1992-03-23

Mrs. Marlene Catterall (Ottawa West) moved: that Bill C-328, an act respecting a national week of the Public Service, be read the second time and referred to Legislative Committee H.
She said: Mr. Speaker, I am proud to speak on this bill not only because a large number of my constituents work for the Public Service of Canada but also because in my role as critic for the opposition for Public Service employment, I have become very much aware of the extent to which Public Service employees across Canada are delivering services to Canadians in every community every day. They are assisting us as parliamentarians in carrying out our duties.
The excellence of the Canadian Public Service has been recognized internationally. It is probably because the role of the Public Service in developing the nation has been an important part of the partnership between the public and private sectors, spreading transportation and communication networks throughout the nations.
The Public Service has always been on the frontiers of Canadian development, more laterally spreading the services that ensure that equality for all Canadians is delivered based not on where you live or the particular climate or economic benefits of your community, but on
a vision of a Canada where all Canadians share the right to equal opportunities.
The Public Service is the instrument by which the will of Parliament is carried out. It delivers services throughout Canada, acting as a unifying force and a visible presence of the federal government in small and large communities across the nation.
Just as important, the Public Service is the eyes and ears of Parliament on the front lines in every comer of the land informing us as policy makers and legislators of changing circumstances and the new and emerging needs of Canadians.
Yet often the Public Service is the target of public contempt of complaints about government expenditures, policies and programs. Often it is criticized unfairly as being inefficient, slow and expensive. Often governments themselves will target their own employees as handy scapegoats to divert attention from unpopular policies, programs and decisions.
The Public Service is often the first to feel the brant of public sector restraint, expected to cheerfully bear cutbacks and wage freezes for the good of the country. Morale in the Public Service is at an all-time low. The relationship between employees and employers has never been so strained.
We have just experienced the largest Public Service strike in our 125-year history. Opportunities for advancement have diminished. The best and brightest in many cases are leaving the Public Service of Canada. We are no longer attracting the brightest and best to the service of their country.
Employees have been told they have to do more with less, and they are responding to the challenge with the commitment and dedication to the nation that has always symbolized the Public Service of Canada.
There are very few who work for Canadians who do not feel they are making a contribution to their country. They are proud of the services they deliver to their

March 23, 1992
Private Members' Business
fellow Canadians. They are proud of the services they deliver to government and Parliament.
But these feelings of dedication, pride and commitment have been tested to the limit. The feeling is becoming endemic that their work is not appreciated, valued or respected by their employer. Moreover, they feel that their employer is attempting to convince their clients, the people of Canada, that their work has no value.
There is good reason for that atmosphere. They have been told that they should be grateful to have a job, any job. Those at the lowest pay levels have been told that their managers who perform well based on the work of all employees will get bonuses and increases while they struggle, many of them on $18,000 salaries to feed, clothe and house their families.
They have watched as their work is contracted out, often at greater cost and less quality while their co-workers are laid off. They have been told that no matter what the Human Rights Tribunal decides on pay equity for employees in female dominated groups, the government will not respect the decision of the Human Rights Commission.
While the government spends over $1 million to encourage partnership and co-operation between employers and employees in the private sector, it excludes its own employees from partnership with government in such important public policy areas as revitalization of the Public Service and management of their own pension plans.
The private sector is learning the importance of teamwork as the need to sharpen competitiveness and productivity gains importance. Employees at all levels must see themselves as part of the team working towards a common goal.
A fundamental ingredient of building teamwork in both the private and the public sector is breaking down the confrontational barriers between management and front line workers, between employer and employees, creating an atmosphere of mutual respect based on the understanding that every employee contributes to the success of the enterprise.
Companies are implementing employee recognition programs not only internally but also externally to ensure that their customers know that their employees are the valued and essential foundation of customer service.
Personal recognition is an important component of job satisfaction that promotes top performance and the incentive to go beyond the bare requirements necessary to earn one's pay cheque. To take risks, to look for creative solutions, to deliver top-notch services benefiting the company, the working environment, the client and the country, the employee must be internally motivated and that internal motivation comes from being satisfied with one's job, knowing that it is important, respected and valued.
Bill C-328 asks the government to step out of the Dark Ages of confrontation and conflict, to recognize that its employees are going through difficult times and are operating in an atmosphere of discouragement. A siege mentality is not conducive to feeling pride in one's work, to feeling loyalty and commitment to one's employer and dedication to going above and beyond the call of duty to provide the best possible service on the front lines.
Bill C-328 asks only that one week be set aside each year to recognize the value of the work performed by employees both to the public, to the government and to Parliament.
While this bill is framed in the context of the federal Public Service, it is not only limited to recognizing the work of federal public sector employees but it also refers to and allows for the recognition of those who serve elected bodies at all levels across Canada. That includes
529,000	federal employees, 506,000 provincial employees, 343,000 municipal employees and countless others who work for local boards and agencies delivering health, education and many other services.
A national week to recognize Public Service employees would be an opportunity for those who work for the public to inform the public about the services they provide. I would like to quote from one of the letters I have received: "A great idea", said one writer. "Not so much to honour the Public Service employees, but it could serve at this time to educate the public as to the services the employees and the governments provide.
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The public wants to know what they are paying for. This would give employees a chance to show off their work".
This has already begun. The Professional Institute of the Public Service has prepared a series of brochures that points out the valuable work performed by Public Service employees in such areas as agricultural research in protecting the safety of our food supply, delivering front line health care services in remote communities across Canada and ensuring the safety of the drugs which reach us in our homes. Recognition has also been given to the importance of public sector scientists and all those who work with them in protecting our fish stocks-that is certainly a timely topic-and in providing weather services that ensure the safety of aviation in constant monitoring of the environment. Up and down the levels of government it is public sector employees that are educating our children, ensuring that our planes fly safely, that our highways function, that fishermen who put out to sea have a good security and rescue network in place. Every day of our lives from the moment we turn on the tap in the morning, the services and the quality of life we enjoy in this country depend not only on the decisions of elected bodies but on the competent, capable and committed service of public sector employees at all levels.
A week of focused attention on the value of public services and the people who provide them would build pride among those who work for the public and remind them as well that service to the public is the purpose of their job. It would also encourage communication with the public who are their clients and could be used as well to encourage public comments on government services.
At a time when the public wants to see different levels of government co-operating rather than bickering about their shared responsibility to the public and for the expenditure of their tax dollars, information on who does what with those public dollars will allow for good public debate.
Adapting to change requires a climate of co-operation and mutual respect between employees and employers. Good management-labour relations are essential to Canada competing in global markets. Our partners around the world have to be able to depend not only on the private sector delivering what it says it will deliver
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but on the public sector being able to deliver what it says it will deliver.
As the largest employer in the country I believe the government must take a leadership role in building an atmosphere of co-operation and partnership with its employees in pursuing national goals just as it is asking private sector companies to develop partnerships with their employees in increasing productivity and efficiency.
The excellence of the Canadian Public Service is recognized throughout the world but there are wounds to be healed. This bill is one small step in beginning the healing process and returning the public sector of Canada again to a proud service that attracts the best Canadians to the service of their country.
This bill may be seen by some as perhaps a bit of tokenism. It is not intended that way. There is a real need to let public sector employees know that despite the cutbacks, despite the salary burdens they have been asked to bear, their work is important to their country. That is why most of them are in the Public Service, whether at the federal level, the provincial level, or the local level. People join the public sector because they want to contribute to the public good.
I would like to quote from a letter I received from the Federal Superannuates National Association which represents retirees from the Public Service, many of whom have spent an entire career making their own personal contribution to the nation. FSNA has this to say: "At a time when Public Service employees are being required to bear the brunt of the government's fight to control inflation, there is an even greater need for recognition of their service to the nation. The passage of this bill would to some extent compensate employees who, particularly during these difficult times, are expected to do more with less, cheerfully and efficiently".
They are doing that. I want to close by thanking the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada for both launching their own information campaign on public services delivered across Canada and also for proposing this bill. While it is not a votable bill, none the less I hope this debate will encourage the government to consider taking a measure like this, giving the employees a focused opportunity to promote the services that they and the government deliver in partnership in restoring the pride they feel in their work.

