together and do just this. However, in this case this legislation deals with a situation in which one of the employer groups has gone through the court system and received an injunction which prevents the employer's
association from signing a collective agreement with its workers.
We believe that this particular legislation will be an improvement, and therefore we will support it. I would like to concur with the last two speakers that it has been very hard on the employees, their families and the communities involved to have such a long-standing disagreement. Six or seven years without a collective agreement is almost unheard of in this day and age.
I am glad that the government has moved on this matter, but I am concerned by the procedures that we used. This is not a new situation. The government had an opportunity to act earlier. The government had an opportunity to get the co-operation of the opposition parties.
We had been told in a House leaders' meeting about one or two weeks ago that something would be coming down on this issue. We tried to find out what the contents of the legislation were. We were not given this until Wednesday during Question Period and were asked to pass it in all stages Thursday. That gave us almost no time to peruse the wording to ensure that we were not getting caught in some sort of a trap or mistake regarding the wording.
Thursday morning we came into this House and found out that the Senate had not even been approached to pass the legislation before it adjourned. It was the New Democratic Party, myself and my House leader from Kamloops, who got up at eleven o'clock and asked: "Do we have assurance that the Senate will deal with this?"
We know that the Senate tends to adjourn Thursday and not gather again until sometime Tuesday. We found out that not only had there not been co-operation and information-sharing within this House, but actually the necessary mechanisms had not been put into place to ensure that the Senate would deal with this legislation.
Obviously as evidenced by the debate that has taken place here in this House, there is co-operation among the parties. Had proper notice been given I am sure this legislation would have been passed by this House and by the Senate yesterday and would be law today.
November 29, 1991


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the second time and, by unanimous consent, the House went into committee thereon, Mrs. Champagne in the chair.
Andrée  Champagne: Order. House in Committee of the Whole on Bill C-44, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (geographic certification).
On Clause 1-Representative [English]


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Chairman, it is not my purpose to ask a number of questions on this particular legislation. However I would like the member answering for the government to indicate when the employer requested this injunction and when he received the injunction.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Chairman, if my memory is good a temporary one was given in 1989, and a permanent one in 1990. We are talking about TPQ. It was two years ago.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Chairman, in the same vein I would ask the member why it took the government two years to introduce this legislation. Obviously it has been an outstanding problem for a number of years because the injunction was received one and two years ago respectively. The fact that the government failed to act probably was the cause of the strike, which has only been going on for the last two months.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Chairman, I have followed the events for several years and every day for the last two years, and there was always the chance and the hope that the employers would come to an agreement. And after each ruling, the employees and the longshoremen would come to me and say: "Well, you win one, you lose one,
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but things will finally be settled and we will be able to sit at the table." I think that is one of the reasons.
The other reason, without wishing to divulge what is coming in the future, is that these amendments were included in legislation which will soon be submitted to the House to amend various sections of the Canada Labour Code. Following the latest representations by the longshoremen at the end of the summer, I urged the Minister of Labour, the Hon. Marcel Danis, to take these amendments out of his bill amending the Canada Labour Code so that we might pass just those amendments without delay, thus avoiding a debate on other items with which the two opposition parties might not agree as rapidly as with this one.


Mr. Robert D. Nault (Kenora-Rainy River):: Madam Chairman, I apologize for being late this morning. I was running from Indian Affairs to Labour.
I would like to ask the parliamentary secretary to explain to me the portion of the bill which suggests that the board will now have the power to choose a representative on behalf of the employers if the representatives themselves cannot choose.
One of the things I was interested to know is that there is no suggestion of a time frame here. There is just a suggestion of an appropriate opportunity for the association to deal with that.
I would like to know how the government proposes to deal with that in a collective bargaining sense if the employers have difficulties coming up with a representative to deal with the collective bargaining agency which in this case is CUPE. Could you help me understand that?


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague who was very co-operative on this issue, as I said before. Since the hon. member was not here, I would like to repeat what I said because in my opinion, Madam Speaker, this bill demonstrates-even if I cannot say that I fully agree with my colleague from the NDP-that when the three parties want to make things happen for the benefit of a part of the country, things do happen. I want to emphasize this for my colleagues from the two parties.

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To answer the question of the hon. member for Kenora-Rainy River, the board will determine the time limit that it deems appropriate after hearing the arguments of both sides. Employers who do not agree among themselves, have the right to make representations to the board. Based on those representations, the board will rule on the appointment and the time limit. I believe that the board has an in-depth knowledge of the matter, since it has followed the process on the employees' side, as well as among the different employers that have gone to the board several times already.
So I do not foresee any problem on that issue. The decision is still up to the board, once it has heard the parties involved.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Chairman, my question relates to the same issue of timing. I would like to use this opportunity especially since the officials are here to say that I am also concerned that there would be a situation where the board would take a long time to act and that could provoke a strike or a lockout or a refusal to negotiate. 1 know that this House acted quickly about a month ago to pass legislation calling upon the Minister of Labour to appoint arbitrators in the case of those postal employees who were fired or disciplined during that disturbance. It relates to the time at which the Canada Labour Relations Board acted.
I wonder if the member could tell us through the advice he might get from his officials if an arbitrator or arbitrators have been appointed to deal with those people. Some of them have lost their jobs and are obviously unemployed at this time.
[Translation)


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, you will understand my interest in the Department of Finance, but I am not as knowledgeable about the Department of Labour. I am very pleased to be involved in this issue, but unfortunately, I do not have the competence to answer my hon. colleague.
However, I am taking note of his question and will transmit it to the minister responsible who I am sure will answer him at the earliest opportunity.


Andrée  Champagne: I think the hon. member for Churchill would understand that as chairperson for this committee I was in a bit of a quandary as to the relevancy of his question. I allowed the hon. member to answer. I think you will be happy to know that the question has been taken as notice and an answer will come to him.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Chair, I recognize that the member who is answering for the government is the parliamentary secretary of finance. Usually when we have legislation of this nature which we deal with in the Committee of the Whole we actually do have the responsible minister available.
We agreed to proceed with this legislation knowing the minister would not be here. After we have rushed through legislation-and in both cases it is legislation under the auspices of the Minister of Labour-we are being asked to pass this legislation quickly. We were asked to pass the back-to-work legislation for the postal workers quickly. We are therefore quite curious to see how long it takes government and government bodies to act afterward.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, with respect to this legislation, I can assure my colleague that if the government does not act as swiftly as I think it should, I will be very pleased to inform the hon. member accordingly and to ask for his help again in order to make the government move quickly.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Chairman, I would like to ask the officials specifically if they could give us this kind of information. Was this situation in another particular sector of labour management relations ever used in order to get the particular group of employers or employees for that matter to the bargaining table? Or is this the first situation on record?
I would like to clarify where I am coming from. Would it not be more appropriate for speed purposes in order to get a situation like this rectified to give the Minister of Labour the particular powers necessary to appoint on behalf of the employers either a representative to deal with the employees or to appoint an arbitrator from the outset when the employers are in a situation where there is no agreement?

There is a reason why I throw that out to the department officials. When we arbitrarily have to make decisions of the magnitude that we are proposing to make with the Canada Labour Relations Board having the necessity to choose a representative for the employers, it could cause not only a delay but also some long term labour-management relations problems. I am wondering whether the department officials could give us some explanation as to just how common or uncommon this is. Or is this is a brand new approach to a very difficult issue?


Pierre H. Vincent: I thank my colleague for his question. He should understand that we are trying to set up a system that we believe Parliament had already set up in 1973. Because of the interpretation given to section 34 over the years, we can see today that the spirit of the legislation passed in 1973 is not being followed by the courts. These amendments have the effect of clearly reaffirming what Parliament intended in 1973. I must admit to my colleague that the riding of Trois-Rivieres has made history in this, since it is the first time that such a situation has occured in Canada, with a legal tangle where the employers are fighting each other while the employees wait patiently.
I believe that the problem will be solved with this amendment to the Canada Labour Code. Concerning a provision that would allow the minister to appoint someone in advance, I think that is the board's job. The board is there precisely to hear the parties and make those decisions.
I would be reluctant to have the minister interpret law which has been the subject of various court decisions.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Speaker, I understand where the department is coming from. However there is a big concern here.
Let us use the scenario that is before us that there are 60 or 70 employers. They have the right to go before the board to present their cases. When you talk about 60 or 70 employers we could be literally months before the board would have the ability to make a decision on the appropriateness of a particular representative to deal with the dispute.
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At the same time we are dealing with the employees who may be on the picket line for a long period of time or without a collective agreement or who could be on strike. In that scenario we could in essence be making matters even worse for the particular employees.
I would ask the department whether it would not be appropriate for us to put a particular time frame for the board to make a ruling. For example within 30 days after a particular period of time has elapsed for the employers to suggest a representative, there would be a decision made as to who would be the representative for the employers.
The reason why I throw this out is if it has never been tried before and if the employers cannot make up their minds as it is and if they decide they want to play games with this whole process, they could tie up the board for months on end and then we would still be right where we started. In other words, the employees are left without a contract and the whole industry is basically in a state of flux.
I just want the department to explain to me whether it senses that is not a legitimate concern. Will the board have the power to move very quickly because of the individual circumstances of the particular process?


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, I emphasize that we are dealing specifically with the marine sector. As we speak, the four marine employers in the port of Trois-Rivieres get along well and the one in the port of Becancour does not get along with the other four. Thanks to the employer in Becancour, the only one there, we are bringing in this legislation. So my colleague will see that his example does not reflect the situation in the port of Trois-Rivieres, the port of Becancour, and even the ports of Montreal or Quebec City. I continue to believe that previous governments set up the board precisely so that it would have total freedom in making its decisions, as it should, based on its knowledge of the issues that applicants raise with it. Consequently, I think it would be rather dangerous to put in a time limit, but rest assured, that as far as the situation in Trois-Rivieres and Becancour is concerned, the employers, at least those in Trois-Rivieres, are hoping that the matter can be resolved as quickly as possible, because they do not enjoy that strike either. With that in mind, these amendments are proposed for the best interests of the two parties, the economy of Canada and especially the economy of the riding of Trois-Rivieres.

November 29, 1991
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Rodney Edward Murphy: I would like to follow up on the question that I started off with and that the hon. member for Kenora-Rainy River continued with.
I have not been the labour critic for our caucus for a number of years now. But the last time I was actively involved I know that there was a backlog and that it did take a fair amount of time for cases to be heard in front of the Canada Labour Relations Board and it obviously took even longer for decisions to be made.
I am wondering if the member, or to be more precise the the officials through the member, could indicate the average length of time it takes to have a case heard and again on average how long it takes for a decision to be rendered after the case has been heard.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Chairman, I can see that I am going to practise labour law today. I studied it at Laval University, quite a few years back. I would like to point out to my colleague-I regret that I cannot be really specific-but I would like to outline two points to him. I know that in case of a strike, legal or illegal, the board moves up the file to the top of the heap, which means a very short time frame. I also know that, depending on the nature of the case, the board may receive written submissions which, again, means a very short time frame for a decision to be rendered for the good of both parties.
Madam Chairman, I also take his question as notice and, with the help of the officials, we will report to the minister, Mr. Danis, who will certainly be glad to answer him in a specific way.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Chairman, under powers of the board on the first page in the clauses it suggests that by order it will be able to appoint an employer representative of its own choosing. In the briefing documents that we received from the officials on the reasoning for this change it says that it provides for the appointment of an employer representative by the CLRB should the employers affected by geographic certification order fail to do so within the time limits set by the board.
There is no time limit set by the board and that is one of the things that worries me. I am wondering whether the department would see fit to make a small amendment which would suggest in the last paragraph that by order appoints an employer's representative of its own choosing within 30 days, or within 60 days, whatever is an acceptable time frame in an industry of this particular nature.
I suggest that mainly because of the difficulties, and the reasons we are here in the first place, because the employers themselves cannot come to an agreement as to who they would want to choose and if they decide to could tie up that board for a fairly lengthy period of time.
This process would put on record, for the understanding of all the actors in this issue, that they only have 30 days, for example, to deal with the issue. It would also put on the record that there is going to be a collective bargaining process implemented as quickly as possible as a result of the effects of not having a collective process and collective bargaining agent to deal with, as far as the workers are concerned.
I wonder whether the department, through the member, could tell us whether that would not be a significant improvement or it is necessary to maintain the flexibility of the board.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Chairman, I would like to point out to my colleague that section 1(3) states, and I quote:
Where the Board, pursuant to subsection (1), certifies a trade
union as the bargaining unit, the Board shall, by order,
(a) require the employers of the employees in the bargaining unit (i) to jointly chose a representative, and (ii) to inform the Board of their choice within the time period specified by the Board;
So it is up to the board to specify a time frame to the employers. Finally, Madam Chairman, I can tell you as a lawyer that I cannot see legislation imposing a time frame for a decision to be rendered by a judicial or quasi-judicial tribunal. I cannot see how a government could possibly impose a time frame to a tribunal. I think that once a judicial or quasi-judicial tribunal is involved, it has, by virtue of the statutes, the common law, its own rules, its own customs, but also its own integrity. We must therefore respect this quasi-judicial tribunal.
November 29, 1991

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To conclude, Madam Chaiman, I would like to answer the hon. member from the New Democratic Party. I just receive a message from the minister which says:

-the minister would appoint an arbitrator only if the parties could not agree themselves as to who the arbitrator to deal with the cases of those employees who were fired or suspended should be.
At this point the parties have not requested the minister to appoint someone to deal with these particular cases.

I think, Madam Chairman, that this answers the question from the hon. member regarding the postal strike.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Chairman, I would like to switch emphasis for a minute and ask a question relating to the geographic area that we are dealing with. I wonder whether the reason we are here today is because the geographic region we are talking about is so large that it has created a process that cannot work for the employers. Has the department taken a look at that particular issue in its entirety and could it suggest to us whether it would be necessary to make recommendations to make the geographic area smaller or split it in half or something of that nature?
Maybe it is reasonable to suggest that the reason why the employers cannot agree is because they are coming at it from different directions and have different concerns on different issues that they are trying to deal with. The only way to rectify that is to change the geographic area we are dealing with.
Could the member enlighten us as to whether we are giving the board the work load of having to make the decision on who the representative of the employer is going to be on every occasion, as a result of the fact that these employers will never be able to agree on a representative because of the unworkability of the geographic zone?


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, perhaps I should invite the hon. member for a visit to my riding.
The port of Trois-Rivieres and the port of Becancour are about a quarter of a mile apart, on either side of the St. Lawrence River. The employees' union certification allows them to work in the port of Trois-Rivieres and the port of Becancour. My position is that since the employees are prepared to work in both ports, to switch and travel to and fro-there is a bridge, so there is no problem-normally the employers should be prepared to do the same.
If the employers are willing-and this is in fact common practice-to hire longshoremen who work at the port of Trois-Rivieres and send them to Becancour, and hire those in Becancour and send them to Trois-Rivieres-so far the employers have had the best part of the deal. They have their employees, there has been no collective agreement for six years, and everything is fine. This legislation is important because it will force the employers, either directly or indirectly, to jointly choose a representative, and otherwise the board will choose one.
In a nutshell, the problem is this: For six years, the employees who are covered by a collective agreement have had no one on the other side of the table to negotiate with because the employers, at least some of them, cannot agree among themselves. Our legislation will oblige the employers to appoint a representative so that the employees, our longshoremen, will have someone with whom they can negotiate.
The geographic area as such is not a problem because only a short distance is involved, and the employees can work without any hardship.
Clauses 1 to 4 inclusive agreed to.


[Stage Direction]
Title agreed to.
Bill reported.
Gérard (Gerry) Weiner: that the bill be concurred in.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
[Stage Direction]
November 29, 1991
Madam Deputy Speaker:: When shall the bill be read the third time? By unanimous consent, now?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I would like to ask the
Elouse, if members wish to speak on third reading, to postpone it until after Question Period. We will proceed with third reading immediately after Routine Proceedings.
It being 11 o'clock a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 30(5) the House will now proceed to Statements by Members pursuant to Standing Order 31.


STATEMENTS PURSUANT TO S. O, 31
Mr. Felix Holtmann (Portage -Interlake):: Madam Speaker, must Canadians continue with the deadly game of beggar thy neighbour? Must Canada be torn apart by wistful gazing in a neighbour's backyard? Must Canadians continue to use the me too syndrome to drag positive announcements into the political quagmire?
Legitimate government assistance for economic and other development is not a ping-pong game. Nor can we enter into a game of cheque book confederacy.
I could stand here today and reiterate and regurgitate millions upon millions of dollars of economic aid that my province has received courtesy of the federal government over the past six months. I will not do so.
I stand today secure in the knowledge that I reflect the views of my constituents and indeed of Manitobans when I say that what is good for one region is good for the nation and that we are beyond the petty politics of regionalism.


MENTAL HEALTH CARE
Ms. Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain):: Madam Speaker, mental illness affects more Canadians than any other illness including heart disease and cancer.
However, the government currently spends a maximum of 15 per cent of health care funds on mental health care.
Despite the federal government's commitment of November 1989 to redress this imbalance, transfer payments to hospitals were frozen in February of this year.
According to the Canadian Mental Health Association, a rebalancing of funding could be arranged through the Canada Assistance Plan with guidelines for community health programs.
While the government has been moving toward a community based mental health care system, it has done so without providing the funding needed to maintain mental health care in this manner.
Canadians do not need another report to tell them how to solve these problems. Canadians want action now. I urge this government to put its money where its mouth is and strike a balance between mental health care needs and health care spending.


THE CONSTITUTION
Mr. Doug Fee (Red Deer):: Madam Speaker, the youth of Canada have more at stake in our constitutional discussions than any one of us and they are prepared to contribute.
In response to my invitation, last weekend representatives of six high schools gave up a Saturday to discuss and debate the proposals for a renewed Canada. These young Canadians, three from each school, shared an intelligent, mature approach to the issues and passed 24 resolutions which I have forwarded to the minister of constitutional affairs.
The ideas we hear from youth and our more mature constituents deserve to be shared in a more open fashion. I would call on the government House leader to find a way for us as MPs to present publicly the position and the ideas that we are hearing in our constituencies.
I would suggest that we dedicate a significant block of time in this House to let each of us express our views and those of our constituents on the public record.
There will never be a more important issue for us to discuss and there is no more fitting place for that than on the floor of the House of Commons.
November 29, 1991


DELMAR CHEMICALS
M. Paul Martin (LaSalle-Emard):: Madam Speaker, yesterday Delmar Chemicals, a Canadian company located in LaSalle, in my riding, permanently laid off half of its employees. Delmar used to supply pharmaceutical chemical products. The federal government granted an increased protection to pharmaceutical multinational companies in order to allow them to be more competitive and to invest more in Canada. Unfortunately, it did not give the required attention to Canadian companies. It did not establish any particular development plan which would have reinforced companies such as Delmar.
The conclusion is clear, Madam Speaker: if the government does not take the necessary measures to stimulate the growth of Canadian-owned pharmaceutical industries, more jobs will be lost. The time to act is now.
sfc *


ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
Mr.   Stan@: Madam Speaker, I have recently received a letter from a businessman from Vancouver. In it he states, and I quote:
Illegal aliens are causing enormous difficulties for local business people and landed immigrants who are attempting to make a fresh start in our area as recent arrests and deportations will attest.
Additionally the prostitution and drug elements these people have brought into the east-end, compound the initial problem of illegal immigration; as a significant number of people conducting these illicit activities are aliens.
These senliments are confirmed by the large number of illegal immigrants and refugees that were arrested in Vancouver's large drug roundup this week. Many of these already had multiple arrests while in Canada.
These criminals must be dealt with quickly and severely. We cannot let them use our generous immigration policies to destroy the fabric of Canadian society by making a mockety of our justice system.