March 23, 1992
Private Members' Business


Mr. Bill Kempling (Parliamentary Secretary to President of the Treasury Board and Minister of State (Finance)):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in today's debate on Bill C-328, the Public Service National Week Act.
This affords another opportunity to recognize the public servants who deliver a wide range of high quality services to Canadians. There is no doubt that the federal Public Service is among the best in the world, and I am not alone in thinking this. In 1975 the renowned British author and physician, C. P. Snow, in addressing a Canadian audience, said that as a former public servant himself, he thought very highly of this country of ours. He said that we had the best Public Service in the world. The Canadian Public Service, as we all know, is based on the British model. Professor Snow said that we had improved substantially on the original model. Yet most Canadians remain unaware of the high degree of respect that our federal Public Service commands throughout the world.
Our Public Service employees are devoted, responsible and conscientious. They work in a variety of areas to serve the public and deliver vital government programs. We find them serving Canadians in such areas as health and safety; they inspect the food we eat and protect the water we drink and the air we breathe; they test the medicine we take; they control our waterways and our airways and our means of transportation.
Public Service employees also protect our interests as consumers. They scrutinize operations and enforce federal regulations from the electronic communications to the activities of financial institutions.
They deliver crucial social programs. Most Canadian families receive federal cheques each year, many on a regular basis, and we tend to forget and take for granted that they are a dedicated people who work diligently to make sure that those cheques are issued correctly and promptly.
Public servants represent us and protect our interests abroad. They support industry, our regions, scientific and technological progress and foreign aid.
I could go on. All these services are delivered efficiently and effectively and in a timely manner. Canadians
have come to expect these services and the fact that they often take them for granted is testimony to the high and consistent quality with which they are delivered.
The government, as employer, fosters an environment where Canadians from all origins can find opportunities for successful careers in the Public Service, and it provides its employees with training necessary to deliver government services.
I am in complete agreement with the spirit of the bill proposed by the hon. member. We need to recognize our Public Service employees and we do in various ways.
One of the ways that we recognize public service employees is through the Government of Canada's Incentive Awards Plan. Among the programs under this plan we have suggestion awards, merit awards, awards of excellence. In addition, managers and supervisors in the Public Service take every opportunity to recognize in a less formal way the contributions of employees. This takes the form of a thank you letter for work well done or attendance at a conference or acknowledgement of an employee's work in the foreword of a report or a study.
The suggestion award program enables employees to submit their ideas for improving government operations in providing better service to the public, enhancing the work environment and generating savings and other benefits. In this way, the government officially expresses its appreciation to employees whose initiatives produce valid suggestions.
In 1990-91 the government saved $36 million through some of the suggestions made by the Public Service employees. The government's suggestion award plan has received more than 165,000 proposals since it began 39 years ago. The program paid out a total of $4.6 million to Public Service employees whose suggestions have saved the taxpayers over $153 million.
Last year, for example, an employee of the Secretary of State of Canada suggested that student loan claims from banks be separated into two categories: complete and incomplete. The complete claims can be audited and paid immediately, resulting in reducing the backlog in interest costs. This suggestion alone saved the government $2.7 million.
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The merit award program provides management with the means of extending formal recognition to employees for meritorious performance. This award is given for various reasons: for example, work performance at an unusually high level over an extended period of time, successful completion of a major project or assignment in a manner that goes beyond what would normally be expected, performing duties in a meritorious way under abnormal circumstances or with an exceptionally high order of achievement, and innovation that results in an important improvement in operations.
For example, last year a merit award was given to a team of employees from Energy, Mines and Resources Canada that showed exceptional investigative skills in the developing of tracer gas technologies. This has improved significantly the health and safety of Canadians working in underground mines and has reduced operating costs at the Cape Breton coalfields.
Finally, we have awards of excellence which are presented each year by the President of the Treasury Board. These awards recognize the best, most exemplary contributions of the Public Service resulting from employee suggestions for meritorious performance of duties. An example of this is the award given last year to five employees in our embassy in Kuwait. Many of the members of this House will recall that during the Iraqi occupation these employees faced guns and endured 45 to 50 degree Celsius temperatures over a three-month period. They had no electricity, no air conditioning, and no food or water was delivered to them.
As we can see, the federal government does recognize the work of its Public Service employees both informally and formally. In this way the government can encourage innovation, save money, improve its operations, and provide better services to Canadians.