DAVID MILGAARD
Mr. Rod Laporte (Moose Jaw-Lake Centre):: Madam Speaker, on behalf of the New Democratic caucus I would like to commend the Minister of Justice for today ordering a judiciary review of the David Milgaard case.
This long awaited decision has been in large part due to the extraordinary efforts of David's mother, Joyce Milgaard, and a loyal and energetic group of supporters.
Mrs. Milgaard's incredible courage and stamina over these many years is not only an example of a mother's love for her son but also a relentless desire to see justice done.
The Donald Marshall inquiry recommended that an independent body be established to review cases where a miscarriage of justice may have taken place. Certainly the excruciatingly painful experience and expense that both David Milgaard and his family have been forced to endure highlight the need for this recommendation to be given real and serious consideration. The present system obviously is inadequate.
I congratulate David Milgaard and his family on this success. I believe that once the Supreme Court has had a chance to review the case, the court will come to the conclusion that a tragic and unfortunate miscarriage of justice occurred in Saskatoon in 1969.


WORLD AIDS DAY
Mr. Gabriel Desjardins (Temiscamingue):: Madam Speaker, December 1 is World AIDS Day. Its theme "Sharing the Challenge", is meant to recognize the individuals and the many groups, including governments and non-governmental organizations, that are already partners in the fight against AIDS. It is also meant to involve individuals and groups that have not yet joined the battle.
The participation of front-line workers in this field has proved essential. Community groups involved in the fight against AIDS, persons infected with the HIV virus or suffering from AIDS, and health professionals are the key players. They help us understand how AIDS affects our communities and how we can tackle the complexities of this problem effectively.

The present government is committed to supporting the groups, persons infected with the HIV virus or suffering from AIDS and their caregivers and to forming partnerships. By having them participate in the definition of goals and in the initiatives of the National AIDS Strategy, we recognize their invaluable contribution as allies in our relentless efforts to eradicate this disease in Canada.
* + *


OCCUPATIONAL TRAINING
Mrs. Shirley Maheu (Saint-Laurent-Cartierville):: Madam Speaker, the business people of Saint-Laurent now have access to a new service which will save them time and money, a one-stop information centre on made-to-measure manpower training.

Partners in Training enables businesses in Saint-Laurent to access various governmental and academic institutions by simply calling a single number.
The one-stop information centre was initiated by the city of Saint-Laurent, our CEGEPs and adult training in order to provide better services to our community.

I want to congratulate the city of Saint-Laurent for this initiative. The one-stop information center will be a major asset for the business community in Saint-Laurent in terms of manpower training.


CANADIAN SCHOLARS PROGRAM
Mr. Howard Crosby (Halifax West):: Madam Speaker, this fall the Minister for Science launched the Canadian Scholars Program for the current academic year at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The program provides financial support and encouragement to 3,200 new Canadian scholars who will join over 4,000 young Canadians
now pursuing studies in engineering and science at Canadian universities.
The Canadian Scholars Program recognizes the need to promote excellence in engineering and science in order to advance our society in this new age of technology.
I am sure all members will record their congratulations to the new and continuing Canadian scholars whose dedication to excellence will allow Canada to develop and prosper now and in the next century.


REFORM PARTY
Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Speaker, the Reform Party is out of touch with northern and rural Canadians. On Wednesday Reform Party Leader Preston Manning said that he would eliminate the northern tax benefit.
Anyone who is familiar with the north will know that residents of this region of Canada fought long and hard to receive a tax benefit that would recognize the increased costs and hardships of living in Canada's north. The northern tax benefit is not only necessary, it is fair.
The Reform Party talks about listening to the grass roots. If Preston Manning knew he would realize that hundreds of northern communities presented petitions, went to meetings to explain why they needed a northern tax benefit. The Reform Party is not listening to Canadians. It is going to throw rural Canadians to the wolves. It is going to throw northern Canadians out to the high cost of living with no recognition by this government.
While it panders large corporations and the wealthy, the Reform Party through promising to support freer trade and less domestic subsidization in agriculture ignores the needs of Canadians.
The Reform Party is trying hard to pass itself off as a party-


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I regret to interrupt the hon. member but his allotted time has expired.
November 29, 1991


WORLD AIDS DAY
Mr. Ross Reid (St. John's East):: 
Madam Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member's time has expired.


NATIONAL RAIL TRANSPORTATION
[Stage Direction]
Mr. Francis G. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands -
Canso): Madam Speaker, Nova Scotians are very concerned about losing access to national rail transportation at the hands of this government. We have not forgotten the insensitive decision to end passenger rail service from Truro to Sydney two years ago. We are fearful that the current attempts by CN to privatize the rail portion of this line is but a thinly veiled attempt to abandon this vital rail link.
We are very interested in the recent cabinet decision to reverse a national transportation agency ruling that would have allowed the 90-kilometre line from Chandler to Gaspe in Quebec to close. We are told that this line has been losing money for years. Yet this train is regarded as an essential mode of transportation to the economically depressed area of the Gaspe peninsula
south coast, especially in winter and especially for the elderly who cannot drive or spend long hours in a bus.
True, but what about the elderly in Nova Scotia who live along the discontinued Truro to Sydney line? What about the thousands of jobs that depend upon maintaining rail transportation from Truro to Sydney? Will the government now act to save these lines-
Madam Deputy Speaker:: The hon. member's time has expired.


REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Mr. Bob Corbett (Fundy-Royal):: Madam Speaker, yesterday an agreement for regional development in the province of Quebec was announced. The agreement involves a contribution of $160 million by the Government of Canada and $140 million from the province of Quebec.
I would like to point out that the government has made very significant contributions to regional development not only in Quebec but in my region, Atlantic Canada, and in the west.
In the budget of 1989 this government announced a regional development allotment for each of the major regions of Canada. The $160 million federal share of yesterday's agreement is from a previously non-allocated portion of Quebec's allotment. In the Atlantic provinces this five-year regional development allotment has a value of $2,125 billion. That is an average of $425 million a year for each year within the current funding framework to be spent on developing the economy of Atlantic Canada.
Developing the economies of all parts of Canada is a priority of this government. It is most unfortunate that some members of the opposition feel compelled to whine and complain every time support is given to a region other than their own, especially when it is-


Madam Deputy Speaker:: I am sorry the time has expired.


VISIBLE MINORITIES
Mr. Eugene Bellemare (Carleton-Gloucester):: Madam Speaker, several of my constituents who are employees of Health and Welfare Canada believe that they are being discriminated against because they belong to visible minorities.

November 29, 1991
Oral Questions
These people feel that they are being denied managerial positions when they feel they are more qualified than others who are appointed and who happen to be Caucasians.

If it is true that the department so discriminates by disregarding the merit principle and give promotions to less qualified employees, the health of Canadians is in jeopardy.
On Tuesday, November 19, the President of the Treasury Board stated that the government will not tolerate racial harassment within the civil service. Yet I have not seen the government take any measures to ensure fair treatment for these employees.

An impartial agency should undertake a substantive investigation that will look into these allegations and offer recommendations to resolve this issue at Health and Welfare Canada.


WORLD AIDS DAY
Mr. Chris Axworthy (Saskatoon -Clark's Crossing):: Madam Speaker, Sunday, December 1 is World AIDS Day and I want to reflect on Canada's role in fighting this deadly disease.
The World Health Organization estimates that up to 10 million people are already infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and estimates that the figure will sky-rocket to 40 million by the year 2000. In Canada alone over 3,000 people have already died from AIDS.
The most tragic thing about AIDS is that it is preventable. We know exactly how HIV is spread and how it can be stopped. With education we have an excellent chance of saving millions of lives from being ravaged by HIV.
Canada has and must continue to take a leading role in fighting AIDS by maintaining both a strong commitment to international development and by funding AIDS research and education here in Canada. Many developing countries are helpless in fighting AIDS and Canada has the ability to empower them to help themselves.
Too often causes are acknowledged by politicians only once a year on days set aside to mark them. AIDS cannot
be fought once a year. It must remain on the political agenda at all times or we risk losing the fight. Canada must do more.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Yesterday a Gallup poll confirmed that for 90 per cent of Canadians the recession is not yet over. Today we know why. Today Statistics Canada has reported that the economy actually slowed in the third quarter. It shrank in August, it shrank again in September.
I ask the minister: How much more evidence does he need that his Conservative government's policies are simply not working? Why can he not create policies that bring sustained economic growth and more jobs and not continue with policies that lead to economic stagnation and add more and more people to the already too long welfare lines in this country?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Madam Speaker, the hon. member is wrong when he says that growth was negative or slowed in the third quarter. There was positive growth in the third quarter by .9 per cent, certainly weaker than we would have liked to have seen it, but that comes on the heels of a very strong second quarter.
I remind the hon. member that the annualized figures for the second quarter were a 4.9 per cent rate of growth. They have been adjusted upward to 5.7 per cent. We see some other promising signals on the horizon. The level of housing starts in October was 202,000. There was a net of 108,000 new full-time jobs that were created during the period of September and October. The residential demand is increasing. Corporate profits in this quarter are up by about 15 per cent on an annualized basis. Those are the kinds of things that will ultimately be translated into investment and job creation opportunities.
November 29, 1991

I know the hon. member lakes great pleasure in telling gloom and doom stories. I wish the growth rate figures were better, but we are doing everything we can in getting the fundamentals right so they will be better.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Madam Speaker, if I am wrong so is Statistics Canada which reported today: "Gross Domestic Product slipped .1 in September following a .3 decline in August". The minister better read his own numbers. Unemployment is going up, not down, bankruptcies are going up, not down and the trade deficit is going up, not down. Why is he saying that Canadians are out of the woods when so many of the government's own numbers are going the wrong way and dragging Canadian workers and their communities along with them? Why does he not wake up and not take pleasure in avoiding the real issue? His policies are dragging this economy backward, not pulling it forward.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, I will not only re-read the information provided, I will read it to the hon. member: "The national account's data indicates that real output increased by .9 per cent at an annual rate". That is not down, that is up in the third quarter, following a revised gain of 5.7 per cent in the second quarter. That has been revised upward, not downward. "Inventory investment contributed strongly to the growth in the third quarter. Excluding inventories, GDP would have fallen by 1.7 per cent. Purchases of goods and services by Canadians increased at a slightly stronger pace of 1.6 per cent led by continued robust growth in residential investment and government expenditures".
That is the briefing note that I read and I would be glad to table it as well.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Madam Speaker, why does the minister not go out and talk to the 90 per cent of Canadians who say that for them the recession is not over?

Only a Conservative government, Madam Speaker, would have the gall to tell us that things are going better when the unemployment rate is going up, the bankruptcy rate is at a record high and exports are dropping.
Oral Questions
I ask the minister this: When will he, at long last, give a glimmer of hope to Canadian families? When will he introduce new policies to create employment in Canada instead of destroying it?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, I am talking to Canadians. I have commenced the pre-budget consultations wherein I have been talking to business people, to consumer groups, to the retail sector, to anti-poverty groups and to people involved and the disabled.
One thing is very clear. None of them are recommending or suggesting that we try to borrow our way out of this difficulty. None of them are suggesting that we try to spend our way out of this difficulty and therefore drive up the deficit.
The hon. member would like us to throw money at the problem and walk away from it. That is not the consensus of Canadians and it certainly is not the consensus of this government.


AGRICULTURE
Hon. Lloyd Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre):: Madam Speaker, I want to raise a question with the Deputy Prime Minister.
I have here a whole raft of letters from dairy producers, turkey and chicken producers in places like Killamey, Gretna, Morden, Rosenfeld, Manitoba, a whole series of communities.
These farmers know that their very livelihood is now threatened because of serious government mistakes. Under the free trade agreement, the government gave away the right to impose import tariffs on agricultural products and processed foods which totally undermine the marketing system. The government is now losing the battle of article XI at the GATT.
What is the government going to do to protect these farmers? Because of the real threat to these farmers, because of the erosion of article XI, will the government renegotiate with the United States the agreement so that we can restore the sovereign right of Canada to set its own tariffs on processed foods and agricultural products?

Oral Questions


Hon. Bill McKnight (Minister of Agriculture):: First of all, Madam Speaker, the hon. member is not factual when he says that the ability to maintain the supply managed system in Canada was eroded by the free trade agreement.
What the hon. member must recall is the only action since the signing of the free trade agreement that has brought any concern to the producers is action taken under GATT.
The hon. member talks about the erosion of article XI. What the position of the government is and what the position of the producers happens to be, and the position of the provinces involved, is a clarification and strengthening of article XI. The hon. member has to be aware when he looks at the free trade agreement that agricultural exports in Canada have increased-have increased, Madam Speaker-since the signing of the free trade agreement. Canada has exported more to the United States of America under the free trade agreement than it had in the past.


An hon. member:: That is news to me.


Lloyd Axworthy: Madam Speaker, this minister is once again trying to cover up the fact that under the free trade agreement, section 401, his government took away the right of Canada to set its own tariffs on processed foods. If you cannot set your tariffs on processed foods, your marketing supply sector cannot supply the processors.
If the Minister of Agriculture cannot understand that, then he should quit his job.
Considering that the dairy, turkey and chicken producers are now under threat, the grain economy is collapsing, that every Canadian in every region is being touched by this crisis, will the minister undertake to approach the Prime Minister and tell him that we need a national conference bringing together the heads of government of all the provinces and of this government, to develop a national response, a national strategy, before the entire food industry in this country collapses.
Hun. Bill McKnight (Minister of Agriculture): The
hon. member may not be aware, but the policy that has been put together by this government over the last two years regarding agriculture was a policy that was developed by the producers, the stakeholders, the further processors, the provinces and the Government of Canada.
The hon. member asks why they are demonstrating on the Hill. There is hurt out there. This government has recognized that hurt. The hon. member asked a question, Madam Speaker, and he keeps muttering while I try to reply.
I appreciate the hon. member's new-found concern about agriculture. This government has put forward-


An hon. member:: You did not go to the rallies.


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, the hon. member says I did not go to the rallies. He should check. I did.


An hon. member:: I didn't see you there.


THE ECONOMY
Mr. Steven W. Langdon (Essex-Windsor):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Today we have seen for the first time in some period two straight months of decline in the Gross Domestic Product. We have seen as far as the quarterly figures are concerned a massive drop in the rate of growth between the last quarter and this quarter. And yet the minister gets up and starts talking not about the problems that we have, but instead about the promising signals in this economy.
I want to ask this minister this. Are the promising signals things like the fact that there are 1.5 million Canadians out of work, or that there are one million Canadian children living in poverty, that our investment is down, that we have a trade deficit in this country, that we have record bankruptcies, that farms are in a crisis situation? Are these the hopeful signs that the minister sees in these statistics?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member is a fair person, and I ask him in a manner of fairness to consider the fact that the growth in the second quarter was 5.7 per cent on an annualized basis. It has been adjusted upward from a 4.9 per cent figure, and I think he knows, as we all knew, that that sort of record of growth was not going to be sustained.
As a matter of fact, in our projections in the February budget of 1991, we indicated that there would not be growth in the first half. The strong growth in the second quarter was perhaps a situation where there was pent up demand and some of it may have been borrowed from the third quarter. To suggest for one minute that the sustainability of that kind of rate of growth of 5.7 per
November 29, 1991

cent carried through the second half of 1991 was achievable was certainly not in the cards.
I simply indicate to the hon. member that while we would have liked to have seen stronger growth, there are some signals in the area of housing, in the area of corporate profits, in the area of job creation that would indicate that the modest to moderate recovery that we have projected and predicted is still there.


Steven W. Langdon: Madam Speaker, the minister is living in a dream world. What exists out there across this country among farmers, workers, the unemployed, the poor, is a very tough situation. The minister seems to be in a dream world instead.
I ask the minister why he is not prepared to stand up and recognize that we have had two successive months of decline and this government has to take decisive action to change its policies and get Canadians back to work.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, I am not in a
dream world. We have had two consecutive quarters of growth. That is the fact. The hon. member says do something. The hon. member is suggesting to spend, borrow more money, spend it, kick-start the economy.
As I indicated earlier, I am engaged in my pre-budget consultations. I can tell you, Madam Speaker, there is no consensus for that course of action. The course of action that is recommended is the one that we are on, getting the fundamentals right, getting interest rates down, getting inflation down, getting the inflationary pressures down, bringing our fiscal house into some order. Those are the recommendations I am receiving from Canadians and I believe very sincerely that that is the right approach for the future of a strong, robust Canadian economy.


Steven W. Langdon: Madam .Speaker, what I hear from Canadians, business, labour, everybody, is first that we have to get rid of the GST and, second, we have to get a lower dollar in this country. That will put us back on the road to recovery.
Oral Questions

My supplementary, Madam Speaker, is the following: Does the government realize how much hardship there is in Canada and in Quebec? Its policies have widened the gap between rich and poor and aggravated divisions within the country. When will the government act and provide assistance to Canadian people?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, the hon. member says to get rid of the GST. What would he replace it with? Is the hon. member suggesting that we drive up the deficit a further $16 billion? How irresponsible, Madam Speaker. He says get rid of the GST. That would drive up the deficit an additional $16 billion. That is the kind of nonsensical suggestions we get from the hon. member opposite.
He is now pleading the case to help Quebecers. I understand that yesterday in the House they were very critical of the very legitimate regional development program that was put in place to help Quebecers. He cannot have it both ways. You cannot stand up one day and attack the government for helping in the regional development problems in Quebec and then turn around the next day and plead mercy for them.


Mr. Stan Wilbee (Delta):: Madam Speaker, my question today is for the Minister of National Health and Welfare, or the minister answering for him.
The chairperson of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technology, Dr. Patricia Baird, has stated that the commission will not report until October 1992. Many of the people in the medical field are very concerned about the research that is being funded by this commission, specifically the type of research that is being funded.
My question is how much of the commission's $26 million budget has been spent? What are the estimated costs of the commission, and when will the commission release a detailed list of the research projects that it has or is going to fund?


Hon. Pierre H. Cadieux (Minister of State (Fitness and Amateur Sport) and Minister of State (Youth) and Deputy Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Madam Speaker, I understand that the commission has asked for some research projects to be

November 29, 1991
Oral Questions
done. I am not in a position today to give the details that have been sought by my hon. colleague with respect to the commission's request which, of course, is an arm's length royal commission. But I will be pleased to forward the requests of my hon. colleague to the chair of the commission, and I am sure that she will address those directly.


AGRICULTURE
Mr. Mark Assad (Gatineau -La Lievre):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Agriculture. Before the free trade agreement in 1987, the Minister of Agriculture made a formal commitment to farmers to protect the marketing system. Given the events in Geneva in recent months and weeks, does the Minister of Agriculture intend to ask the Prime Minister to intervene personally in this issue, which is a matter of life and death for farmers in Canada?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, as the hon. member is aware, we have just had discussions with the Director General of GATT, Mr. Dunkel, the Minister for International Trade and myself with the Cairns group, with the Quad. After we had concluded those discussions, putting forward Canada's position on the strengthening and clarification of article XI, a position which was developed by the producers and by the provinces and put forward throughout the negotiations by the Government of Canada, I had an opportunity with my colleague, the Minister for International Trade, to meet with the leadership of the supply managed products in Canada. We went over the discussions we had all had in Geneva and the contacts that we had made and the position we have continued to put forward. The outcome of the discussions, as we concluded yesterday between the farm leaders and the Minister for International Trade and myself, was that we would continue to put forward the position for strengthening and clarification of article XI under GATT as had been
developed by the stakeholders and put forward by the Government of Canada.


Don Boudria: Madam Speaker, that is not very reassuring. I would like to ask the same minister a supplementary question. On July 23, 1988, the hon. member for St. John's West, who was then Minister for International Trade, told us that Canada would refuse to conclude any negotiations with GATT that would endager our milk producers.
Can the minister still tell us today, can he even assure us, as his colleague did in the past, that Canada will refuse to sign a GATT agreement that would endanger article XI? Yes or no?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: The
hon. member has to recall what article XI is about. Article XI as it exists today is not sufficient in the minds of the producers of supply managed products, those industries, to give them the protection that they believe is important and the government believes is important, to allow them to continue the type of supply managed system that we have in Canada today.
In answer to another colleague from the Liberal Party, I had put forward that the discussions that are taking place are discussions between 108 nations. Canada has put forward its position on article XI for strengthening and clarification. We will continue to do that. The hon. member is speaking as if there has been a conclusion of GATT and those discussions. There has not been a conclusion of those discussions. There are 108 countries presently putting forward proposals to strengthen the economic activity in the world. Agriculture is one very, very important part of those discussions that are under way today.


DAVID MILGAARD
Mr. Russell MacLellan (Cape Breton-The Sydneys):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister.
Finally, after having spent 22 years in prison, David Milgaard is having his case referred by the government to the Supreme Court of Canada for a review. The fact remains, Madam Speaker, that David Milgaard is still in custody.
November 29, 1991

Oral Questions
After what the Milgaard family, and David Milgaard in particular, have been through because of delays in this matter, I think it is time to show some humanity. I want to know why the government will not provide that David Milgaard be released on bail so that the Milgaard family have a merry Christmas finally after 23 years.


Pierre H. Cadieux: Madam Speaker, as my hon. colleague has indicated, the Minister of Justice did announce her decision today to refer the case to the Supreme Court.
I understand that with respect to the specific question of my hon. colleague that the minister has indicated that it would be up to Mr. Milgaard's attorneys to make such a request to the appropriate court.


Russell Gregoire MacLellan: Madam Speaker, if the government follows the procedure that was set forth in the Donald Marshall case, David Milgaard could be out on bail by Christmas and Mrs. Milgaard, who is truly a remarkable woman, would have her son home for the holidays.
I want to have assurance from the government and will the government give me the assurance that it will provide in its reference to the Supreme Court of Canada that the Supreme Court entertain a motion for bail from Mr. Milgaard and his lawyers and that they will deal with it expeditiously.


Pierre H. Cadieux: Madam Speaker, again as I have indicated, the Minister of Justice in answer to a similar question this morning indicated that the attorneys of Mr. Milgaard should make the appropriate request.
I understand that on another matter Mr. Milgaard has already benefited from escorted releases in the past and I understand that he obviously will be eligible for such temporary releases in the future, unless the court gives him bail as the hon. member suggests.


AGRICULTURE
Mr. Lome Nystrom (Yorkton-Melville):: Madam Speaker, I also have a question for the Minister of Agriculture.
As he knows, over the past 20 years, marketing boards for milk, turkey, chicken and eggs have been extremely important to farmers in this country, especially to milk producers in Quebec, who account for nearly 50 per cent of Canada's milk production.
As a point of clarification, Madam Speaker, since it is so important for fanners, could I have assurance from this minister now that in the GATT negotiations, the Canadian government will protect these marketing boards which are essential to the survival of agriculture in this country? Can I have categorical assurance from this Minister of Agriculture?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, the hon. member asks a question that is important, not only to the province of Quebec and those producers, but to producers throughout Canada.
There is a large percentage of production in Quebec in the dairy industry, as he referred to. I can only say to the hon. member that the position that has been developed and put forward by the Government of Canada, that of strengthening and clarification of article XI as it now exists under the GATT, is a position that was developed with the producers. As late as yesterday in discussions with the farm leadership, that position will be maintained.
The hon. member is suggesting that Canada, being one of 108, has the ability to control the outcome of GATT. What we have the ability to do, as everyone else has the ability to do, is to put forward a position that is in the best interests of our producers and we will continue to do that.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Madam Speaker, I will put a direct question that I think is very important.
If article XI is not strengthened and in view of the importance of these marketing boards for the producers for a stable income and consumers for a stable supply of food products in these areas, can the Minister of Agriculture assure us that if the marketing board system is weakened in any way that he would recommend that his government not sign a new GATT agreement that would deprive us as Canadians of the right to protect our own farmers in this country. Yes or no to that very specific question.

Oral Questions


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: 
ETHANOL
Hon. Ralph Ferguson (Lambton-Middlesex):: Madam Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Agriculture.
The minister should know that the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association estimates that if all gasolines in Canada contained 10 per cent ethanol it would require between 8 million and 10 million bushels of Canadian grain, which is almost one-fifth of our total annual production in Canada. Ethanol blended gasolines are already labelled environmentally friendly.
Why is this government dragging its feet in creating this huge new domestic market for Canadian grain that would also serve to clean up our environment?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, as the hon. member may be aware-and from his question he may not be aware-this government has been involved in developing ethanol production to be used in gasoline.
I can take the hon. member to two examples in the province of Saskatchewan that this federal government has been involved in. One happens to be Kerrobert with North West Food and Fuels where grains are used to produce alcohol.
The other happens to be in Langham, Saskatchewan in conjunction with the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, where the Department of Western Economic Diversification, the provincial government and Sask Pool are again involved in the production of ethanol to be used in gasoline and the by-products being used in a cattle feedlot operation.
This government has supported the production of ethanol from grains and will continue. There are provinces that are supporting the production, along with the federal government. We believe it is an important source. It is important for the environment. We look forward to continued co-operation and growth in this area.


Ralph Ferguson: Madam Speaker, I am very much aware of the new plant at Langham, Saskatchewan, and one at Minnedosa, Manitoba and I am aware of some other smaller ones being built. But they will only serve a small fraction of our needs in Canada.
A 10 per cent ethanol blended gasoline would replace the octane enhancer methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl currently used in Canada. This substance attacks the nervous system of the human body and was banned in the United States in 1978. Evidence is mounting that the health of Canadians is being affected by these gasoline additives.
Will the minister act now to ban MMT in Canada and protect the lives of the Canadian people, particularly our children who are most vulnerable? When will this government get behind the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association, give it full support and stop supporting a product that has been banned in other countries?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member is putting forward an outrageous hypothesis I do not agree with. There is no scientific evidence that would allow him to substantiate the accusations that he has made.
This government is interested in ethanol production. Ethanol production is important from two points: the environmental point and the ability to use a renewable resource.


November 29, 1991

We have been involved in ongoing discussions with that industry as the hon. member knows. We have given support as the hon. member knows. We will continue to give that support.


LEAD AND MERCURY
Mrs. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister.
Earlier this week the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs said in the House that the use of lead in paint had been eliminated by voluntary compliance by the industry. But a report from his own department contradicts this statement and says clearly that lead and mercury in paint continue to be a health hazard to children even before they are born.
Why is the government refusing to say no to lead and mercury in paint? Why is it refusing to co-operate with the industry which wants a ban and has asked the government for a ban to protect our children?


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Madam Speaker, I will take that representation on behalf of the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs, but my recollection is that yes, there are lots of houses that still have paint which was put on at a time when the danger of lead was not recognized, high lead content paint in renovations and so on. This represents a hazard. That is all the Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs said. There is a hazard out there.
In terms of outlawing paint in any and every application, I am sure the hon. member would recognize that that makes sense when there is any chance of human contact but may not make sense when there is no chance of human contact.


Marlene Catterall: Madam Speaker, the minister said clearly that co-operation with the industry had eliminated the addition of lead in paints. That is simply not the case.
A spokesperson on product safety said on radio months ago that regulations were being prepared. The paint industry asked in September 1990 that the government ban the addition of lead and mercury in all new paints. The government has not acted.
To be very blunt about it, how many more children have to be poisoned before the government does what
Oral Questions
the industry and everybody else wants and bans lead and mercury additions in paint? It is that simple.


Harvie Andre: Madam Speaker, I do not think there is any argument. No one in this House is arguing that lead and mercury are not poisons and they should be eliminated to the extent possible so that there is no human contact.
It certainly does not do her case any good to stand up here and claim that children are dying in this country right this very moment because of lack of action. That is simply false. She knows it, and I wonder why she has to resort to scare tactics like that rather than just pursue in a logical reasonable fashion the appropriate and reasonable representation that lead and mercury be limited.
It is not necessary to go around scaring people and saying that kids are dying because of this situation.


CANADA-UNITED STATES FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Felix Holtmann: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Agriculture.
Previously I heard the minister indicate to this House that there had been a profound increase in the export of Canadian agricultural products as a result of the free trade agreement with the United States.
How extensive was the increase of trade with the United States? Was there any negative impact to the marketing boards that presently exist in Canada as a result of the free trade agreement?


William Hunter (Bill) McKnight: Madam Speaker, the hon. member is right to draw to the attention of the House the increase in trade that took place after the free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. took effect.
The increase in agricultural trade since January 1,1989 was some 25 per cent. Agriculture increased some 25 per cent from that time period. That is very important when we look at the percentage of agricultural imports. The imports into Canada only increased by 16 per cent. There was a net benefit by Canada in signing the agreement between the United States in the area of agriculture.

November 29, 1991
Oral Questions
The hon. member also is aware, as my colleague pointed out yesterday, that there was a marketing agency created under the supply management system since the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement came into effect. The Broiler Hatchery Agency was created in that atmosphere and added to the ability to export more agricultural products to the United States than we had before.


REFUGEES
Mr. Dan Heap (Trinity-Spadina):: Madam Speaker, in the absence of the Minister of Employment and Immigration, I address my question to the Deputy Prime Minister.
As the government knows, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Refugees which Canada signed forbids Canada to cause a refugee to be forcibly returned directly or indirectly to a country where he would face persecution.
Will the minister confirm that Canada is seeking an agreement with the European Community that would enable Canada to remove refugee claimants without having examined their claims to European Community countries through which they pass en route to Canada?


Hon. Monique Vezina (Minister of State (Employment and Immigration) and Minister of State (Seniors)):: Madam Speaker, I can assure the hon. member that we as a government recognize our responsibility to respect the various conventions that have been signed. If the hon. member is referring to the Dublin convention, we may remind the House that we support the development of international strategies and that, as a government, we will always respect the international conventions we have signed.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Madam Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the same minister.
Since some countries of the European Community do not have nearly such high standards of definition and treatment of refugees as does Canada, will the minister assure this House that Canada will not remove any refugee claimant unless his or her refugee claim has been examined and judged ungrounded?


Monique Vézina: Madam Speaker, the hon. member is familiar with our procedures. Every claim is examined individually, and our approach is humanitarian. And, of course, all the eventualities to which he referred will be dealt with according to the procedures established under our Immigration Act.


AIRPORT SCREENINGS
Mr. George S. Rideout (Moncton):: Madam Speaker, in the absence of the Minister of Transport, my question is for the Deputy Prime Minister. It concerns the tendering process for the pre-board screening contract at the Moncton airport and at other airports in Atlantic Canada.
The previous Minister of Transport stated: "When tendering contracts for airport screening services, the airlines will include a specification to protect current employees' wages and fringe benefits at the levels of the existing contract".
The employees providing this service are to be fired and new ones hired at substantially lower wages because a new company has been awarded the contract. What is the government prepared to do to protect these employees?


Mr. Lee Richardson (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Transport):: Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member is aware that the awarding of contracts and the resulting changes of screening personnel is strictly a negotiating matter between the carrier and the security guard agency.


George Saunders Rideout: Madam Speaker, I have a supplementary question. That response is nonsense.
This contract is renewed every three years and the government has a moral obligation to protect those employees so that they are not victimized by having new contractors undermine any improvements in salary, or worse that they lose their jobs.
November 29, 1991

When will this government take a stand for fairness?


Lee Richardson: Madam Speaker, I think thehon. member is also aware, because the question has been previously answered in the House, that in 1988 the former Minister of Transport came to an agreement with the airline industry regarding the protection of current employees' wages and fringe benefits for rehired employees.
Transport officials are currently looking at the awarding of the new contract to ensure that the previous commitments are respected.


POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (St. Boniface):: Madam Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance. When granting student loans for post-secondary education, the government still uses data that were collected in 1984, in other words, data that are already seven years old. This practice or policy, if you prefer, is preventing thousand of students from receiving millions of dollars in financial assistance. Why is the government still using this obsolete information? Why does it continue to give students this kind of insensitive treatment which prevents them from pursuing an education that will prepare them for good jobs later on?


Hon. Robert de Cotret (Secretary of State of Canada):: Madam Speaker, the government could not agree more that a thorough review of the student loans system is necessary. I have said so many times in the House, and I have said so to the hon. member. The program was started 27 years ago and has not been changed since then. However, I can inform the hon. member today that we are very close to tabling a completely revised version of the student loans system that will meet the primary objective of the program, which is to help students in need to finish their education and become full-fledged Canadian citizens.


Ron J. Duhamel: Madam Speaker, my supplementary question is for the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Oral Questions
The minister will know that the Assembly of First Nations met in Ottawa this week and it has completed a report entitled Tradition and Education: Towards a Vision of Our Future which includes a declaration of First Nations jurisdiction over education.
As well, in 1990, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development contracted with Mr. Jim McPherson, Dean of Osgoode Hall, to research jurisdictional issues in native education.
Is the minister aware of the contents of the first report, and is the minister prepared to tell this House when he will table this second report, this study which he has had since September of this year?


Hon. Thomas Siddon (Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development):: Madam Speaker, I am not aware of the content of the report or the recommendations that might result therefrom. When my officials have completed the analysis of the report I will be happy to review it and bring it forward at the appropriate time.
I should say that the federal government is fully committed to devolving education responsibility to First Nations. In fact, we have an impressive track record of turning over to First Nations leadership both at the primary and secondary levels, as well as at the postsecondary level the responsibility for education administration.
I signed an agreement with the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs on an innovative five-year program of education research. We now have a situation where 87 per cent of the post-secondary funding available to aboriginal students is administered by Indian administrative organizations. Most schools are Indian administered and the priorities are set by native leadership.


MANITOBA ECONOMY
Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
The minister is aware that the Manitoba economic indicators are all negative. They are all in decline. For example, in investment, Manitoba ranks eight out of ten; in retail trade it ranks eight out of ten; in housing starts Manitoba ranks ten out of ten; in building permits Manitoba ranks eight out of ten; and in manufacturing shipments Manitoba ranks ten out of ten.

Oral Questions
I ask the Deputy Prime Minister what specific agreement the federal government is negotiating with the province of Manitoba to try to turn around this very dismal economic performance?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, as the hon. member knows, the western diversification initiative has funded well in excess of $1 billion toward endeavours in western Canada. It has been very much a part of strengthening and broadening the economic base in western Canada.
In addition, there are the ongoing programs that are negotiated on a partnership arrangement under the auspices of the co-operation agreements wherein the province itself identifies the priorities that it wishes to identify and support. We work out agreements on that basis.
I should say to the hon. member, because I am sure he would be interested, that in terms of regional development funding as outlined in the budget of February 1991, out of the total package of $1.1 billion western Canada is getting about $363 million in terms of the western regional development funds which are in addition to some of the established programs.
I guess the short answer is that there are a number of co-operation agreements in place. We are providing heavy support to the agricultural sector. Of course we are always interested in sitting down with the provinces and helping them work toward developing any new industries or expanding any sectors that they wish to identify.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Speaker, on a short supplemental, I would also indicate that since the Western Diversification Program came into effect that is when we started to have these dismal figures in the province of Manitoba.
Again referring to the government's own figures, my question is this: The region of Canada within our provinces that has the highest unemployment is northern Manitoba with 23.3 per cent unemployed. Why has this government not negotiated a new northern development agreement to make sure there is infrastructure and training in that region.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Madam Speaker, the hon. member bad-mouths the western diversification initiative. There are something in the order of 400 specific projects that have been funded or assisted through the Western Diversification Program.


An hon. member:: In Manitoba?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: In Manitoba alone. In total there have been 2,700 initiatives funded in western Canada.
Is the hon. member suggesting that we should cancel the western diversification initiative, that we should cancel the 300 or 400 projects that have been funded in Manitoba? Is that what he is suggesting? When he says that everything has gone to hell in a hand basket since the western diversification initiative came in, it means that he is not supportive of the 300 or 400 projects that have been funded.


Ms. Ethel Blondin (Western Arctic):: Madam Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
Yesterday I met with Barbara Hood Hall, president of the Northwest Territories Mental Health Association. Mental illness affects more Canadians than any other disease. The northern territories lead the nation in illness and poor health. The north experiences higher death and disease rates and higher birth and infant mortality rates than the rest of the country. Cancer is four times greater. It has the highest rate of suicide in the country.
Knowing this, how can the minister withhold moneys much needed for this desperate situation from the Government of the Northwest Territories?


Thomas Edward Siddon: Madam Speaker, since the most recent agreement on formula financing, which I believe was signed in December 1989, the Government of the Northwest Territories has been accepting more and more responsibility for the administration of programs in the general health area. We have had a number of discussions with the Government of the Northwest Territories about the responsibility it has accepted to administer these programs.
November 29, 1991

I recently spoke with the new premier of the Northwest Territories, Nellie Cournoyea. Of course there are matters that will continue to be under discussion. I might remind members that the formula financing initiative led to an increase in per capita funding into the Northwest Territories in the past year as compared to previous years. This is a very generous and appropriate means of ensuring adequate fiscal support and fiscal arrangements with the Government of the Northwest Territories.