Ms. Margaret Mitchell (Vancouver East):: Mr. Speaker, I too am veiy pleased to support this bill and particularly to have an occasion to stand up on behalf of all my caucus colleagues, and indeed I am sure all members of the House, to thank the very hard working public servants who serve us and our constituents right across Canada.
The Public Service of Canada is a very skilled, hard working group of people who care very much about the public they serve and who care about their country that
Private Members' Business
they serve so loyally. They vary of course. They serve the public in many ways: as maintenance workers, file clerks, truck drivers, receptionists, administrators, skilled planners and scientists. They perform many different functions. My two colleagues who preceded me have outlined those very eloquently.
As a person from the west coast I want to mention these people particularly: the lighthouse keepers, the Coast Guard, the RCMP, and others who guarantee our safety. While I am at it, I would like to plead with the government to keep our lighthouse keepers in place because they have a very important function that goes beyond just the keeping of the light.
It is often a very thankless job to be a public servant. I am sure this has become increasingly so over the recent years. The stress in their jobs has increased considerably as restraint cuts have been imposed by this government and people have been laid off in almost every department of the country in very large numbers.
Privatization of this government has also changed opportunities, the whole field of Public Service, and in many cases this has been quite unwarranted and has resulted in less effective services for the public.
As workers face increasing pressures and heavy job loads, they unfortunately have also become the scapegoat for many of the government's policies because they are the face of the government that the public can get at. We often hear people speaking about those terrible "bureaucrats". This is really very unfair. It has become a convenient scapegoat for the frustrations the public feels because of government policies. It is veiy important that the public understands this and realizes that the policies are made by ministers, not by the front-line public servants we deal with every day in our ridings.
At the same time as public servants bear the burden of heavier workloads and increased job pressures and job insecurities, many have experienced unrequested transfers as the government has arbitrarily made changes without consulting with them.
I agree with my colleague and I commend the member for Ottawa West for presenting this bill. We support it. We should have a national Public Service week as one of the means of recognizing and showing our appreciation to the Public Service of Canada. Hopefully it will help to improve the morale of the public servants which I agree