POINT OF ORDER
Mr. Willie Littlechild (Wetaskiwin):: Madam Speaker, during Question Period the member for St. Boniface referred to two reports in asking a question of the Minister of Indian Affairs.
I am wondering, through the Chair, if those two reports could be tabled at an appropriate time.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Hon. Gilles Loiselle (President of the Treasury Board and Minister of State (Finance)):: I am pleased as President of the Treasury Board to table in both official languages the third annual report on official languages in federal institutions for the fiscal year 1990-1991, pursuant to section 48 of the Official Languages Act.


GOVERNMENT RESPONSE TO PETITIONS
Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to 15 petitions.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]
Routine Proceedings HOUSE MANAGEMENT


Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, I have the honour to present the Eighteenth Report of the Standing Committee on House Management.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]


PETITIONS
Mr. Stan Keyes (Hamilton West):: Madam Speaker, I have the honour, duty and privilege to present to this House a series of petitions according to Standing Order 36, certified correct by the Clerk of Petitions.
These petitions contain the signatures of Canadians living in my home town of Hamilton, as well as Stoney Creek, Caledonia, Beamsville, Dundas, and Burlington. They join the thousands of other Canadians who have signed petitions which have been presented in this august Chamber.
All the petitioners are in support of the parents of Nina De Villiers. They request that Parliament recognize that crimes of violence against the person are serious and abhorrent to society. They call upon us to amend the Criminal Code of Canada, the Bail Reform Act of 1972 and the Parole Act accordingly.


Mrs. Coline Campbell (South West Nova):: Madam Speaker, I too rise under Standing Order 36. I have the honour to present another petition signed by people in the Middleton, Nictaux, Paradise and Greenwood areas of Nova Scotia.
They want to remind the government that CFB Cornwallis has first-rate facilities that could easily accommodate any new duties, in addition to recruit training, that the Department of National Defence might require.
With that in mind, they humbly call upon this Parliament to urge the Department of National Defence to add to its present operations a recruit training school at CFB Cornwallis.
Government Orders CHILD CARE

November 29, 1991


George Saunders Rideout: Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure pursuant to Standing Order 36 to rise and present a petition from constituents of mine who reside in Moncton, Dieppe, Salisbury, and Riverview asking the government to amend the Income Tax Act, so that the child related benefits and deductions for child care are fair and equitable to all family structures based on financial need and irrespective of child care choices.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
Albert Glen Cooper: I suggest, Madam Speaker, that all questions be allowed to stand.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Shall all questions be allowed to stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


M. Weiner (for the minister of Labour) moved: that Bill C-44, an act to amend the Canada Labour Code (geographic certification), be read the third time and passed.


Pierre H. Vincent: Madam Speaker, I would like to spend a few minutes speaking on third reading so that we can emphasize that what we are doing today, namely an amendment to section 34 of the bill, is a first in Canada. Likewise, the issue that we have to deal with by way of that amendment to section 34 is almost a first in Canada as well. I believe that it is appropriate to stress that fact.
Back in 1973, and it is still true, the object of section 34 was to ensure that marine employers would appoint a representative that would be under a strict obligation to negotiate with the longshoremen. The problems that arose, particularly in the riding of Trois-Rivieres, at the Trois-Riviere and Becancour harbours, have to do with the fact that in the last six years, the longshoremen in Trois-Rivieres have not had the opportunity, and I insist on the word opportunity, to negotiate a collective agreement because the employers kept passing the buck to each other through injunctions, temporary, permanent and others, so that there would not be anybody at the table that had the authority or the mandate to negotiate with the employees. I believe it is important to emphasize this while at the same time ensuring that once this bill is passed in this House, the other place, as we like to call it, will give its approval quickly. And, Madam Speaker, I rely on the hon. member for Kenora-Rainy River to send the appropriate message to his colleagues in the other House, so that this bill can be passed quickly. I can tell the hon. member that I will also inform the senators that they must act diligently as regards Bill C-44, which is essential to solve the dispute in Trois-Rivieres, and to make sure that the longshoremen, who have been on strike for two months now, can go back to work with a formal collective agreement, which is something they need and have been without for six years.
Madam Speaker, allow me to stress the fact that I am honoured to sponsor this bill which is a concrete achievement by an hon. member for his riding. This is a good example of an issue that had reached gigantic proportions in judicial terms and which, I believe, will be solved with this bill. I also want to emphasize the work of the hon. members for Churchill and Kenora-Rainy River, who co-operated so that we could proceed quickly.
Of course, as you know, Madam Speaker, the House leaders are always involved, and I would like to thank my own House leader and the two others as well, who were very co-operative and agreed to let this bill go through the House a little faster than usual, for economic reasons-the port of Trois-Rivieres is strike-bound- and for humanitarian reasons as well. As you know, Madam Speaker, when employees have not had a wage increase for six years and have been on strike for two months, there is a major problem. However, with the support of the House and that of the other place, I hope the federal government will be able to do its share to help them deal with their problems.
November 29, 1991

Perhaps I may also mention the patience and hard work of Mr. Bernard Paquet, the union rep, and members of the Trois-Rivieres longshoremen's unions executive, Wilfrid Martel, Stanley St-Louis, Jean-Guy Lafreniere, Leo Dumont, and all the others, including Robert Lemay, and so forth. I won't name them all because I am sure I will forget a few, but I just want to say how patient they have been throughout this whole process. They are dedicated to their cause, and they are dedicated to helping their fellow longshoremen. I think that has to be said.
Madam Speaker, this bill will, I hope, be passed today, and in concluding, I would like hon. members to realize that if the bill is adopted today, we will soon be able to say to our people in Trois-Rivieres: mission accomplished.


Robert Daniel Nault: Madam Speaker, I too would like to enter the debate at third reading and make a few comments. I think it is imperative that we understand the importance of this legislation, Bill C-44, and the changes to section 34 of the Canada Labour Code.
Before I commence with talking in particular about this piece of legislation, I must say that it is very frustrating to hear and to tiy to put together some sort of focus in one's mind as to why it has taken almost seven years for this government to bring this piece of legislation forward. It has complete knowledge of the fact that the employees in this case have not been able to get an increase in wage and have been dealing basically in a vacuum without a collective agreement.
Having had the experience in the labour movement and being involved in collective bargaining processes myself, I know very well just how difficult that whole scenario would be to an individual who would have to go to work every day not having the collective agreement in place that would give them the incentive to want to be the best employee possible.
I would say to the government opposite that it basically is high time that we put this piece of legislation and this change to the Canada Labour Code in place. I question the wisdom as to why it was even brought in at this late stage this week because of the fact that the Senate is not
Government Orders
here. One of the problems that we are going to have now is that we will probably have to wait until next week at the earliest to get this legislation right through the final process in order that the collective bargaining rights of the workers can be maintained through the process of collective bargaining by forcing the employers to go to the bargaining table.
One of the things people who are listening to us today have to understand is that what this amendment basically does is allow the CLRB to simply enact the changes necessary to force the employers to put someone into place and if they do not do it within a reasonable time then the CLRB will do it for them.
One of the things we talked about in committee this morning was that it is a possibility even with these changes that we will still be delayed for many more months simply because we will have to wait for the CLRB to have interviews with the different employers and ask them why it is that they have difficulty coming to an agreement. Furthermore, it will have to wait for interventions of all the employers, if necessary, before it can make a ruling on who it will choose if that becomes necessary.
I would suggest to the government opposite in its letter to the CLRB that when the necessity and issue at hand is explained to them that it also make it very clear that this has to be dealt with very expeditiously and if there are other issues that are before them that they be put aside in order that this can be dealt with first hand.
The reason for that is because the employees, as we know, whom we are dealing with now are on strike at this moment. Christmas is coming. It is quickly drawing near. I think it is high time that they get back to the bargaining table and deal with the issue in its entirety.
I also question the wisdom of whether we are resolving the issue. I ask if it is going to improve the collective bargaining process in that particular geographic zone. We have been going through a process in the last six or seven years of these employers not having the ability to get their act together and agree on a particular representative to go forward and get involved in the collective bargaining process as is their right to do. It is also their moral obligation as it relates to their employees.

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I suggested in Committee of the Whole that they undertake a complete review of the geographic certification of that area and look at it in its entirety to see if there is the possibility or the necessity to change it somewhat to reflect the realities of the situation. When we take a look at how long this has been in place, which is since 1973, there can be and there probably are some significant changes that have taken place since then.
I want to suggest to the government opposite that we on this side approve of this particular piece of legislation in its entirety. We have some reservations and concerns as to just whether it will be as effective as it could be. We hope that we can resolve this issue for the men and women who are involved in the dispute.
We would ask that the House pass this quickly and that the the other place do the same. We will certainly do as the member has indicated. We will send the message to the Senate that we on this side of the House feel that there is no reason to delay the legislation. It should be passed as quickly as possible.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Madam Speaker, I will start my very short remarks by sharing a concern that I think the Liberals and the government representatives alluded to and it is that we are asked in this House to rush the legislation because there is a perception of a need. At the same time we know that the Senate is not sitting today. We know that the Senate will not be sitting over the weekend. It will not be sitting Monday and the earliest that this legislation will be dealt with is on Tuesday.
I question how the government can get up and state that there is a need to pass this legislation quickly and at the same time not make any arrangements to have the Senate deal with the legislation.
I also find it ironic that where there is a situation such as a strike or a lock-out, this government normally will move very quickly in the perceived national need.
As was pointed out by the previous speaker, this problem has existed for a number of years. The employees have been without a collective agreement for seven years. The company that has refused to accept the Maritime Employers Association as the bargaining unit
for the employees has had injunctions in place over the last two years.
The strike itself has existed for 60 days. There did not appear to be any concern by the government on this issue until the last possible moment. In addition to that, when we were asking for government legislation last week this particular legislation was not even indicated as something that the government intended to deal with on Thursday or Friday of this week.
For that matter the discussions between House leaders earlier this week did not have this legislation down. You have to wonder where the government's priorities are and where the government's commitments are.
I congratulate the member for getting the legislation into the House but I think it could have been done better. I think that there is still going to be a sense among employees across this land that if it is legislation that works against their interests, this government moves quickly, but where there is legislation that works in the interests of the employees, this government does not move quickly. It moves very slowly.
Obviously the regular apparatus of the government through its House leader does not work in their best interests.
I would also like to raise the issue that was dealt with in Committee of the Whole. The fact is that there is nothing preventing the employer group that sought the injunction from trying to create further trouble in this particular instance.
There is nothing preventing that employer from seeking an injunction while it appeals its case before the Canada Labour Relations Board. Again as was mentioned in Committee of the Whole there is nothing saying that we will get a quick decision from the Canada Labour Relations Board. It may be put as a priority. It may not be. We do not know that.
There is an indication by the government member who spoke. He was the very member who has been pushing this bill. He hoped that this issue would be dealt with quickly but he did not believe that timetables should be put in place for a quasi-judicial board.
November 29, 1991

We put timetables in for all sorts of agencies and all sorts of individuals. People who do not like an unemployment insurance ruling have 30 days to appeal, which is not very much time for an individual to collect the information that he or she may need before appearing before a quasi-judicial board. Labour legislation often has a timetable or a deadline in it for an arbitrator to rule.
Consider the length of time that has been involved. It has been seven years that we referred to without a collective agreement and two years since the company sought its first injunction to try to get around the Canada Labour Code. There is also the fact that these people have been on strike for 60 days now because their employer is legally prohibited from negotiating.
I think in this particular case it would have been reasonable and sensible to have a clause in this legislation that said in this specific case that should there be any appeals that the board would hear the case and rule within the next 60 days. I think that would have been a very good clause to make sure that the legislation was ironclad and that the workers were not going to be facing the potential of another long drawn out mess.
With those comments, Madam Speaker, we will not delay the legislation. I sincerely regret that the Senate cannot be ordered back to work itself to deal with this legislation later today.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed.

[Stage Direction]
The House resumed from Thursday, November 28, consideration of the motion of Mr. Bouchard (Roberval) that Bill C-39, an act to amend the Canada Pension Plan, the Family Allowances Act and the Old Age Security Act, be read the third time and passed.
Government Orders
Mr. Mac Harb (Ottawa Centre):: Madam Speaker, let me start by congratulating the Minister of National Health and Welfare on his bill. Certainly it is never too late. One would suggest we should have seen the problem with our pension plans that we are trying to deal with in the bill today. We should have seen that a while back. Unfortunately through a miscalculation it was not the case.
The bill in fact was introduced in order to ensure the future viability of the Canada Pension Plan. I think in my view that is the thrust of the bill. Along with that there are a number of accessories that come with it such as the proposal to increase the Canada Pension Plan benefit for dependant children of disabled and deceased contributors by approximately 30 per cent. This means that if you want to look at it in terms of dollars and cents that will increase the benefit from about $113 to approximately $148 a month.
As a result of that there are close to 170,000 children across Canada who would receive those benefits at an approximate cost of $75 million to the government.
There are also some other changes that were introduced as a part of the bill. In a way there were some minor amendments such as amending the legislation to protect the benefit eligibility of Canada Pension Plan benefit contributors who are unable to apply in time because of incapacity. Also it extends benefits to children who come under the custody or control of an individual who is already receiving disability benefits.
This is more or less the main structure of what we are dealing with today. Under the new legislation, in order to adjust the misfortune, what we are going to see is the combined employee-employer contribution rate increasing gradually in steps starting in 1991. It will go from 4.6 per cent and will move up until the year 2011 where we will see approximately a 9.1 per cent increase. Compare that to what we have presently. If we were not increasing those contributions, then by the year 2011 an employee and an employer would only contribute about 7.6 per cent.
This is as a result of the fact that department officials or those who were involved with the calculation made the assumption that the birth rate in Canada in the 1970s was going to be at a certain level. Unfortunately those forecasts and figures were not accurate. At that time it was estimated there would be sue workers that would be available to provide benefits for each retired worker in the future. But because of the decline in the birth rate we are seeing now that there are only three workers in

Government Orders
the work force who would be paying benefits for a retired individual.
As a result of that there is a tremendous shortfall in terms of the pension plan. In the year 2011 or 2016 we are going to see quite a bit of difficulty.
Before I move on I want to congratulate our critic for National Health and Welfare, the member for Winnipeg North. He made an excellent presentation yesterday and attempted to introduce some amendments to the legislation. Unfortunately most of those amendments were not accepted by the government. It is too bad because most of those amendments were excellent ones. I would suggest that the government should look at them again and see if it could change its view and its mind. It could hopefully approach the Senate in order to reintroduce them and deal with them.
When we talk about pensions the first thing that comes to my mind is those who receive the pension benefit and those who are no longer in the work force, our senior citizen population.
As you know by the year 2031 the proportion of the population aged 65 years and over will increase approximately four times. If you recall in 1971 we had approximately 8 per cent of population at age 65 years of age and over. According to Statistics Canada, in the year 2031 we will have in excess of eight million Canadians who will be eligible to collect pensions and who are senior citizens. That will be out of a total population of about 32 million people.
In the short term the proportion of seniors is expected to rise about 15.7 per cent by the year 2011. That will translate to approximately five million senior citizens. So it can be seen why the government is moving with its proposal now in order to avoid difficulties at a later date.
Not only are we faced with an aging population in the year 2011 and beyond, but we are also faced with a shrinkage in terms of the tax base. We will not have enough people in the work force in order to support all the existing programs or all the possible programs we might be thinking of in the future unless something drastic is to take place.
That is why I have been speaking over the past two and a half years about the importance of putting a lot more emphasis on education, investing in research and development, combating illiteracy and training and retraining our work force. It seems like every time I look at a piece of legislation or a bill before this House, if there is a deficiency or a better way to do it, the answer always seems to be that it may be through education and investment in the future of Canadians.
You will be interested to know that our population is not only aging but thanks to the technical talents of people in the industry they are even living longer. For instance in the period from 1966 to 1986, the number of men over the age of 90 has doubled while the number of women over the age of 90 has tripled.
It is also startling that as people get older they are moving away from their families. For example in 1986 about 86 per cent of men between the ages of 55 and 64 lived in a family home. For men over 75 the percentage was approximately 66 per cent. For women the decline was even greater. Almost 80 per cent of women between the age of 55 to 64 live in a family household and by the age of 75 less than 35 per cent are still in the home. You can see that we have people who might be living at home but a good portion of them are not living at home and as a result of that they are in need of a support system such as the Canada Pension Plan.
While they might or might not be living at home, I do not want anyone to get the impression that after they reach the age of 65 they sit idle. You will be very happy to know that about 25 per cent of women over the age of 65 and over 20 per cent of men over the age of 55 do a tremendous amount of volunteer work in our communities for a variety of charitable and non-profit organizations. We are seeing an incredible trend in people who are retired from the work force. It seems that they are catching on fairly quickly in acknowledging the need for education. As a matter of fact presently there is in excess of 5,300 seniors enrolled in Canadian universities. Most of these seniors are enrolled in part time courses and they take advantage of programs that many universities have been offering senior citizens free of tuition, which is something they are to be commended for.
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Also, full-time enrolment has increased by almost 70 per cent for undergraduate study and by over 40 per cent for graduate levels.
Not only is it a challenge we are going to face to ensure that we have enough funds in our budget to deal with issues such as pensions, we also have to be geared toward introducing programs that cater to the senior citizen population in the year 2011.
As a result of that, it requires an overhaul of all our existing systems to ensure that those systems are meeting the needs of our seniors, and not only our seniors of today but also the seniors of tomorrow.
The ideal plan would be one that you can use and apply without any difficulties and without any worry. Unfortunately the existing Canada Pension Plan, when it was introduced in 1966, was built around the limit of the 25 per cent figure in the hope that employees would have other plans, such as the occupational pension plans, the registered retirement plans, and some other revenues that seniors could bank on.
Unfortunately this expectation was not realistic because many of the people who are now receiving benefits did not rely on registered savings plans. The reason is that the registered savings plan is used by people who earn quite a bit of money, in excess of $35,000 or $40,000.
As a result of that the benefit of that particular plan was not available. While we invest in excess of about $7 billion a year in retirement benefits by over two million seniors, the simple fact is that many of those seniors have to go to other sources to guarantee that ends meet at the end of the month.
Let us look at some examples. If we are to look at the different programs and see what the maximum a senior citizen or a retired individual can collect from all of the possible pensions, we will find that a single person is relying on Canada Pension Plan benefits of around $6,800, old age pension of about $4,000, the guaranteed annual income in some cases of about $1,400 or $1,500, for a total income of about $12,200.
In an urban centre the poverty line is approximately $12,000 a year. Therefore, the system, even if it is used to the limit, barely deals with the problem.
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To that extent, our pension plans, even though they are very fine plans, are still not really meeting the objective as one would like to see them doing.
For example, in 1989, 57 per cent of single people between the ages of 65 and 69 had an income below $15,000 a year, and 68 per cent of the people over the age of 70 had an income below $15,000. Those figures are only the tip of the iceberg. In the same year close to 40 per cent of all single senior citizens lived below the poverty line, as established by Statistics Canada. Approximately four out of every 10 senior citizens live below the poverty line.
Of single elderly people living below the poverty line, about 80 per cent of those people are women. About 41 per cent of all single females who live below the poverty line and 26.9 per cent of all males who live below the poverty line are asking for help or seeking assistance. This is a situation that needs to be addressed. However, if we are to just introduce a plan and not look at the cost of living or the different types of difficulties our seniors are faced with, in the very near future we will see a greater number of our seniors living below the poverty line. That will be a catastrophe.
While I indicated that there are a lot of good things in the proposed bill, there seem to be some difficulties. My colleague from Winnipeg North has stated his views on those issues. For instance, the current Pension Plan Act defines conditions necessary for receiving disability benefits as being severe and prolonged. This language, as it has been stated, is quite ambiguous. Our suggestion, made by my colleague, is that the definition of "severe" should be a person who is unable to do his or her usual type of work without mental or physical pain, preventing the person from fully discharging duties of that job as determined by a licensed medical doctor.
Unfortunately in my constituency office we are faced with a situation in which somebody who had a heart attack and applied for his pension had great difficulties trying to receive benefits. We also wanted to see "prolonged" defined as three months or more of continued disabilities.
There are other amendments that my colleague tried to put before the House. Unfortunately many of those amendments were not adopted. However I would like to bring to the attention of the minister the fact that in the area of the Canada Pension Plan, the Family Allowance and the Old Age Security Act there is a need for a close

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look at not only the over-all management of it but the services we are providing to the community.
You will be surprised to learn that in some cases for an applicant to receive benefits that applicant would have to wait in excess of about four months. There is a tremendous backlog of applicants, in excess of 50,000 across Canada. It takes about three months to get a slight change in address of an applicant or an existing potential beneficiary.
Those are issues the government should look at. In closing, I would like to say that I wish the government would look at our amendments as presented by my colleague from Winnipeg North and try to deal with them in an appropriate fashion.


Elizabeth  (Beth) Phinney: Mr. Speaker, I am sure my hon. colleague from Ottawa Centre is aware that currently in the Canada Pension Plan Disability Benefits section, these benefits may be severed if the beneficiary tries to retrain for re-entry into the work force.
As critic for the disabled, I was working with the task force across Canada this past spring and summer. One of the comments that almost everybody who appeared before this task force mentioned was that these people are trapped because they are getting this disability pension. If they should try to stop being completely supported by the government and get retraining or get a minimum wage job they would immediately have all of these benefits cut off.
That means they have to try to get back on to these disability pensions, or they just do not make the move at all because they have no means of support. Without this disability pension they cannot pay for their equipment or the medicine that they need regularly and that they must pay for.
I just wondered if he agrees with me that it is too bad the government did not accept the amendment suggested by our colleague that would allow disabled Canada Pension Plan beneficiaries to take training or education courses in a recognized institution and prepare for alternate work without forfeiting the benefits
they were getting. This would be a very reasonable thing to have included in this bill.


Mac Harb: Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Hamilton Mountain for a question very well put.
I know she has been involved with the task force that travelled across the country to listen to the concerns of the disabled. She has done a magnificent job in this area. I am looking forward, as well as my colleagues and I am sure all members of this House, to receiving a copy of her final report so we can exchange some information in this area.
Certainly the member raised a very good question. Any system, any type of benefit or any type of program should never penalize the recipient if he or she is taking any type of training courses or achieving any type of education to further their knowledge or make them better citizens.
There is no question in my mind that when you look at the system that we have in place, whether the benefit that my colleague is talking about or any type of benefit, you can see that it does discriminate against people who want to become better citizens in our society.
For that reason, the government has a moral obligation to look at all of our social welfare and social assistance programs to ensure that those programs are not only meeting the needs and objectives they were created to meet, but also that they could be used as an incentive to encourage and help those recipients who decide to receive an education or go back to training institutions.
As my colleague indicated, right now it is the opposite. The system is in fact discriminating against those who want to improve their qualifications and become better citizens.
That takes me to another point. We seem all the time to be dealing with the problem rather than trying to anticipate problems or putting plans in place that would prevent problems from taking place.
It is my hope that we will shift away from the short-term proposals to long-term proposals that will change our society as a whole. I think the act is a good one. I think there is a lot of merit in it. However, examples like the one my colleague spoke of, which the government should look at very seriously, shows there is no need why they cannot amend or change it.
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There is no reason why. I do not see why they do not look at those amendments and implement them. Someone might say: "It is a little too late". However, it is never too late. The bill has gone for third reading, and after the bill will be on its way to the Senate. Maybe the minister will meet with the officials of the Senate and try to introduce those amendments.
I want to close by congratulating my colleague on her great work in the area. It is a very well put question. I totally agree with her.


Mr. Len Hopkins (Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke):: Madam Speaker, one of the problems we have had with the federal-provincial assistance plans over the years has been that every time someone on provincial assistance programs receives the Canada Pension Plan, their provincial moneys are reduced by the same amount as their Canada Pension Plan. Therefore, they are really no better off than they were before. They may indeed have a very serious medical problem.
I would just like to have the hon. member comment on this. In my offices we have settled case after case for Canada pension recipients. I must say that the Canada Pension Plan personnel have been very good to deal with as far as this member is concerned. I give them full marks because they do have a tremendous burden of work.
I would like the hon. member to comment on this process, because it seems to me that it does not solve a major problem for the individual when he starts receiving a cheque from the federal hand and ceases to get the same amount from the province. That really does not solve his or her problem. Would he comment on that, please?


Mac Harb: Madam Speaker, that is a very well put question. This is another example that helps to make the case that what we have before us, while it does deal with part of the problem, does not seem to be able to deal with the problem as a whole.
To that extent, I hoped that the federal government would have had a chance to study our amendment and our suggestions so that loopholes in the system, such as the one my colleague has mentioned, could have been dealt with in a very equitable and forceful way.
There is no doubt in my mind that our seniors and people who are retiring should not be running around trying to go to this agency or that agency. They would not have to do all that if the system in place was fine-tuned and it was properly organized so that it was a one-stop shopping arrangement.
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A senior citizen or retired person should not have to be fighting with this agency and that agency, this level of government and that level of government, and going from this account to that account. It is really quite frustrating and I can understand why the hon. member is raising this point.
I do not know when the government is going to sit down and have a look at the way we do things when it comes to providing services for our seniors. As I indicated a little earlier, the time has come for us to address the whole question of a society that has an aging population and a shrinking tax base, a society with a lot more to offer and a lot to lose unless we focus on issues of long-term planning for both our seniors and our youth.


Leonard Donald Hopkins: Madam Speaker, as I see you in the chair today doing your usual fine job of chairing this House it reminds me that it was also a woman who initially introduced the Canada Pension Plan to this House.
The Canada Pension Plan was introduced in this House by the Hon. Judy LaMarsh and became effective on January 1,1966. Prior to that the Hon. Edgar Benson, who was then Minister of National Revenue, did the spade work with the provinces, going from province to province meeting with the ministers of health in order to put the plan together. Then the Hon. Judy LaMarsh introduced it and piloted the legislation through this House.
In her memory I think it is very important to state today that this legislation, which she piloted through the House back in the early 1960s, has been a tremendous service to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of Canadians. We will salute her today.
The Canada Pension Plan is one of the great support blocks, the cornerstone in many ways, of our social net in this country. Many people come to my office who have been turned down when they applied for Canada pension, and we take up their case for them.
The first thing that I always insist on when talking to them is that they bring in the doctor's report. Sometimes doctors give them a report saying they are capable of doing light work. That is the worst thing that can happen to them because it does not say they are disabled. Of course in the particular area that I represent-and I know that many other members in this House are in the same position-there really is not that much light work for people to do. You are limiting them in their terms of employment. Also, they are not really well enough to go to work. They will take work if they can get it, and they

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suffer while at work, but when they apply for Canada pension the bottom line is that they need a clear-cut statement from their doctor that they are in fact in need of Canada pension and are disabled in medical terms.
I want to commend the Minister of National Elealth and Welfare today for bringing in this bill. Naturally there are other things that I would have liked to have seen in it, such as those amendments brought forward by the hon. member for Winnipeg North, one of my colleagues who has done a very good job in playing the role of opposition critic for Health and Welfare Canada.
The minister has brought this bill forward in a manner that is going to help the Canada pension fund to continue. As a former chairman of the public accounts committee of this House, I am very pleased to note in the bill that the funds in the Canada Pension Plan will be scrutinized by the Auditor General of Canada to ensure that the fund is sound. Of course this bill today goes a long way toward making that fund sound.
The $42 billion in it today will pay for the demands on the fund for the next two years. That is a massive payroll going out there in two years' time. However, if the increased contributions that will be requested of Canadians and employers are not included and not put into the fund at this time, there will only be six months of necessary funds left in the over-all fund of the Canada Pension Plan.
This plan is of great benefit to Canadians. It really is a safety net for many people. In my view this plan and medicare are two things that really have to be scrutinized and kept in good financial shape so that Canadians today and in the future can look forward to medical plans.
In the United States in a recent election someone campaigned on having a medicare program and turned around a 45 per cent public opinion vote deficit into a big plus and was elected in a landslide. One can understand that, because Americans do not have the fine programs that we have, such as the Canada Pension Plan and medicare.
I think there is a good rapport in this House of Commons for working toward this.
By bringing in this bill today which will increase the contributions to the Canada Pension Plan, it will mean that for years to come those people who are working today will pay into it, that the fund will be there 20 years from now for them. If those rates had not been increased and if the plan were not kept in good financial condition, they would not be able to gain those funds. This is really an insurance plan for Canadians. Hopefully everyone benefits from it at one stage or another.
The extended benefits to families is a very important part of the Canada Pension Plan. As we look at the plan there is a need to increase the payments for widows or widowers left with small children today.
For example, people under 35 years of age who loses a spouse can get benefits if they have dependants. In today's world with the one-parent family having to pay additional costs for bringing up those children in a good and responsible way, people need this additional assistance. It is very important that this bill addresses that fact and that more money be placed in the hands of people when they are going through a traumatic part of their life, when they have lost their life partner and when they have children to raise strictly on their own. It is not an easy thing to face. However, it does give such individuals some hope and some encouragement when they realize that the Canada Pension Plan is there to help them out.
It is very important that this Parliament follow through on that great work introduced in this House by the Hon. Judy LaMarsh, since deceased, a great contribution to Canadian politics.
Under the current contributions the amount would diminish to six months by the year 2001.1 think I stated a while ago "in two years' time". If I did that is wrong. It should be that there would only be six months' benefits in the fund to pay out by the year 2001 instead of the present two years of $42 billion which are in there to pay for benefits.
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It is very important that any of these funds be kept constant and in good shape. We hear a lot today about the non-viability of pension funds. We know that these funds are looked at by financial experts. If these plans are not viable then the contributions have to be increased. If we want these kinds of benefits to continue in Canada, which I am sure everyone does, then we will have to pay for them.
It does not come at an easy time because of the economy and because of people having lost their jobs. The only hope that we have is at least these people are paying into something that they or their families will benefit from eventually.
For the provision of increased benefits for the 170,000 children of deceased plan participants, benefit amounts will rise as of January 1992 to $148 per month from $113. Those are some of the trends about which I spoke that are very necessary.
Other people have gone into the details of this. I will not repeat them because it would only be repetition.
However, I do want to say that my colleague from Winnipeg North brought in some very good amendments to this legislation. I think that when he tackled the reasons for receiving disability benefits as being if a person was in severe physical condition or had a prolonged medical condition, the words "severe" and "prolonged" are pretty nebulous terms. How do we define them when it comes to deciding whether or not a person gets a pension?
We know that in the committee stage those two words were changed to "significant medical condition" or to "an extended medical handicap". Those two are sort of generalized terms and do not mean very much when we are trying to make a decision. He brought in an amendment of course to define that much better, along with several other amendments. I compliment him on that.
I want to say to the government that this bill is certainly due. I thank the government for bringing it in at this time. It is not very often in this House these days that we can get some legislation that really fits the Canadian mould and that we can come to a good sense of agreement on. While we in the Official Opposition had
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some amendments to make and they were not adopted, I do not compliment the minister on that. I think the bottom line of this legislation is such that it makes the Canada Pension Plan viable today and right on into the future. That certainly should be the aim of every member in this House.
In conclusion, I want to say that a lot of people over the years have contributed very good ideas to the Canada Pension Plan. A lot of them have come from John Q public out there, people who come into our offices and make suggestions. I suppose they sometimes feel those ideas never get passed on or they are just talking to their member. I think it is important to note that in the committee stage some of those ideas did come out.
I know that I have certainly talked from time to time to various ministers about ideas that have been put forward.
I think that is very basic to any legislation in this House.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for your patience. I hope after this legislation is in place that we will not stop there, that we will be looking forward to more timely amendments along the way. Perhaps some of the amendments that we proposed during the course of this debate will eventually get adopted.


Rodney Edward Laporte: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to make a few brief comments with respect to this piece of legislation.
The Canada Pension Plan is one of the most important pieces of legislation that we have in our statutes today. It is certainly a piece of legislation that is there as a result of the long-standing efforts of the New Democratic Party which has always been in the forefront of social welfare for Canadians, of pensions, and of looking after the average Canadian.
The amendments that have been brought in with respect to this bill are important amendments. They are certainly amendments that this caucus can support and that I can support. There are other aspects of this legislation that need some attention soon.
In my riding I have a number of constituents who have come to my office concerned about the permanent disability aspect of the Canada Pension Plan. The definition of permanent disability is an extremely rigid definition. It is unfortunate that many Canadians who I think all of us would agree deserve to receive such a pension

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are simply not receiving one because the nature of it requires it to be permanent and longstanding.
I know there has been some discussion in this House about taking this matter back to committee to look at the ins and outs of this bill. I know there is a feeling on the part of a number of the members that the definition of the permanent disability aspect should be looked at to widen it and to include not only those who are permanently disabled but people who are disabled for a period of time and who may not be able to work for a period time and who are in a situation where they cannot work or are very limited in the work they can do.
As it stands now anyone who can do any type of work is prohibited from receiving a disability pension. That is an area that the New Democratic Party would like to see the minister and the health committee look at more closely.
The other aspect of the permanent disability part of the Canada Pension Plan has to do with time limits. To be eligible a person has to have worked two of the last three years or five of the last ten years.
Again I have situations in my own riding where people were injured ten years ago and only now do they realize they are permanently disabled and have made application. But because of the fact that they have not worked five years out of the last ten years, they are barred. That is unfair. There are situations where people who are disabled and unable to work have been trying to rehabilitate themselves and retrain themselves and have simply found that after an extended period of time and putting the effort into trying to make themselves gainfully employed again that it is simply impossible. They finally then turn to the Canada Pension Plan as a last resort only to find that the pension plan is no longer available to them.
That is unfair and that needs to be changed. It is unfortunate that was not addressed here.
I think the advantage of having the review of this bill and having this legislation before the House at this time is the fact that it has allowed members to highlight those points. I know there was a recommendation made by our health critic who indicated that he hoped there would be an extensive review of the Canada Pension Plan in committee so more recommendations would come forth.
I hope that happens because people in my riding would
appreciate a review of this legislation and would appreciate a more humanitarian approach to this legislation.
It is hoped that the Canada Pension Plan will stay in place as it is now and have the funds to afford to pay people who become deserving of the pension plan under all categories. Certainly the future of the fund and the contributions to the fund should be and need to be looked at very closely. Although there have been some changes there is still concern that in the future the Canada Pension Plan is going to be in some difficulty.
In closing, I would like to say that although this is a move in the right direction and is something we in the New Democratic caucus can support there is room for improvement, need for improvement and need for further discussion. Our caucus will be pushing very hard to have some of these items reviewed with the hope, the view and the desire that there will be further legislation introduced in this House to make the Canada Pension Plan a fairer and a more just plan for all Canadians.


Stan Kazmierczak Keyes: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the hon. member who has just addressed this particular bill.
I understand that there were a number of organizations that came forward to the committee and expressed concerns with the bill in specific areas that they had concerns with. A couple of them that I would be interested in are specifically the concerns they had about the definition of disability. Even more important are the conditions of receiving benefits, specifically the retraining or education courses which have been disallowed. I think this should be a consideration of just about any bill that comes forward to us in this House.
I wonder if the hon. member could address these particular areas of concern.


Rodney Edward Laporte: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the hon. member's question. Certainly he is aware that with respect to definition of permanent disability there has been a lot of concern and there is a need to revisit that definition to look at widening the definition of a permanent disability.
As it stands now, there are many people in this country who become injured and disabled who do not fit into this very rigid definition, yet we would all morally feel they
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would be entitled to some pension under the Canada financial footing. It is also to increase benefits for Pension Plan.	children. Then there are some minor amendments.
As the member knows, if a doctor says the person is available for light work, which is a fairly broad term, then that person is unable to receive a disability pension. Many times we have a situation where we have people who are struggling to maintain themselves and struggling through taking jobs which they had never been trained for and had never participated in in their entire life. They are forced to attempt to painfully employ themselves in some occupation simply to maintain themselves when we would all agree that the person should not be working and certainly should be under the Canada Pension Plan.
I know we all have cases like that. One of the things that is important has been mentioned by many groups and by my hon. friend and members of his caucus and our caucus. It is that we have to revisit the definition of permanent disability to widen it and make it fairer and more just.
As far as retraining goes, that is another area that should be looked at in the sense that there are a number of people who become disabled and may not be able to engage in their occupation but who still want to contribute to society. We have a duty I would suggest as legislators to do what we can to ensure that those people can be retrained for positions that are going to allow them to contribute and to feel good about themselves and to offer something to this country. That is another area that needs to be looked at very closely and needs to be revisited and revised.


Robert Daniel Nault: Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure this afternoon to enter into the debate on Bill C-39.
First of all I want to come at this from a somewhat different perspective. I want to deal with two major items in the time that I have. Before I do that, I want to just maybe outline to my constituents and to people who are watching what we are talking about here today, and that concerns the proposed changes to the Canada Pension Plan and its effect on our constituents.
It is well known to those of us in this place that the purpose of the changes to the Canada Pension Plan in essence is the intent to keep the plan on a sound
The major amendment is that the bill proposes an increase of $35 in benefits for dependent children of disabled and deceased contributors. This is a very admirable proposition. Obviously the main purpose-and it is well-known for those of us who are in committee dealing with C-39-is that in order for the position of this particular plan to be in a solvent situation, there have to be some increases in the premiums to Canadians simply because there was a miscalculation of just how many people would be paying into the plan. There was also a miscalculation of how many children, in the long term, in the 25 years of the program people would be having. Therefore, when they miscalculated, they had to revisit it every five years in order to put themselves back on a proper financial footing and back on track.
I say that just so people are aware that is the main reason why we are here today. Something else which is of importance to us all is there has to be some confirmation by the provinces that they approve of the amendments and the changes. That has also been done. The provinces unanimously have said that they approve of the changes to the plan and therefore everything is in place. After this bill has passed in this place, goes to the Senate, is approved and given Royal Assent the changes should be put in place by January 1, 1992.
One of the things in the committee that we dealt with was the difficulty that we are having with the plan as it is now. The issue of accessibility to CPP disability pensions was discussed at length. I want to tell you as a member of Parliament who deals with a lot of these issues on a day to day basis in my constituency it is a very frustrating issue to deal with in the sense that the definitions of the CPP have got to the point now where it does not reflect the realities of a modem Canada and of a modem world.
Because of those changes that are necessary to make this plan more accessible and make this plan more effective for all Canadians, we had hoped that during this process of the normal mandatory five-year review that they would also look at making those significant changes, for example in the definition of what is considered to be an appropriate definition of who is disabled and who is not.