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Private Members' Business
is at a very low state. We should all bear a responsibility for seeing that this is improved.
It will also be a useful way of making members of the public much more aware of what the Public Service employees do for them, the very important services they provide and the very high degree of competence that our Canadian Public Service is noted for internationally as well as, hopefully, within our own country.
A Public Service week will be useful, but I think we would all agree that it will be very meaningless and, as my colleague said, perhaps a token unless there are sincere changes in the way that public servants are treated in Canada.
Given the arbitrary treatment that this particular government has provided to public servants, it is very important that we have a Public Service week. But that is not enough. We must also have a change of attitude on the part of this government and a change in policies and practices. It is first of all very important that the government show much greater respect for its employees, for the jobs they do, and for their collective bargaining rights. Surely the people in this House remember the treatment they received during the last Public Service Alliance strike when collective bargaining rights were completely overruled by this government.
Women in the Public Service deserve special recognition, not only for the contribution they make but because of the hardships they have faced in the past and the pay inequities they have experienced. It is deplorable that this government has refused to pay the retroactive pay owing to women in the Public Service because of the inequities in their paycheques over the past years. The government must play fair and pay this money that is owing, retroactively.
It is unconscionable that now the government would obstruct and threaten to ignore the Human Rights Commission and the recommendations it will be making on this matter.
We also need to implement employment equity in the Public Service fully. We want a Public Service that will truly represent the people of Canada. Therefore we must see more visible minority people, persons from all ethnic backgrounds being hired. We must see physically and mentally disabled persons in our Public Service.
They must have equal rights to employment. We must see many more native Canadians. The proportion of native Canadians in the Public Service is intolerably low. We must see women at all levels in the Public Service. These people must not only have the opportunity to get in the door, but they must have opportunity to move up the scale and have much greater access to promotions and to senior jobs as well.
We should also be expanding child care services for our public servants. If the government continues to refuse to do anything about a national child care program to which it were committed a number of years ago, the least it can do is provide child care for its own employees, its own public servants. We can do this and must do this in many ways. Where there is a large number of public servants in one location, we should have day care centres available just as we have here in the House of Commons. Incidentally that was why I initially proposed a day care centre on the Hill. It was to demonstrate that this is the kind of thing that should be offered to employees right across the country, not only to people on the Hill.
We must have increased child care services, and if there are not day care centres then there should be some provision perhaps in their collective bargaining package to help to pay for the costs of child care so that children will not be suffering as parents go to work.
As the member of Parliament for Vancouver East I would like to thank particularly the public servants who serve my office and my constituents. I know it is the same for other members of Parliament in the House.
When we have problems with immigration cases, we can readily phone a consultant in the immigration department for advice. When constituents have problems with unemployment insurance or training programs, we contact Canada Employment to resolve them together. We frequently call Health and Welfare about pensions and disability cases and many other local public service people who serve our constituents well. When we go overseas I am constantly impressed about the high professionalism of the people in External Affairs. I want to recognize them particularly.
March 23, 1992

Public servants cannot change policies and we should not blame them for the policies of the government. They are extremely hard working dedicated people. They are our employees and the employees of the people of Canada. Therefore they must have better treatment and greater recognition for the job they do. We would certainly think the 125th birthday of Canada would be a good time do that. We support the idea of a national week to recognize the Public Service of Canada.


Mr. Stan Wilbee (Delta):: Mr. Speaker, it is a real privilege to be able to speak on Bill C-328 today. It is a very significant bill and it seeks to establish a Public Service national week.
I am sure that every hon. member of this House agrees with the spirit of this bill. This House certainly recognizes and appreciates the commitment and dedication shown by all members of the Public Service of Canada.
My government is fully aware that the Canadian Public Service has evolved for more than three-quarters of a century to become one of the finest organizations of its kind anywhere in the world.
Public servants are often thought of as only serving elected governments. While it is true that much of the business of the Public Service is to help develop and implement government policies, public servants as their name applies are men and women who serve Canadian citizens every day: for example, the air traffic controller who guides our plane to a safe landing, the scientist who is developing a preventive vaccine, the immigration officer who welcomes new Canadians to our land, the person at the Canada Employment centre who helps workers find jobs during these tough economic times, the health inspector who ensures that our food is safe to eat, and the letter carrier who brings us our mail.
These men and women belong to a body of more than
500,000	public servants whose work is valued by Canadians all across this great nation.
I am sure my hon. colleagues will agree that the Public Service has been at the forefront in helping to advance employment equity for women, persons with disabilities, and minority groups. The hon. member for Vancouver East spoke very eloquently about the situations and the need for continued improvement in this area.
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Public servants, both French speaking and English speaking, are ambassadors for Canada both at home and abroad. They are a force for national unity. This government fully supports the ongoing efforts of the Public Service institutions to recruit quality men and women who will reflect the rich cultural and regional diversity of Canada. Throughout our history the Public Service has been the infrastructure upon which governments have built sound institutions that have helped give this nation one of the highest standards of living in the world.
As my hon. friend said when she introduced her bill, we now have a dynamic and flexible partnership between the public and private sectors, a partnership that requires enhanced creativity to safeguard our prosperity in this decade and on into the 21st century.
When Canadians look at the Public Service, they see themselves. They see husbands and wives raising the next generation of Canadians. They see citizens actively participating in community organizations. They see women and men putting in long hours as federal public servants and then heading for their neighbourhood community centre to coach youngsters in minor hockey leagues, to help a talented figure skater, to help a skier dreaming of making it to the Olympics or some other such volunteer organization.
Our Public Service is a truly distinctive Canadian entity. Over the years, it has evolved to reflect the diversity of our multicultural and multiracial society. Looking at the organization from an international perspective, the Public Service has kept pace with Canada's emergence as an important member in the world community. I believe that most Canadians recognize that an effective Public Service is fundamental to our national health and individual well-being.
This highly professional organization performs a wider variety of functions than any other organization in the country. Those of us who work primarily here in Ottawa need to remind ourselves that two-thirds of the federal public servants work and live in communities outside of the national capital region.
In presenting her bill, my hon. colleague spoke of the value of the services provided by public servants. The hon. member is right. Valuable services are provided and they are provided in a manner that reflects values established over several decades; values that this govern-

March 23, 1992
Private Members' Business
ment will continue to uphold so that all Canadians will be proud of their Public Service.
I believe that Canadians who choose to serve their country are inspired by motivation that goes well beyond the necessity of making a living. Hon. members probably know a number of men and women who have set aside promising careers in the private sector in order to work as public servants for the betterment of their country.
In her introduction to the bill, the hon. member mentioned that many people are leaving the civil service to go into private industry. I would also remind her that many people from the private sector are proud to come into the public sector as well.
Despite their willingness to serve, I am sure that there are times when it is extremely frustrating to be a public servant. The responsibility of spending the hard-earned taxes of Canadian citizens is not one that public servants take lightly. Because of their responsibility, public servants are often open to criticism from Canadians and indeed members of this House.
The women and men of the Public Service of Canada fully understand and appreciate that our democratic system depends upon individuals living up to their responsibilities. We can be proud that our public servants maintain a high standard of both personal and professional conduct at all times. The values that I spoke of earlier are entrenched values that permeate the Public Service and sustain its high quality. That understanding was clearly reflected by the Prime Minister in PS 2000. To quote the Prime Minister in his introduction to the white paper, he said:
The Public Service of Canada is fundamental to the successful functioning of our democratic institutions and of our country. It serves Canada ably and has contributed immeasurably to our stable economic and social environment, to our achievements as a modern industrial nation and to our values and identity as a people.
I believe that Canadians genuinely appreciate the contributions of Canada's public servants and while I fully support the intent of my hon. colleague's bill, at this time I cannot support establishment of a Public Service national week. The hon. member from Ottawa West may feel that a special week would be well received in her riding and certainly I can understand that, but considering the potential cost to taxpayers, it is reasonable to believe that such a proclamation would be regarded with cynicism in other parts of the country.
Members of this House are well aware that the recent budget demonstrated the necessity of keeping discretionary spending under control during this time of fiscal restraint. The cost may not be great, but there is always publication and advertising that must be done.
This does not mean that a special week cannot be set aside, if the hon. member, along with other hon. members and private citizens, wish to do so.
It does not require a formal recommendation from the Government of Canada to establish a special week to acknowledge the contributions of public servants. Any group of private citizens is free to take that responsibility on themselves.
In closing, again I commend the hon. member on the spirit of her bill and perhaps in a healthier economic climate, it should be reconsidered. At the present time, I regret that I am unable to support such a bill.


Mr. Jean-Robert Gauthier (Ottawa-Vanier):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to support the motion that Bill C-328 be read a second time and referred to Legislative Committee H.
This bill would ensure that, each and every year, the third week of the month of June is known as Public Service National Week. I support this proposal and hope it will meet with the approval of all members of this House.
I have only a few minutes. I realize that the hon. member for Ottawa Centre, the hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell and other members from the national capital region wish to speak as well, but I imagine their speeches will not be very long either, considering the little time we have at our disposal.
Today's debate is an important one, because its purpose, as I see it, is to recognize the constructive and indispensable contribution made by Public Service employees.
March 23, 1992

I want to congratulate the hon. member for Ottawa West, whose idea it was to propose this bill, and I would ask hon. members to give her the support she is seeking.
This plan would help make Canadians more aware of the remarkable work done by public servants and improve the image of a Public Service that has not had an easy time since 1984, when this Conservative government was elected.
As you know, the last few years were particularly difficult for federal employees. Numerous lay-offs in which nearly 13,000 public servants lost their jobs, privatization of services that so far had been provided by Crown corporations, the pay freeze-zero for this year and 3 per cent next year-and last summer's strike, the biggest one ever in this country, have made Canadians aware that there is a problem. All these measures have caused a number of serious financial problems for some people, and sometimes family problems as well. In the process, Canada has lost some of its best people, and there are also the problems this creates for young people who were intent on a career in the Public Service.
There is a long list, but I will not get into all the details. Briefly, Public Service morale is at its lowest ebb in many years, despite the fact that a plan to renew the Public Service of Canada, PS 2000, is now before the House. However, I doubt that this initiative will be able to restore the trust of public servants in an employer who has given them an extremely raw deal for the past seven years.
Our Public Service, known as one of the best in the world, consists of about 529,144 federal public servants, 506,600 provincial public servants and 343,200 at the municipal level.
In the final instance, public servants deliver the services approved by provincial and federal legislatures. The Public Service has served the Canadian people well in the past and hopefully we can change the government's attitude so that these public servants can not only regain initiative but also have confidence in their future, that their positions will be secure and that they can have
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a career in the Public Service knowing that one day they will be entitled to a well deserved retirement.
There is a partnership between public servants and politicians. We politicians deal with the reasons why. We decide why we want such and such a program. Public servants are the specialists whose responsibility it is to advise us how best to implement it. That is important, and it is extremely difficult at times to understand why this government is determined to lower the morale of the troops.
This week I received a letter from Iris Craig, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service, in which she said that the purpose of Public Service Week is to make Canadians aware of the services and security that public servants give them. Further on, she said that National Public Service Week would be an ideal opportunity for the government and public servants to tell Canadians that they are at their service. I conclude with another quote from Ms. Craig: "We would like to celebrate Canada's 125th anniversary by showing Canadians that a healthy and efficient Public Service is essential to their social and economic well-being".
The government has a duty to ensure that the public service is able to serve the national interest effectively while providing the services that Canadians expect of their government. To do so, public servants must be able to count on their employer's respect and good will. A National Public Service Week would thus be a step in the right direction.
Mr. Speaker, I would ask you to obtain the unanimous consent of this House so that Bill C-328 can follow the normal course and be seriously considered by a committee of this House to give all hon. members a chance to be involved and say where they stand in this debate. I would ask you to have Bill C-328 referred to Legislative Committee H so that it can be studied in committee.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBIois):: The question is on the motion of the hon. member for Ottawa West. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt this motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.

March 23, 1992
Government Orders


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to, bill read second time and referred to Legislative Committee H.