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The reason why I bring that to your attention today, Madam Speaker, is because we have on numerous occasions had difficulties in our constituencies with individuals who basically in a plan on the provincial side or in a private plan have had the ability to collect disability insurance. But on the Canadian side, which is the Canada disability plan, they do not meet the criteria in some instances. Therefore, it is not consistent with plans across the land.
It is very important for members of Parliament and very important for provincial members of provincial parliaments to try and put into place programs and planning that meet and go in the same direction. One of those areas is the fact that we do have the ability in the province of Ontario through workers' compensation to allow someone to collect a disability while at the same time go into rehabilitation or to indeed go into training while they are collecting. In our federal plan on the Canadian side of things, we do not have those abilities. So we are at loggerheads as to what our intent is and what our approach is and how we are trying to get some sort of training over a long period of time for the people that we consider to be disabled in this instance. They may have to go to a post-secondary institution and start all over again and take a four-year course. But during that process, they do not qualify to collect CPP because of the definition.
The definition of "disability" was discussed and mentioned at committee. I think it is important for us to read the definition. One of the first areas is what they classify as the two main tests under the CPP definition. One is "severe" and the other is "prolonged". Each test is taken separately based on the particular individual applicant.
A severe disability under CPP is defined as a disability which makes the person incapable regularly of pursuing any substantially gainful occupation. In essence that simply means in our plan in Canada that if someone wants to work somewhat part time, one day a week, sitting and watching as maybe a security guard at a department store, a very easy job as long as you do not have to chase the odd criminal, you could maybe do that as a disabled person or as someone who is incapacitated in a lot of other ways. That is something we should encourage.
We have to say to ourselves that we realize the amount of dollars we pay to disabled individuals are nowhere near enough to look after themselves in what is considered to be an appropriate manner. I think we should encourage people to go out and try to find part-time employment, even if it is one or two days a month, to get out and be active in the community and make a few dollars at the same time. I think we should encourage that. This definition severely restricts that.
The other part we thought we would discuss is prolonged. This means it is likely to be of long, continued and often indefinite duration or likely to result in death. Prolonged for me means any more than three or four months, six months or a year. That to me is prolonged in the sense of not being able to work. Because, as you well know, if you are not collecting any other forms of insurance you certainly cannot expect an individual to survive on no benefits at all for more than two or three months.
I think we should take a good look at that seriously to make sure we are not severely restricting those individuals who, as far as they are concerned at the moment they make their application, are incapable of doing the particular job they were doing and that somewhere down the line they will be able to improve on that. If we were serious about helping those who cannot help themselves in this land, we would make improvements to the definition as was mentioned by my colleague, the critic from our party, who has put in an amendment.
The first amendment basically suggests that we change the definition of severe and prolonged to significant and extended. Those substantial changes would give people the opportunity to make application in order that they can have some sort of income, because they are in essence disabled, and give them the opportunity to improve themselves somewhere down the line.
That brings me to the other issue that I think we missed the boat on in these amendments, and this is the opportunity under Bill C-39 to change the Canada Pension Plan. Bill C-39 should have dealt with something that we have been talking about in this House for many months. We are trying to focus the abilities of Canadians on retraining themselves. Under unemployment insurance we are now focusing more on UI, taking UI funds and putting them into training components in order for people to train themselves and to get accustomed to the fact that in a more global society it should
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be accepted that they will have to be retrained two and three and four times in their lifetime.
On the one hand we are focusing on that regard with our training dollars under the Unemployment Insurance Act, but on the other hand we are suggesting to the disabled that if they have some sort of commitment in their own mind and do not want to continue to be on disability for the rest of their lives, they will not be able to take the opportunity and avail themselves of some sort of other education, some other training that will make them able to go back into the work force at a later date. That is completely contrary to what we talk about in this House.
In essence what we are suggesting to people is that once you get CPP then you better stay on it because the moment that you have any ambitions of trying to get off it and improve yourself, you will be removed from your benefits under this particular act. That is obviously the wrong message for the government to be sending.
In my constituency, as I said before, we deal with a lot of cases which are very frustrating in that applicants were not aware of the program, were not aware that they met the criteria of the program and were not aware that if they applied they would be eligible for CPP.
My colleague from Winnipeg North has put forward an amendment which would focus the government's attention on the fact that all Canadians should be aware of these kinds of programs. Simply because of the necessity of the credits that are involved in the CPP program, the longer they wait the more chance there is that they will not qualify. Therefore they will be left in a lot of cases, the senior population in this country, without any kind of benefits at all, without any kind of disability insurance.
I would think that the government and the communications networks in this country today could easily rectify that situation. That could be done very quickly. I would suggest to them that this is a good opportunity to send out the message to Canadians that we are open, above board and prepared to tell them exactly what these programs are, what the benefits are that they can receive. By doing so we would not run into the cases, as members of Parliament like myself and others are
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running into, of those who come into our offices and find out that they have missed the deadline, that they no longer qualify because the period for application has lapsed. It is a tragedy when someone comes into our office. We know they qualify. They were not made aware of the program but there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can be done. I would suggest to members opposite that small change would go a long way to improving this particular program.
There is another change that some members in this place have considered to be of a positive nature. I am not quite sure that is the case at all. For example, they are suggesting that the one-year appeal process at the first stage of the appeal be reduced from one year to three months.
In most cases that I have dealt with in my constituency these individuals are not even aware because of the lack of documentation of whether they will be able to appeal. They are still in the process in most instances of trying to get rehabilitation under the Workers' Compensation Board. They are still in the process of dealing with the belief in their own minds that they can still work, that they can still be productive individuals. They want to continue to make the kind of living they were accustomed to before the difficulties which caused them to come to their members of Parliament to apply for CPP.
There is one positive aspect of changing the one year to the three months. At the same time it was suggested under the act and with the changes the government is proposing that they could write to the minister and the department and ask for an extension. What will take place now because of this change from one year to three months is that we will as a normal course as members of Parliament ask for an extension the moment the person walks in the door. It is an indefinite period as far as the act is concerned, with these changes. Now the individuals will be protected as they go through the process of trying to find whether they can be rehabilitated under WBC or whether they can be retrained to do something else under a training program from the province of Ontario.
In the meantime they will ask their members to focus on making sure they still have the ability to appeal the whole process down the line if so necessary.

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I do not know if people consider changing the one year to 90 days as an improvement. The government has said in its documents and communiques that this will speed up the process. However, I doubt that very much. When people do know about the program, if they are fortunate enough to know, the only reason they do not apply right off the bat is because they are not sure they are disabled yet and are still waiting to go through the whole process with their doctors, their employers and with the WCB. Once they are sure that they have complied with all those requirements then they will apply.
There was a legitimate reason for the previous government to have the one year figure in there. As far as I am concerned, it made a lot of good sense.
I want to wrap up my remarks by saying to my constituents that in essence the $35 that we are giving in benefits to the dependent children of disabled and deceased contributors moves the cost up when all is said and done, with the increases that are to be forthcoming because of inflation, to roughly $144 to $150 a month. Not a lot of money but I think it is an improvement.
I want to say to the government that I am very pleased to see that it has recognized the importance of giving more dollars toward looking after our children. I am also very much in favour of putting this particular plan in its entirety on a good, strong, financial footing. I want to suggest to my constituents that we are quickly coming to the realization that there will be three workers paying for one disabled person in the years to come. That is going to necessitate a continual increase in the premiums Canadians will have to pay to keep this particular program running as smoothly as we believe it should, because of its necessity to those who cannot look after themselves.
The disabled and all those other Canadians who do not have their own pensions necessitates some sort of social security system. In order for us as parliamentarians and taxpayers to pay for these programs, we have to make some sense of how they work.
As I have suggested in this place before, when provincial programs reduce the amount they contribute to an individual, the moment the federal House increases the
amounts of dollars we are putting toward the individual's pension, it really resolves nothing.
We are asking in another amendment that has been put forward by my colleague from Winnipeg North that there be some sort of negotiated settlement between the provinces and the federal government to ensure that when, for example, we increase the $35 to dependent children the government of Ontario does not turn around and cut back a particular social program it has for those same children. That in essence leaves them getting exactly the same money before we stood up in this place and started debating this whole issue.
That is the sort of situation that frustrates many people and causes cynicism in this land with regard to politicians because it makes no sense at all.
I want to assure you that my constituents will be very well informed of this change, as I am accustomed to doing with all pieces of legislation that directly affect my constituents. I will let them know of the changes so that they will be able to make the appropriate changes in their own lives and will be able to better understand what all this means to them beginning January 1, 1992.
Be assured that we on this side are going to continue to look at the difficulties this plan has caused our constituents. It is because of them that we are standing here debating these changes. If we continue to get the kind of dialogue and openness that we have had from our constituents about the severe difficulties that are encountered when they try to deal with CPP, we will eventually come up with a program that will not leave people in the lurch, not leave people on the food bank lines. We will make sure that we look after our senior citizens and the disabled in this country in the way that we expected that we should look after them.
I appreciate the opportunity to make these comments today.


Don Boudria: Madam Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak this afternoon on this very important topic, the amendments to the Canada Pension Plan.
The Canada Pension Plan for me as a rural member of Parliament is probably, apart from unemployment insurance, the greater part of the workload of my constituency office. I would not say the more frustrating part of the
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workload because no one can possibly match the mess caused by the immigration department, but that is a matter which we will discuss at some other time.
The Canada Pension Plan is something that does cause an enormous amount of activity in many constituency offices of members of Parliament, and more particularly in mine.
One of the most frustrating things that we deal with, as members, is the delays, particularly with Canada Pension Plan disability benefits. I think this is as good a time as any to put that on the record and to ensure that the ministers across the way, the large number of them listening to this important debate, will take note of it, as well as their parliamentary secretaries and other MPs who are listening.
For my part, I find it unacceptable that a constituent who would apply for Canada Pension Plan disability benefits must wait for months and months and months. Finally some eight or nine months later they will get a form letter informing him or her that the Canada Pension Plan benefits have been disallowed because the particular affliction is not severe and prolonged.
It is a form signed by some sort of a computer graphic affair that no one has seen and it takes the better part of a year to receive that refusal. Then the constituent appeals. They often visit the MP's office and we go through their initial application with them, when they have the initial application. This is another matter, as doctors fill those forms out and do not give a copy to their patients. If any doctors are out there listening, the biggest favour they can do for their patients is provide them with a copy of the application. Otherwise it has to be reconstructed in absentia.
In any case, several months later we try to discover where the application went wrong, many times of course without the benefit of the original application and without knowing what the doctor put in the bloody thing. How can one challenge what was said when one does not know what was said? Obviously one cannot do it very well.
Members ask the patient if they know what their doctor said and so on, refer them either back to the same doctor or to another doctor and say: "Get an updated medical opinion. Perhaps your situation has worsened since then" and so on. We get the second opinion, accompany it with a letter and send it off on behalf of the constituent. Then we wait. We wait six months, a year. Finally 18 months later the constituent gets a hearing. Of
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course the hearing is always months after that too. Then they go through this second exercise and sometimes they fail again, sometimes they succeed. I see the minister sitting across the way listening to this speech. He was Minister of National Health and Welfare for a good period of time. I remember writing to him on numerous occasions about constituents who had waited for long periods of time and never were able to get benefits from the Canada Pension Plan system.
There are also those cases of people who fall between the cracks. I asked my staff to send me a few examples of such cases. Of course I am not going to name the individuals because I did not seek their permission ahead of time. However, I do have an individual whose case I appealed for her and eventually lost. This particular case involved a woman whose husband had become severely handicapped to such a point that the husband could no longer live at home.
To make a long story short, this particular gentleman eventually passed away. When his wife tried to collect the survivor's benefits from Canada Pension Plan, she was refused. The refusal was on the basis that they were not married. That should not have made any difference. They were living together common law, had two children who were teenagers, and she was the only spouse of that particular person. In other words, there was not a competing claim on behalf of anyone else or anything like that.
The good people at Canada Pension Plan said: "At the time of the death you were not living together". That might have been true but that was because they were not in a condition to live together. One person had become severely handicapped and could no longer live at home. They said: "Well we are sorry, but if you were not married and you were not living together at the time of the death, you therefore do not qualify for benefits". That is a silly argument.
I fought this case and I lost. I lost even though in this particular case the name of the husband and wife was on cheques coming from the same department for child benefits. The baby bonus cheques had the name of both partners. In other words, Health and Welfare Canada said with the right hand: "Yes, you are the parents of these children. Yes, we recognize both of you as being spouses for the purpose of administering the family unit insofar as the child benefits are concerned". However on the other hand: "No, when the husband dies you are not

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spouses in terms of receiving Canada Pension Plan benefits".
How does that make sense? The rationale given to us when we lost the case was simply that the wording was different, the definition of spouse under one act is not necessarily the same definition of spouse under the other act.
Madam Speaker, I do not know about you, but when I go home at night my wife does not seek to determine under which particular act we are spouses and under which we are not. We usually consider ourselves to be the same regardless of which legislation we happen to be discussing.
That is one problem with this legislation that perhaps has not been discussed extensively. There needs to be a clarification of a lot of the language, particularly as it involves the administration of various programs under the same government department, not only under the same government but under the same government department.
I have another case which I would like to bring to the attention of the House. This particular person is a gentleman who was self-employed for many years and eventually became disabled and could no longer be employed in any way, shape or form. Canada Pension Plan examined his case and said: "Yes, you are disabled. Yes, your disability is severe. Yes, your disability is prolonged. No, you are not going to get a pension". When asked why he was not going to get a pension, the gentleman said: "Canada Pension Plan said I have not contributed five of the last ten years". We looked at the situation. We looked at the income tax returns of the gentleman and he had contributed in all those years.
But, do you know what happened, Madam Speaker? The last year that he worked he only worked about two weeks in that year. Because the contributions he made, and he did make them, to the Canada Pension Plan were less than a particular amount the income tax department had refunded them to him. It was totally beyond his control. He had contributed the requisite number of years. He was disabled, severe, prolonged and all that good stuff, and was still unable to collect the benefits even though he had qualified and made all the right contributions.
Why? It was because Revenue Canada has given him his contributions back. Did he ask Revenue Canada to give those contributions back? No. Did he know he got the contributions back 11 years prior? Obviously not, but he had and he was disqualified.
That is another case of a person falling between the cracks. I know. I lost that one as well and I defended him personally. Those are only a few cases of how people fall between the cracks of a system like that, a very complicated bureaucracy.
I say this to the government across the way. [Translation]
I am very glad that it has finally increased the benefits under the plan, but we should not pretend that raising these benefits solves all the problems, Madam Speaker, as our colleague from Winnipeg pointed out to us in several amendments he proposed. We should amend the bill some more. This does not mean that we in the Liberal Party are against the amendments presented by the government, but there must be more. I do not have to give a whole list; my colleague from Winnipeg has already done so. We would have liked the government to adopt many of the amendments we proposed. Unfortunately they did not, Madam Speaker, but I must still admit that the bill goes in the right direction.

I have a final concern about how the Canada Pension Plan works in its entirety. It is a worry I have and have had for some time as a former member of a legislative assembly of one of the provinces of this country, namely the province of Ontario. I cannot help but think that there is something not quite right when provinces can borrow money from the contributions of taxpayers for less than what the money is actually worth. In other words, they are borrowing that money at reduced interest rates to fund their provincial operations.
I see my colleague from Oshawa over here. He will remember our years in the legislature when we used to raise the issue there as well about how Canadians were contributing toward that plan. The provincial government would go into the plan, raid the coffers of it and borrow the money at subsidized rates and then never pay it back. There is a tremendous concern there. I would hope that members do raise that; perhaps not only in the context of this bill but otherwise. It is, as I say, something
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that all of us in Parliament should think about very seriously.
If it was to be done over again, and I know this plan has been in existence for many years now, I wonder whether the wise thing to do would not have been to do something totally different. You could take those pools of funds within regions. You could not put this in one massive fund. There would be just too much money in it. It would be an amount that would be too large to be manageable. Within regions, perhaps provinces or even smaller units, we could have these pools of capital that could be invested in various businesses or other areas in order to yield a profit. That profit could be pooled together with the funds and then we could pay contributions to the people when of course they qualified to get them. I suppose that is water under the bridge. The system has been with us for some 25 years or so.
I come back to the concerns that I have expressed earlier. I want to indicate to the government that in addition to the amendments it has brought forward it should as well include either in this law or subsequent legislation amendments such at those that have been proposed by my colleague from Winnipeg. It also needs to co-ordinate the procedures within the department in order to shorten those delays which are totally unreasonable at the present moment.
We are talking in this bill about shortening the period of time that an individual has before he or she can launch an appeal. There is nothing in the bill that says that the government must respond within a certain number of days and if it does not there is a deemed benefit on the part of the individual. If the onus is applied to the individual taxpayer maybe the government should also be subject to it as well. That would light a fire under the chairs of whoever is responsible for some of these delays.
We need to ensure that we take all those pieces of legislation that have definitions or are outright silly or even different in the way that I have described with this one case about this woman who was the spouse of an individual. She had raised the family of this individual
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who had been ill for most of the life of the children they had had together. But because he was living in an institution at the time of death they could not draw benefits because they were not living together and they were unmarried at the time that he died. These kinds of rules, particularly when the rules are different within the same department, have to be wrong. I could even say asinine. That is probably more the expression that comes to mind.

So, Madam Speaker, I too was pleased to take part in this debate this afternoon. With my colleagues, I again tell the government that it should have listened to the advice of the hon. member for Winnipeg North, who of course wanted to offer many amendments to improve this modification that the government has before us today.


Ethel Dorothy Blondin-Andrew: Madam Speaker, I am honoured to rise in the House today to speak to Bill C-39, an act to amend the Canada Pension Plan, the Family Allowances Act and the Old Age Security Act.
I come from a part of the country where the impact on every member of our community, on every family member, is very pervasive. It hits everyone in the community and in the family. This particular legislation is very important and touches the lives of many people.
It is most unfortunate that the amendments sought were defeated and were disallowed. This would have enhanced the legislation significantly and would have accommodated many of the concerns raised by witnesses who appeared before committees of the House of Commons. These witnesses came forward and put a human face to the problems that are experienced because legislation is regressive and perhaps not as helpful as it would be had these particular amendments gone forward. Motion No. 2 was disallowed. It asked that Bill C-39 be amended to strike down the deadline for the filing of applications irrespective of the mental capacity of the patient. It would have enhanced the lot of many individuals who have major concerns across this country.