[Stage Direction]
The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-61, an act to provide borrowing authority for the fiscal year commencing on April 1, 1992, as reported (without amendment) from Legislative Committee E.

The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: It is my duty to rule on the motions proposed in amendment to Bill C-61.
There are five motions in amendment to the report stage of Bill C-61, an act to provide borrowing authority for the fiscal year commencing on April 1,1992, standing in the name of the hon. member for Kamloops.

Motions Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 will be grouped for debate. A vote on Motion No. 1 will apply to Motions Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5.1 will now propose Motions Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 to the House.


Mr. McDermid:: I rise on a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I notice those motions are in the name of the hon. member for Kamloops, who is not present in the House to introduce his amendments. I wonder if the Chair would rule on that. Since he is not here to move his amendments, are they in fact in order?


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: The Standing Orders of the House are quite clear in this respect. If the mover is not in the House, the House cannot consider the hon. member's motions in amendment.


MEASURE TO ENACT
John Horton McDermid: that the bill be concurred in.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Some hon. members:: On division.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: When shall the bill be read a third time. By leave, now?


Some hon. members:: Agreed


John Horton McDermid: that the bill be read the third time and passed.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak on third and final reading on Bill C-61, the borrowing authority bill.
Let me begin by putting this legislation in its proper context. That of course is the context of the budget that was presented a few weeks ago by the Minister of Finance, a budget that cuts government spending, cuts taxes, cuts the deficit, bolsters economic recovery and strengthens the international competitiveness of our economy.
Any debate on borrowing authority has to address the issue of public debt and deficit, burdens that weigh heavily on the people of Canada and that constrain the capabilities of the government.
There is one important and fundamental lesson governments everywhere have learned from recent recessions. That is never again must government allow itself to be financially crippled by debt.
The Liberals sit here and laugh at that. They sit there and they laugh. They laugh at government being crippled by debt. They left this government with a $200 billion debt. Canadians have been paying for that ever since.
Governments cannot assist those facing hardship or stimulate economies with money they do not have. To try to do so by borrowing more would only lead to higher deficits, higher debt, higher interest rates, slower growth and all that. It is not a pretty picture, as we know.
Renewed effort to reduce the deficit was one of the things Canadians clearly told us they expected from this budget. In all the pre-budget consultations that the Minister of Finance, myself, and the President of the Treasury Board had across Canada, that was the one message that came from every group no matter what
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their status in our society, that we must reduce the deficit. They also wanted realistic and lasting solutions to our economic problems, streamlined government to meet the realities of the 1990s, new opportunities for people to improve their skills and knowledge.
The government has responded to these challenges with a budget that takes action to bolster recovery this year and strengthen growth and job creation in the years ahead.
The budget provides help where help is needed, but it pays for that help not by increasing taxes or increasing the deficit, but by reducing expenditures; not by increasing borrowing and taxes. It cuts spending to reduce taxes and bolster economic growth and competitiveness. The budget also ensures significant declines in the deficit for 1992-93 and the following years.
The deficit will be held to $31.4 billion in the 1991-92 fiscal year which ends in about a week. It will be reduced by almost $4 billion to $27.5 billion next year and to $22.5 billion in 1993-94.


Mr. Milliken:: Nobody believes that.


John Horton McDermid: The hon. member for Kingston and the Islands is sitting over there delivering his speech from the seat of his pants. I understand that he is the next speaker for the Liberal Party and I would encourage him to withhold his comments until that time.
The net public debt will begin to shrink as a proportion of the economy in 1993-94 for the first time since 1973-74.
Reducing the deficit is essential for a return to sustained economic growth and new jobs. It is an essential foundation for a return of confidence, at home and abroad, that will ensure a strong recovery. Most important, the measures in the budget will not compromise our deficit reduction goals.
Continued spending restraint will help bring about a major reduction in government borrowing. The government's financial requirements will be reduced to zero in 1995-96. The government will then begin to reduce its outstanding debt in the financial markets for the first time since 1969-70.
It is in this context of deficit reduction that we must consider Bill C-61.
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Mr. Boudria:: Who wrote that?


John Horton McDermid: I did. I wrote it. In case you wanted to know, I wrote it. It's a good speech too.
Like borrowing bills in recent years, this bill contains three basic elements: financing authority to cover financial requirements for 1992-93; an amount to cover exchange fund account profits; and a contingency reserve. In total, the government is requesting authority to borrow $24.7 billion for the 1992-93 fiscal year.
It bears noting that the House committee has reviewed the provisions of the bill and has reported back with no amendments.
In addition, there is provision for an additional borrowing authority of $3.9 billion to provide for borrowings conducted in this fiscal year under section 47 of the Financial Administration Act. There are also a number of technical changes to tie the bill more closely to the fiscal year.
Before I finish my remarks, I would like to draw the attention of hon. members to the fact that the government has been operating under section 47 of the Financial Administration Act since January 28 of this year. Various factors contributed to this, particularly the increase in financial requirements as reported in the budget.
Let me remind members that until new borrowing authority is in place, only short-term debt instruments can be sold, and the government cannot maintain the desired balance of short and long term debt in its debt program. This balance is carefully designed to achieve the objectives of cost minimization and reduced exposure to increases in debt service changes. It is therefore important that Bill C-61 be considered in a timely manner.
The amount of borrowing authority requested in the bill is directly connected to the budget and the financial requirements stated therein. The information required to deal with the financial aspects of the bill is set out in the budget documents.
I therefore urge the House to proceed with this legislation as quickly as possible so that new borrowing authority will be in place at the beginning of the new

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fiscal year and the government's regular borrowing program can proceed as the fiscal year begins.
Our record of spending restraint and deficit reduction offers sound testimony that this country's finances are being handled prudently and responsibly.
I urge all members to support this bill.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Mr. Speaker, the unbelievable statement of the minister with which he closed his brief address was, of course, one that I will seek to refute in the time allotted to me today. It is obvious that he could not have said that with a straight face. I was amazed that a wide grin did not break out on his face as he uttered those statements. I was also amused to hear him suggest that this bill should get speedy passage because the government had run out of borrowing authority on January 28 and was having to borrow all of its money on the money markets on short-term notes.