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We have to commend the members from Winnipeg North and Hamilton Mountain for their work on this legislation, as well as the government for this important bill. I want to address the bill from a slightly different direction, in my case as it affects seniors in the north, as it affects women in the north and the benefits to which they are entitled, as it affects the whole issue of poverty in the north and as it affects those northerners who are disabled.
The three most serious issues facing seniors in the Northwest Territories have to do with adequate housing, with the low fixed incomes and basically perhaps the abuse of elders. This is not by all individuals but it is a specific problem which I think needs attention and which is being expressed by that particular constituency.
The north faces many challenges today. One of the most serious is how we can ensure that our seniors in the north are taken care of at a time when the federal government is withdrawing financial commitments to its share of social and health programs. It is a fact that over the last week there has been publicity in the north that the government is withholding $50 million in transfer payments from the territorial government that would go toward health care programs. This has a direct impact on the elders, the people who are most vulnerable and need this assistance, and the people who would benefit greatly from the particular resources that are being withheld.
I have to say that I had the opportunity in the past to work with many of our senior citizens. In working with the senior citizens and with a group of other people at the grass roots level, I had an opportunity a number of years ago to work with 38 senior citizens and numerous others to help assist in putting down their stories about their lives. It is a real tribute to have worked with a couple of people, one by the name of Margaret Thom and another by the name of Tessa Macintosh, on elders in the north in a book called Nahecho Keh which we produced. It expresses all of the concerns that the elders have in terms of their lives and the struggles that they endure. We produced that book because we believed that our elders reflect through their infinite wisdom what values and principles are important for our survival in modern day society.
Housing is the number one issue facing seniors in the Northwest Territories. How does any kind of legislation relate to housing when you are on a fixed income and when you have a lot of encumbrances in terms of trying to achieve any gains you would make through getting your pension and you have all of these obstacles in front of you? One of the problems you would find difficulty with is if you do not have money for housing on fixed incomes. It is very expensive in the north. It should be noted that housing is also the number one health priority, a basic right taken for granted by most Canadians.
I am especially pleased to be talking about the issues related to health because it happens that people responsible for mental health are meeting in Ottawa to discuss this serious issue over the past week. Yesterday I met with our representative, Barbara Hood Hall, about the serious mental health problems in the north. Mental health is our number one health problem. As I mentioned earlier one of the causes of this illness like other illnesses in the north is poor housing. It is not unusual to have as many as 16 people living in a poorly ventilated, substandard home. The chronic housing shortage is a major obstacle to combating infectious diseases which plague many of our elders, particularly tuberculosis and respiratory infections.
A priority for the seniors in the north is the requirement for facilities in the communities with individual accommodations. There are some senior citizens homes in the north in communities like Fort McPherson, Aklavik, Inuvik, in the Mackenzie Delta region particularly, in Fort Rae, Fort Providence and Yellowknife.
There are 23 other communities where these facilities are still required, so housing and accommodation is definitely a problem for these senior citizens. Many seniors are living in public housing and are required to pay at least $150 rent, not including utilities.
The problem with this situation is that 85 per cent of the seniors in the north are on fixed incomes. The average fixed income for seniors in the north with old age security, the guaranteed income supplement and territorial supplement is only $850 a month. This monthly income is for residents living in communities where the cost of living is 30 to 60 per cent higher than the cost
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of living in southern centres such as Edmonton, for instance. This means that the majority of senior citizens in Canada's north live below the poverty line.
For the most part, disabled people in the north who are affected by this bill, like the senior citizens in the north, face a greater risk of poverty than others because of unequal opportunities, discrimination, lack of recognition for the work they do, higher living costs and inadequate income support.
Many senior citizens are solely dependent on their pension plans and the money they get from their pensions through work because many of them share their moneys with the people who live in their family as a result of the extended family situation. They share their incomes with their sons and daughters, their grandchildren and other relatives. This is not an income to support one individual or two but, in a situation where there is high unemployment, to supplement the whole family's well-being.
The whole issue of poverty is another one that is felt because of the impact of this legislation not being so amended. The anti-poverty organization has identified one in four Canadians over 65 years of age as living below the poverty line. The risk of poverty is greater for women over 65 years who live alone or with non-relatives. Over 50 per cent of these women live in poverty, compared to 23.9 per cent of men. People who have contributed to the building of this country, who have put most of their life's work into building communities and sustaining families for the betterment of our community deserve much better than this. No one should have to live below the poverty line, but that is not the reality of our country.
I would also like to add that census figures show that while two out of five Canadians who had incomes in 1985 received less than $10,000 the percentage is much higher for northern Canadians, for disabled people, for aboriginal people including Metis and on-reserve Indians- almost 55 per cent.
Northerners, and particularly seniors, can testify that income is shared veiy unequally in Canada. In the 1990s our elders, our senior citizens, do not choose poverty. It is imposed on them. Similar to that of Canadian children who live in poverty, I personally believe that it is the most horrendous issue in Canada today. The homeless
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and the hungry are a legacy of this country that we cannot afford when we have a reputation in the world of being one of the best countries to live in. The elders and the children of the poor are the most helpless victims in existence, and for me it is a national shame.
Not only are our elders victims of poverty but increasingly there is another problem. It is very difficult, controversial, and provocative to speak of it but more senior citizens are victims of abuse. I am talking about physical abuse, neglect, financial exploitation and psychological abuse. Our elders, our senior citizens, are being abused because they are vulnerable, primarily through their age. Elder abuse has probably taken place all through history but finally it is getting public attention. Like people who are disabled, seniors are abused because they have to depend on others to provide them with care. They are not only being abused by members of their family but they are susceptible to violence by neighbours, care givers, strangers and relatives. It is indeed a difficult subject to speak of. It is one that we would not believe but it is a fact that it exists. Statistics suggest that family violence, including that against elders, is more prevalent in aboriginal communities than in other communities. It is not a statistic that I, as an aboriginal person, like to quote but it is indeed a fact.
Knowing the issues facing seniors, disabled people and aboriginal Canadians, it is our utmost responsibility to provide the financial support for the programs and services that will benefit these important but vulnerable members of our society.
I want to conclude by paying tribute to all those care givers in the north, the employees or family members who are providing essential care for our senior citizens.
I would like to tell the members of the House that there are two seniors from Yellowknife who have given their entire life to look after others: those who are homeless, those who are poor and needed to get out of the cold. It is not desirable to be out and homeless in the north at 40 below. It is indeed a sad thing.
Ruth and Gordon Bailey opened their home in Yellowknife for years to strangers and friends who needed care. Now Mrs. Bailey is suffering from poor health and they have moved to another community, but they are still active in the church and community programs. If we were all as committed to enhancing the quality of life as

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the Baileys have been, we would have a nicer and safer country.
It is incumbent upon us, as lawmakers, to ensure in whatever way we can that we create the best legislation for the people that need our help the most.


Russell Gregoire MacLellan: Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to speak on Bill C-39. I think it is a very important bill.
As we study and look at this bill we realize the significance of this bill, particularly that of the Canada Pension Plan and the other benefits we have in this country.
This is an act to amend the Canada Pension Plan, the Family Allowances Act and the Old Age Security Act, primarily with concern to increasing the contributions so that the fund will be sufficient. I think that we may lose sight of some of the things that really need to be done.
I want to thank my colleagues, the members for Hamilton Mountain and Winnipeg North, who have done a great deal of work on this. Not only have they done a lot of work but they are very compassionate people. Therefore, the work they have done has been very relevant. It reflects what we in this party want to get across with respect to the importance of this legislation and the importance that the people in this country are placing on this legislation.
Certainly the most important aspect today, as far as I am concerned, is the Canada Pension Plan disability. It is the one that Canadians seem to know the least about, mainly because if we are talking about the Canada Pension Plan it is generally well known that you receive it when you are 65, or if you qualify you can receive it at 60 with a reduced amount, there are also survivor's benefits and various other aspects of it. People are also familiar with the very important old age security and also with the augmentation and with the capital cost allowance.
I would say that the one that people know the least about is the Canada Pension Disability Program. That is because most Canadians have been blessed with good health. They have been able to carry out their employment without the necessity of having to worry about the
future, without the feeling that at some point soon they are going to have to cease work.
Of course, this does not take into consideration the ones that lose employment because they are laid off, because there are plant closures or because they are in areas of this country which are economically depressed. I am talking about the ones that have jobs they think will continue but because of health problems they are unable to continue their employment. This is a very tragic situation because I do not think, regardless of what anyone says, that a person wants to give up his or her employment. It is a very important part of not only their income and their every day schedule but of their dignity.
To be able to work and have gainful employment is a major factor in the profile and attitude of Canadians. When one has to give up this job, it is a very traumatic time.
I know because in my area the unemployment rate is approximately 35 per cent. The employment basically is heavy industrial. It is mainly coal mining and steel making. There are a lot of industrial accidents in which people are injured, sometimes at a very young age, and unable to carry on their employment.
Had this Canada Pension Disability Program not existed there would not be an income for them and their families. I do not know how my area would survive even to the extent it has at the present time.
I want to ask the government to try to imagine the ramifications of this program and the good that it does, to try to imagine the people who benefit from it and the regions of this country that are benefiting from it.
As well, I want to say to those that look at public servants as people who are uncaring and who disregard the needs of others that frankly the experience I have had with the public servants in the Pension Benefits Section, and particularly Canada Pension Disability, has been excellent. I found them to be a very caring, very efficient group of people.
When they are here in Ottawa, with jobs and good health, one would expect that there may be a tendency to forget those that are having health problems and are unable to work, that there would be a tendency to say: "Well, this person is not that badly hurt" or "That person is not that sick, I think they are really elaborating on the health difficulties that they have".
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Although you may get some of that, most of their concerns are of a very caring nature. They are to be commended for the work they have done.
That being the case, what they are doing with this program is the best they can with the program as it now exists. There are problems with this program that frankly should be addressed. The member for Winnipeg North has mentioned a few of them. In fact, he and the member for Hamilton Mountain proposed certain amendments at report stage which were defeated.
That is unfortunate because I think those amendments were very worth-while amendments and could have added a lot to this program.
In one he mentions that in most cases, the standard procedure in turning down somebody for Canada pension disability is to say that their injury or sickness is not severe and prolonged. That is a very nebulous statement. As the members for Hamilton Mountain and Winnipeg North have asked: "How do you determine what is severe and what is prolonged?" It is extremely difficult to do because it is a subjective test determined by those that are judging the person.
If the person is in my riding, they are on Cape Breton Island and the people doing the judging are here in Ottawa and have not seen the person. Certainly, if the applicant is turned down in appeals and is turned down a second time, then on the third time around the applicant is examined by the doctor of the government, in which case the people here in Ottawa have a common denominator.
The problem then is that probably over a year has gone by and the applicant has no income with which to support himself or herself or his or her family. It really depends on this objective test. In that case I feel that the public servants here in Ottawa have been basically fair. I know that it is not entirely their determination because we do not have a definition of what is severe and prolonged. The problem now is that the tendency to say "severe" and "prolonged" is something that is going to actually be an incapacitation for an ever longer period of time, and that "severe" is a sickness or an injury which can be in some cases that the person is not able to move.
Along with the statement that the injury must be severe and prolonged one gets in one's rejection letter from the federal government the statement that this person is capable of doing light work. That is awfully
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difficult to take for some person who has a back problem who cannot even sit down and they cannot stand for long periods of time. To say that light work is going to be able to help or that they would be able to do light work is really not being fair to the applicant. I think this approach has got to be changed considerably.
Furthermore, in areas of high unemployment, where are you going to find any kind of work, let alone light work? As you know, Madam Speaker, in companies where there are jobs that are perhaps not too onerous, there are a lot of older workers who perhaps have a minor disability or a minor health problem who are given some of these jobs. For those who really have a major disability or a major health problem, there are no jobs. They cannot after they are 35 today go and apply for another job because they are considered to be too old. There are no jobs for them in other industries, that is if there are jobs that exist which in many parts of this country there are not.
I think that attitude about having to look at the person as being able to carry on light work is something which is very unfair. It puts the applicant in a position of feeling that the government feels that they are trying to put one over on them. I think that is unfair. It only adds to the mental problem that a person has when they come to grips with the fact that they have to apply for Canada pension disability.
Our party has defined what is severe as stating it is a person unable to do his or her usual type of job without mental or physical strain and preventing the person from fully discharging duties of that job as determined by a licensed medical doctor. We define "prolonged" as being three months or more of continued disability. I think these would be major improvements if they would be adopted by the government.
It would also downplay this belief that they could do a type of light work which in most cases they cannot, even if they could get the employment.
Suppose a person receives the Canada Pension Plan disability benefit. It may be after a year, it may be after two years if they have to go through two appeals and are examined by the doctor of the federal government. It may take two years. In this case they receive a cheque which goes back four months from the time they first applied. In the meantime they may not have had any income at all unless they were obtaining assistance from

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welfare. That being the case, they are in a very difficult financial position.
I think there has to be some way of making it easier for the applicants to have some funding. I think this should be discussed with the provinces to allow for community services to perhaps be a little more lenient with these applicants while they are waiting.
It is not a risk to the federal government because if the person is successful in getting Canada pension disability, the province has a claim on the amount that they have paid in community benefits while the person was waiting. The province is reimbursed and the federal government does not have to pay any more. It does allow the applicant to have something in the meantime. This could be a long period of time without significant funding.
The other thing is that when the applicant is successful and is paid, of course the province is always there to make sure it gets its money back. If the federal government decides it wants to increase the amount it is going to pay the Canada pension disability recipients then the provinces decide that they are going to reduce what they are paying.
Consider the person who is on disability, is married, has children and the Canada pension disability is not going to be satisfactory to look after his needs. He is getting some assistance from the province but as the amount the federal government pays is increased, the province in turn reduces its assistance by the same amount. Therefore, the person cannot get ahead.
I would ask the federal government and the provinces to get together on this question so that when an increase is given the applicant gets the benefit of this increase.
I would also like to say that we must not forget families. Quite often when the applicant is on disability there are family members who are affected as well. Usually they are wives and children who must try to make do with the smaller amount the family will be receiving after the Canada pension disability locks in.
In the meantime there are the aspirations of the young people who want to attend university and to improve themselves. I do not think we can say that is not an important aspect. If we want our young people to be well trained and if the government is sincere about a higher
degree of education and preparedness for jobs in this country, then we have to look toward the sons and daughters of these recipients of Canada pension disability. We must make sure that these sons and daughters are not punished by the fact that their father or mother or sometimes even both through their diligent work and strong work ethic have become injured on the job. They find that their children are not able to receive sufficient education after that has occurred. I think there has to be some attention paid to that.
The plan says one has got to be able to do light work and that one can do light work. But it is not ready to allow the recipient to take further training or education to be able to upgrade himself or herself should the occasion allow it. This may happen even if it is an area in which they get this training and they can do this work without having to take Canada pension disability. If that is the case then the government is just defeating not only the purpose of the program and it is actually costing it more money, but it is taking away the opportunity of the individual.
I would hope that the government would look more favourably upon the recommendation of the members for Winnipeg North and Hamilton Mountain when they say that the applicant should be allowed to take training and to receive Canada pension disability until that training is finished and for a reasonable period thereafter to allow the recipient to be able to obtain employment. I think that is very reasonable and it would be helpful to all involved.
Canada pension disability may be the sole means of support for a family. Quite often when economic conditions become difficult it causes a great deal of stress on the marriage. Quite often there will be a marriage breakup, which is always very unfortunate. But wives do not know that they have rights and that they can be looked after. More and more women are realizing that they do not have to just be left penniless and that they can have some financial assistance. Unfortunately, under the Canada Pension Disability Program, their rights do not extend very far.
I would like to support what has already been recommended by this party in that the spouses on marriage breakup be able to be the beneficiaries of automatic splitting of the Canada pension disability benefits. That is if two people are separated or divorced, the wife has an
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automatic right to a certain percentage of that Canada pension disability.
Quite often the wife does not know that she has that right and many months and perhaps even years may go by before she realizes that the right exists. I think it should be retroactive and there should be a conscious program to make sure these women have the right to the automatic splitting of the benefits and that they are made aware of the rights they do have.
If we are going to do that and we are going to be fair then this is something we should work toward.
I think we have to look at this as a program that is going to become more and more important. We have an unacceptably high unemployment rate today. We have a lot of people who have worked very hard all their lives in jobs that have been very stressful and injurious to their health and who have received very serious injuries. We have young people who are looking for jobs who cannot get employment. I think that we have to take a very realistic approach to those who have suffered injuries. Instead of having them go through hoops to prove they do have a disability which warrants this kind of assistance from the program, we should be more receptive to giving them assistance. If they are on the program and a job is made available, then that job is made available for a younger person who is maybe just recently married and has a family and a mortgage and needs a job very, very badly.
I think we have to look very compassionately at this program and what it can do for Canadians. I would hope that the government will not try to squeeze this program because this program is one of the few sources of income that low income Canadians have. It is one of the few means with which low income Canadians can maintain themselves and their dignity in these times of decreasing employment opportunities, cutbacks in spending on housing and reduced unemployment insurance pay periods. We have got to maintain the dignity of Canadians and the opportunity for Canadians to have an income.
This is a very important program. When a person goes through this kind of stress of losing their employment through injury or mental distress then that in itself is a problem. We should not at the same time ask them to
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bend and to try to move heaven and earth to get the assistance under this program. I would hope that the government would be cognizant of what is going on out there and would be sympathetic and realize that this program is becoming, if it is not already, one of the most important social benefit programs that exists in our country.