An hon. member:: Doesn't that make sense?


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: It does make sense. The trouble is that it just shows incompetent management. If the government had asked for the proper borrowing authority last year instead of underestimating its requirements, as it did, I say to the minister, he would have not been into this mess and would not be here today pressing us for speedy passage.
We were assured last year that the borrowing authority that was asked for was more than sufficient. The government had everything covered and everything planned. Now we see in fact that not only did it not have it properly planned, it misplanned it. It botched it as usual and of course now the Canadian taxpayers are paying the price of this bungled, incompetent government which cannot manage a lemonade stand let alone the administration of the Government of Canada.
The purpose of this bill, as everyone has stated, is to permit the government to borrow to cover the annual deficit that it is running up in this country. It said that the deficit this year is going to be lower than last. Time will tell. If so, it will be the first time in about four years that the government has managed to get it down. Every year it is trumpeted by Ministers of Finance how wonderfully this government is managing things, that it has managed to cut the debt, it is really working and deficit control is a big priority, but every year the deficit goes up. For the
last four years, the deficit has continually risen and 1991-92 was no exception.
In the new financial year, and we will see, the minister says it is going down to $27 billion. But the minister has been wrong before, almost consistently, and so time will tell whether he manages to get this one right. In any event, his deficit is unduly large and I will make some commentary on it later in my remarks.
I want to draw to the attention of the House what the results of the Conservative policies have been. I want to deal specifically with my own riding of Kingston and the Islands where the hardship that has been wrought by this government's disastrous combination of policies has been severe. It is estimated that in Kingston, 1 of every 25 people is collecting welfare benefits and this does not include those receiving family benefits or unemployment insurance.
In 1989 Kingston's welfare payments totalled $5.2 million. In 1990 the figure was $8.6 million. In 1991 it will be approximately $14 million by the end of the year. That is almost triple its level in 1989.
It is predicted this upward trend will continue with an estimated further 60 per cent growth in case-loads over the next year. This could bring welfare payments over the $26 million mark by the end of 1992, compared with only $5.2 million in 1989. The welfare case-load in the Kingston area is up 140 per cent in 1991 over the 1990 figures. The provincial average is even higher than that.
I am sure that the minister of state for homelessness will be interested in the fact that the welfare payments in Kingston are higher in 1991 than they have been at any time in the past decade by almost double. It is a disastrous situation brought about by a series of disastrous policies.
In building permits, total building permit activity in the Kingston area was down 14.7 per cent over the 1990 total. Kingston fared reasonably well in that respect. The industrial and commercial and residential building permits comprised 77 per cent of total building activity down from 90 per cent in 1990. Housing starts in the greater Kingston area fell from a total of 1,199 starts in 1990 to 644 starts in 1991, almost half.
That is the record the minister boasts about when he says this government-I hope I have not lost his words, they were so memorable-"was managing prudently and
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well". I do not consider that set of figures to be prudence or competence in management.
There are more disturbing figures. The food banks in the Kingston area experienced significant growth in 1991 over 1990 figures, a growth of 15.6 per cent in the number of parcels delivered. It is clear that they are not always able to meet all the demands placed on them. That is the report from the Partners in Mission Food Bank operating in Kingston.
There are other disturbing trends in the economy that the government has failed to address. The Canadian Federation of Labour in a recent survey it conducted in the fall of 1991 found that 36 per cent of Ontario's small businesses are considering moving all or part of their operations out of the province.
The minister, I am sure, has some personal knowledge of businesses that have moved out of his riding. Later in my remarks I will be referring to some of the ones that have moved out of my riding of Kingston and the Islands.
They have moved out for two reasons. I will grant the minister that. It is not just the policies of the federal government; it is also the policies of the provincial government in Ontario that have caused heartache and disturbance to thousands of people and they are leaving the province like flies.
The hon. member for Oshawa is laughing. He, of course, used to be a supporter of that government. He can afford to laugh. He got out of the morass. He got off the sinking ship before it dragged the province down. He is still laughing. I am surprised he would take such a callous attitude toward his constituents.
This year bankruptcies are running 50 per cent ahead of last year, with retailers hardest hit followed by manufacturers, wholesalers, restaurants and construction companies. What we have in Canada today is a lot of bad news brought about by a government which is unable to deal with economic problems in a rational and meaningful way.
The world-wide recession is what is blamed by the government for the present mess. But we all know that the recession in Canada started before it started anywhere else and is worse in Canada than it is almost anywhere else. The reason that it is worse and the reason it started sooner is because of the policies of the government.
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There were three major policies that have caused this difficulty for our country and I will go through each of them in turn. First, free trade; second, tax reform Tory style; and, third, high interest rates.
The free trade agreement, which the government negotiated and said was going to save Canada from everything, has been a complete disaster for this country. The minister laughs. He knows that is true. He knows how many jobs have been lost in his own riding. I know that there have been a significant number of jobs lost in my riding attributable directly to free trade. It is not just the recession; it is people moving out. That has made the recession worse in Canada. It has crippled Canadian industry in a way that has not happened in this century, at least not since the great depression.
The chief negotiator for Canada, Simon Reisman, who sold this country out, who gave it away to the Americans in the free trade negotiations, has consistently tried to hide his incompetence. Now he is apologizing for the deal in effect saying that perhaps the Americans are playing unfair, that they are not doing what they said they would do, they are not living up to their side of the bargain. Well, he did not get it in writing; he gave everything away. He had the wool pulled over his eyes by the Americans.
We said so during the campaign. What was his response? He called the Leader of the Opposition at the time a traitor. With respect, I think we know who the traitor was.
I think this free trade deal has cost Canadians jobs. It has cost jobs in my riding. It has cost jobs across the country but particularly in Ontario.
I have some quotations I would like to read about what has gone on. A major plant in Kingston that employed a little over 60 employees when it closed was K. D. Manufacturing. I will read part of the article that appeared in the Kingston The Whig-Standard last fall:
K.D. Manufacturing operated in Kingston for more than 70 years as the largest producer of wooden picture frames in Canada. Its 60-plus employees worked in the Montreal Street plant for an average of 20 years. At one time more than 100 workers were employed there.
But now the company is enjoying the advantages of free trade on the other side of the border.
The whole plant, which was family owned, closed down in Kingston and moved south of the border.