David Charles Dingwall: Madam Speaker, I listened with considerable interest to my colleague from Cape Breton-The Sydneys and found his remarks to be rather appropriate indeed.
However, I wonder if I could make a few comments and then at the conclusion put a question to my colleague.
The member for Cape Breton-The Sydneys has served his constituency with great distinction for I think almost 13 years now. He is probably as well aware as those of us who represent constituencies in the various parts of this country. I am sure in that timeframe he has been made aware of numerous cases of individuals who have made application for Canada pension disability benefits and/or for Canada pension generally and that the timeframe which government has taken to process those claims has been inordinate. I am wondering if he has encountered the same kinds of cases that I have encountered. My constituency is geographically next to the hon. member's constituency. I find in my own riding that a number of applicants who are making these claims of the Government of Canada are having to wait in some instances three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen and eighteen months before there is a final adjudication as to whether or not there are any benefits which will be flowing the applicants. Thereafter the claimant has the appeal process, and that again will add another minimum of six months on his or her claim. I am wondering if the hon. member could respond to that question, whether or not he finds an inordinate amount of time in the processing of claimants.
Second, I am wondering, since the hon. member is the justice critic for the Liberal Party and a very able one at that, if he could perhaps give some consideration to whether or not due process is in fact being served when Canadians have to wait for such an inordinate amount of

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time to get a decision, presumably and preferably a positive decision as opposed to a negative decision.
I am thinking, for instance, of the principles of natural justice. How in the name of God can the Government of Canada make an adjudication on a claimant from Hamilton, Ontario when the claimant is not before the officials in Ottawa who are making that particular claim? I am wondering if perhaps the hon. member could give some thought to that.
Finally, my comment and question, which will be my third question, is about a concern I have when the Government of Canada increases benefits, and we will say a disability claimant. Let us say they reside in his constituency of Cape Breton-The Sydneys or mine of Cape Breton-East Richmond. It has been the practice under the government of the former premier, Mr. Buchanan, and certainly under the practice and under the leadership of Don Cameron, the Premier of Nova Scotia, that when benefits are given from Ottawa they taketh away in Nova Scotia.
We in the Parliament of Canada provide a benefit to the recipient only to find at the end of the day when the cheque is mailed to the recipient the provincial government comes in with a big claw and takes it. The benefit which is bestowed upon the recipient is a mere fraction of a cent, thereby precluding the individual of that benefit.
As the hon. member will want to attest to, we are not talking here about large sums of money, but the money which is going to the recipient is indeed large. I gave an example yesterday-and I am sure the Chair has read Hansard and has followed the debate very carefully-of the $45 a month or the $36 a month which works out to in excess of $400 a year which can pay the fuel bill, which can pay for clothes for children, for milk and bread, the necessities of life.
I find it unbelievable and unreasonable that the Government of Canada is not making certain that provincial governments are allowing that benefit to go forward, thereby not precluding the recipients of the benefit in its totality. Second, they are not expediting those claims which everyone knows are taking an inordinate amount of time.
With your permission, Madam Speaker, I would like to hear some responses from the hon. member who has served in this Chamber, is a very distinguished justice critic for the Liberal Party of Canada, and has great experience as it relates to Canada pension and the
various claimants who have made claims under that particular piece of legislation.


Russell Gregoire MacLellan: Madam Speaker, I would also like to thank my colleague, the member for Cape Breton-East Richmond, for the questions that he has brought forward. They are very important questions indeed, questions with which he has been confronted in his role as member of Parliament in that constituency, which like my own is unfortunately a constituency with a higher rate of unemployment than either one of us would like.
I want to address again the third point he made, that is that the province takes away the increase which the federal government puts on Canada pension disability from any assistance it gives. The federal government has said that it is going to look into this and it has said in the past that it would look into it. Still the process continues. It is very deflating for families with Canada pension disability and the assistance from the province not to see that increase when prices have been going up and costs have been going up. How are they supposed to be able to make ends meet? We have been asking that for a considerable period of time, but it seems that the governments will not come together and deal with it. I think the federal government has to try harder to get the provinces to agree on allowing that augmentation of the benefits to go through.
Also as my colleague has said, and rightly so, this is an infringement on the rights of natural justice and the rights of an individual to be able to support his or her family in this day and age. What we are seeing, frankly, is a terrible tendency that government is accepting that it is right to have two levels of Canadians. If you are healthy and you have a job, great, you are going to be all right. You work and you pay taxes. If you are unemployed, if you are disabled and cannot work, then that is tough. You drew the short straw. We will make sure the roof does not fall in on your head or we will keep you in bare essentials, but that is all we are prepared to do.
I do not think that is right. None of these people asked to become disabled. None of these people asked to have these health problems. In most cases they have been soldiering on in the job for a good period of time with this discomfort and this disability, just absolutely reluctant to the nth degree to go on this kind of assistance because they feel that it is embarrassing for them. They feel that they are just not the same person if they cannot have a job. Of course they look upon the funding they are going to get which in practically all cases would be
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well below what they would make when they were employed.
I want to go particularly to the first point the hon. member made respecting the process. I do not put a lot of blame on the public servants per se. I think it is the government that is really shortchanging the process in that if you apply for Canada pension disability it will tell you: "Don't expect to receive any word for four months". That is the starting point now. Four months is the time it takes for your file to get to the top. It evidently is a result of the fact that there are more people needed in dealing with this.
If you are unsuccessful you are told that perhaps your injuries are not prolonged or severe enough in nature, which is very subjective to say the least, and that you should try for light work that just does not exist in the hon. member's riding and in my riding. Then you go into an appeal process which will take probably another six months and, as my hon. friend said, it could take up to two years if you are turned down that second time before you go to the second appeal which would be the third level. At that point you are then told that you have to be examined by a doctor who would be a representative of the federal government.
In our area of Cape Breton the doctors that the people there have to visit are mostly in Halifax.
They have to get on a bus or a plane or get a drive and go to Halifax to be examined, at great inconvenience. They cannot go by train any more. That is gone. Perhaps in two years they are told whether their final request has been successful or not.
It is just not as good as it should be. The program is an excellent one, but the delivery is not efficient to the extent it should be. It is not in keeping with the dignity and the needs of Canadians.


Lloyd Axworthy: Madam Speaker, one of the advantages-and there are many of course-of coming near the end of a long parliamentary debate is that you have an opportunity to listen to the words of your colleagues. We are often told that
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Parliament is becoming irrelevant to the governing of Canada. I would argue strenuously with that assertion, having had the opportunity over the last several days to listen to the comments made by members of both sides of the House as they dealt with a very fundamental issue that everybody across this country regardless of what region you live in understands, and that is the need to have some sense of security as one gets into an older age and when one faces the sudden prospect of disability.
It has been for me a real learning experience listening to the experiences of constituents of Cape Breton, the constituents of the member from Saskatchewan. They were all talking about their kinds of difficulties and citing the problems faced by people in their own areas.
I only hope that this debate will be listened to. I only hope that we will understand this bill, which is what I call a fix-it bill, necessary to fix some clear problems that were appearing, particularly in the underfinancing of the Canada Pension Plan, has really through the dynamics of this debate generated a quite different perception and quite different understanding of what is going on.
If there is anything that should be taken from this debate, it is not so much the details of the particular bill or piece of legislation. It is that it has given an opportunity to open a window on the much broader range of anxieties and concerns about the level of the Canada Pension Plan.
It goes back to one fundamental issue. When the CPP was brought in there was a premise made, an assumption made, that there would be a much broader private coverage than in fact has occurred and that the CPP would almost be a supplementary benefit to the extensive network of private coverage. In fact the opposite has happened. We have not had the evolution of a broad based private pension plan system. There are pension plans there, but of course many of them are being eroded. As we go through this extended recession it happens even more frequently that pension benefits are being cut back and companies are moving.
I had a case in my riding just a few weeks ago. A gentleman lost his pension benefits because the company picked up its bags, moved south, and there was no obligation for it to continue paying benefits.

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There is serious undermining going on in the private pension field, which puts even more serious responsibilities on the public sponsored pension system.
I simply want to use this opportunity to draw the attention of members and hopefully of the government or a future government to the fact that the reform of the pension plan system has to go beyond just tinkering, fixing some immediate problems. We may have to come to grips with a level of pension benefits that will be available as each generation of Canadians reaches retirement age.
I have between 18,000 and 20,000 constituents who make less than $25,000 a year. If we use today's calculations by the National Advisory Council on Welfare, their pension benefits plus their old age and the old age supplement would still put them below the poverty line. There is not sufficient build-up of a pension benefit to the CPP and the old age security to ensure that they can look forward to their retirement with some sense of security. That is particularly a problem in the larger cities like Winnipeg or Toronto or Vancouver where costs are so much higher.
I would suggest that the problem is that we should be projecting the profile of what our Canadian population will look like 10, 15, 20 years down the road and designing our CPP to meet that problem so that future legislators will not have to scramble to face a much broader problem of large scale insecurity because we at the present time did not exercise our responsibility of stewardship to make sure that there would be enough of a benefit base to satisfy those needs.
Similarly I find it also of concern that the number of real problems that have been identified in the implementation and administration of the Canada Pension Plan are not being fully addressed in this bill.
The member from Cape Breton who just spoke detailed very clearly problems of delay, problems of adjudication, problems of getting proper processing of pension benefits and in many cases being caught with all kinds of inconsistencies.
I will give an example from my own riding, if members will bear with me. I had a very strong and I think eloquent statement by Mr. Gerald Kelly. He pointed out that for reasons totally beyond his responsibility he had to take early retirement on a government employment
pension. He had a tax liability of $8,000 at the time of his retirement. No effort of his, of mine or anyone else's was able to get the government minister to move on it.
We are finding the situation where people are let go at their employment for reasons of cutbacks, stringencies and the belt tightening that is going on. They expect to get their benefits, but because of the nature of their pay-out they now must assume a lump sum payment. In the case of Mr. Kelly it was almost $8,000. It is an enormous penalty to have to pay, because of someone else's decision that you are no longer a useful member of the work force.
That is not fair. It is something that could have been fixed as part of this over-all pension area or maybe it could be included when we look at the question of Public Service pensions. The fact of the matter is there are people hurting out there as a result of the regulations and the administrative procedures that have been set up that penalize people like Mr. Kelly.
Let me give another case history of Mr. Carleton from Kenniston Boulevard who has been a member of the armed forces for many years. He discovered on remarriage after the death of his first spouse that survivor benefits were no longer made eligible for him. Once again a citizen who has been paying into the CPP honestly over the years finds out that his family no longer has the protection it has the right to expect. Again there were all kinds of representations, all kinds of pleas, all kinds of adjudication, and once again a stone wall with no ability to make any changes in that kind of case.
By the way, I received probably one of the longest letters on record from the President of the Treasury Board trying to explain his way out. What I find hard to accept is that we will go to so much effort to find a tortuous answer as opposed to solving the problem of that individual.
I found it interesting to listen to the comments of our House leader in this debate yesterday when he spoke at the beginning of third reading. He talked about the fact that many of these things are easy to fix, if there was a certain flexibility of mind, if we were prepared to take the administrative problems and just face up to them as opposed to defending them. As he said, it is no wonder people get discouraged about government sometimes

when they get caught in this kind of administrative sea wall and no one is prepared to give them a helping hand.
Another interesting case has just come to my attention. It concerns a gentleman who wants to make contributions to a United Kingdom retirement plan so he can draw on it when he is retired at the age of 65. However, he is not allowed to take any tax deductibility for it. As he properly points out, he will get the full benefit and will not be a burden to Canadian society if he is allowed to make those extra payments for the next 10 years or so. Again the Minister of Finance says: "There is nothing I can do about it". Of course there are things he can do about it. Tb use that as an excuse is simply not acceptable. There are many things he could do about it if he wanted to.
I have a file full of cases but I will just use three or four examples to point out that there is a real need, and the debate has shown this clearly, for a much broader pension reform in this country, to deal with the broad issue of the sufficiency of the pension benefit itself as our population becomes older. It is necessary to take a hard and clear look to tackle that problem in an effective way. At the same time but on a different level, it is equally as important to deal with all these twists and turns in which people get caught in dealing with their fundamental problems of security.
Therefore, we have to use this debate as the opportunity to make that case. I can think of perhaps no greater contribution this Parliament can make to the people of Canada than to give them a degree of assurance about their security.
A few nights ago I had dinner with an old acquaintance who is a senior ad executive. I was asking him questions about how his own business was being affected by the recession and by what is going on. He gave what I thought was an interesting answer and it is pertinent to this debate. He said: "The problem is that people are so insecure that they are not going to purchase, that they are not going to be making a commitment to the future when they know that in some capricious way they are going to be laid off, lose their job, be on the cut-off roll, find themselves with a benefit cut away".
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I do not think members opposite realize what the cumulative effect of their eight year attack upon the social contracts of this country has really been. I do not think they fully comprehend the way in which it has changed people's perception of themselves and their role in society. We have spent a lot of years trying to build up a certain safety net, a social contract in which the fundamental psychology of security could be there so that people could become entrepreneurs, could become innovative, could take chances, could take risks, could invest, could feel that they have a real stake in this society. However, every time there is a claw-back, every time there is a cut-back, every time you niggle away at one or another of these benefits-transfer payments, children's benefits, family allowances-every time you attack it you are creating one more erosion in that sense of security, another sense of not knowing what the next day will bring.
That leads to a perception that makes people draw inward because they feel they have to protect themselves. That means that their best efforts and best energies are not used in an energetic contribution to Canada. That undermining of the Canadian sense that they are going to be looked after-not in a paternalistic sense, but that they have made a fair contribution and now they have a right to expect some benefit-has been, to my mind, one of the most damaging and eroding aspects of the last eight years. It is most always our seniors, who in many ways feel fundamentally betrayed.
It also demonstrates perhaps the most glaring problem that members on this side of the House have tried to bring to parliamentary and public attention over the last couple of months, and that is the condition of children. I listened in debate to the parliamentary secretary who talked in quite glowing terms about how this bill will add $35 a month to a dependent of someone on disability. She said how important that was but never recognized when she spoke that what she was really saying was what about all those other children in society who are not getting an extra $35 a month, who cannot get the $178 a month benefit, whose only support is the approximately $35 family allowance.
What struck me when the parliamentary secretary spoke on third reading and talked about this benefit for the dependants of those with disabilities was that she might have understood that she was talking about a problem that reaches out in a much broader way. One of the elements of security we have to begin to provide in this country is security for the family to provide a real

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foundation, a real anchor so that families can feel they are part of it, that every time they reach a crisis, whether an accident, a marriage breakdown, a sickness, an illness, or a problem, they are not going to fall between the cracks and end up homeless, at the food bank, or without the kind of support they need. It happens every single day. They are not being supported any more.
I hope that changes in terms of dependants of those who can get disability benefits will be of some help. I still feel anguish for many of those who have not had the same kind of attention paid to their problems in any piece of legislation in this House.
As we end this third reading and this legislation goes on the books and we pass on to something else, I hope that we will not forget the lesson, that we will not forget how members of this House of all three parties who count stood up and talked about the problems and anxieties facing their own constituencies: seniors without proper pension benefits, people with disabilities, spouses who go through marriage breakdown and do not get a fair share of the credits.
We also recognize that those problems must be looked at through a prism and the light must shine on a much broader spectrum of Canadians. That is what this is all about. Security is not welfare. Security is not a handout. Security is not paternalism. It is the bedrock upon which we build our economy. It is the bedrock upon which we build a society that feels confident about itself and feels that it cares for one another. That is the way in which we are going to become a new productive society.
The government is out consulting with its new paper on competition and productivity. I have read those papers carefully. Unfortunately it does not mention what perhaps may be the most important ingredient in becoming a productive competitive society, and that is a society that feels secure about itself, that knows how to take care of those who are less fortunate and uses the full talents of all its people.
You will never become competitive and productive as long as you keep treating people, to use the words of my colleague, as second class citizens.
I support this bill because it moves to fix pension plan problems and toward those with disabilities. I hope to God that we will take this bill and realize that we have an awful lot more work to do.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, every time I hear that my colleague from Winnipeg South Centre is participating in debate I try to get to the Chamber because if there is one individual in the House who has demonstrated an ability and a capacity to represent his constituents with vigour, enthusiasm and intelligence it has been the hon. member for Winnipeg South entre.
Not only has he been a very distinguished member of this House but he has served in other capacities as well in government and he has distinguished himself there.
He knows what he is talking about when he makes reference to some of the pitfalls of the Canada Pension Plan and when he draws to the attention of members of this House the inequities that are still within the system. I think he would concur with some of the very bright, articulate and enthusiastic members of the Public Service, but because of the restrictions of the law they lack the ability to rectify the errors.
The hon. member has made reference to the fact of flexibility in terms of resolving the difficulties. I think all members ought to concur with that. Flexibility is needed but what also is needed is some sense of discipline at the top when moneys are made available to worthy recipients as it will be in this particular case. In fact survivors will get an increase of roughly $35 for a total of about $420 a year. But we need flexibility in the Canada pension and we need discipline at the top.
You cannot ask a claimant to wait 12 months or two years or 18 months or 6 months before they get some sort of an answer. That is not flexibility. I am sure that the hon. member opposite who is a parliamentary secretary in his own right would want to stand and agree with me that that is gross negligence. It is not done by the public servants but by us, the lawmakers in Parliament.
I ask the hon. member if he senses any political will within the government to try to change these kinds of mistakes and errors. Has he sensed that? I have a tendency to believe whatever the response of the hon. member will be because of his distinguished track record in this House and because of the way he was represented


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his constituents both in government as well as in opposition.
While the hon. member is on his feet I am wondering if he could respond to another question as it relates to Bill C-39 and the consequential effects of Bill C-39 in terms of pension reform. I will conclude with this question. I know there probably would be a disposition within the House for me to continue but I will conclude with this question.
The hon. member knows very well that this is a time of great crisis and the recession has not let go. Canadians from coast to coast, in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan and the great province of Quebec, western Canada, Atlantic Canada and Ontario are feeling the crunch. Is it fair for governments to waver, sit on its hands and do very little if anything to assist claimants who are waiting in excess of 18 months in order to have their claims processed. I ask the hon. member: Is that fairness?


Lloyd Axworthy: Mr. Speaker, let me first say to my distinguished colleague about his very complimentary opening remarks that if he does not go to heaven for the virtue of generosity he may end up in hell for the sin of exaggeration.
I would say to him that I feel inadequate to answer his question because I think we all recognize that there is no one in the House more knowledgeable about pension reform than our hon. House leader. In his previous capacity he was critic for national health and welfare. I hope the hon. member recognizes and that all members recognize what a contribution the House leader of the Liberal Party has made. He not only contributed to this debate but also to the whole momentum toward changing pension reform. He is still on the barricade demanding that we fight against the real problems that exist.
What I tried to say in my remarks is that the inadequacy of the legislation does not just stem from the broad brush strokes of policy. It also stems from, as he properly said, an attitude of mind at the ministerial level. Recognizing the urgency and imperative of the times we live in, there is nothing to prevent any minister from organizing special procedures for processing applications, for streamlining applications or for ensuring that there is quick deliberation. It is simply a matter of will.
Government Orders
It is simply a matter of saying how we are going to do it and using the best resources in the Public Service to provide a case in point. I can recall when I was responsible for immigration and we had the problem of illegals. We set up a special system of adjudication. Various kinds of applicants and groups could come in and we would process thousands within a period of six months. It was a good committee.
It seems to me that the same kind of answer could be found today. I concur. In this case I think a little bit of joshing is necessary. I find the same problem. When it comes to dealing with pension problems, people see it as some kind of Gordian knot that has to be untied. They see it as some kind of crystal palace where people have to walk through the maze to kind of get an answer and never really find their way out.
It is the most tortuous thing to have a file of correspondence this thick on one pension case. I think every member in the House knows it is the same problem, that we bum up more paper and more time and more energy on one case as opposed to having some minister saying: "Look, part of my job, never mind being a partisan advocate or a member of the cabinet, is to sit down on some Friday afternoon with my top officials and say that we have a problem and let's clean it up. Let's fix the mess and get the administration streamlined". That is all we have to do.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. O'Kurley):: Is the House ready for the question?


Some hon. members:: Question.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read the third time and passed.
Albert Glen Cooper: Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I believe you will find in this magical place called Parliament that we could call it four o'clock.


Madam Deputy Speaker:: If there is unanimous consent for me to see four o'clock, four o'clock it is.
The House stands adjourned until Monday next at 11 o'clock a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 3.16 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Monday, December 2, 1991