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I quote here from the owner of the company, Howard Kelly. He said: "We have been pleased with the move because of our sales retention. We didn't lose much of our business". He added that about 90 per cent of his business was still in Canada. Free trade makes it easier to sell goods in both countries. Ninety per cent of your business is in Canada, and you move to the United States. That is the advantage of the free trade deal that the government talks about so enthusiastically. "Most important it now allows us to manufacture products more competitively with our North American competitors and gives us more exposure to the U.S. market", he said. "Free trade, cheaper non-union labour, a new market and a state loan were all factors but there are no simple explanations".
A state loan to help set up business, where was the government with its adjustment programs for Canadian workers to help this kind of business stay in Canada? There were not any.
I have another series of quotes. The Whig-Standard the same day published an article about whether or not free trade had created a level playing field:
Despite the free trade agreement, Kingston's economic development officer is concerned that Canadian companies are being pressured to open plants in the U.S.
Wejay Machine Products Co. Ltd., which designs and builds custom, automated material-handling and packaging machines for the aluminum, steel, paper and textiles industries, is one company Kingston Township expanding its presence in the U.S. market.
I am sure it meant from Kingston Township but it does not say that in the article. So here was a company operating in Canada that felt it could not get business in the United States unless it opened a branch plant in that country and started producing its products there.
I quote from Mr. David Cash, Kingston's very competent economic development officer. He said:
But it seems to me that the spirit of the free trade agreement is such that a U.S. company shouldn't discriminate against a company located in Canada.
We were told that was exactly what free trade was going to do. That is what Simon was running around the country saying. That is what the Prime Minister was running around the country saying. That is what the Minister of Finance at the time was running around the country saying. Who was telling the truth? We did not get that kind of deal.
Then Mr. Cash said, and I quote again from the
article:
Mr. Cash is still concerned that the free trade agreement is not working out the way it was supposed to do. "The whole idea of free trade was, and still is, that you can serve your American market from Canada without duties, so I get concerned whenever U.S. companies are pressuring their suppliers in Canada to move or expand their operations into the States, but I don't know what I can do about it.
It seems to me to be a fairly new and emerging concern."
It is a concern, but one that this government ignores completely. There is absolutely nothing that the government is doing to assist in this problem.
We had the Prime Minister rattling his sabres the other day saying that maybe there was some problem and the United States was being unfair in free trade. Of course, he is a great friend of the President. We have all heard what good terms he and the President are on. He and the former President used to sing duets together, but it is not doing any good now. Canadian industry is still suffering as a result of the free trade deal and this government's policy in supporting it.
I want to quote from the Prime Minister again. I quote from a more recent edition of The Whig-Standard, March 17. There was an excellent article written by Ian Austen of Southam News which was printed in the paper. It quotes the Prime Minister. Listen to this; this is unbelievable. He says:
Our highest priority is to have an agreement that ends the threat to Canadian industry from U.S. protectionists who harass and restrict our exports through the use of trade remedy laws.
That is what the Prime Minister is quoted as having said in the House of Commons in March 1987.
We all know that that objective was not achieved in the free trade negotiations. The government failed Canadians in getting what it said was a prime objective. "It was the highest priority", the Prime Minister said. Of course, we have heard him say things like that before and we all know that he is talking through his hat.
The article goes on to say about the free trade deal that:
The lingering problems are two-fold: The trade agreement has neither changed the way the Americans operate nor made solving disputes any faster.
It states quite correctly:

As for the Honda case, the free trade agreement doesn't even offer the hope of a binding settlement.
The two governments are in the early stages of setting up a bi-national panel to review the dispute. But in this and all customs cases, neither government will be bound by its findings.
The article refers to Mr. Ritchie, the deputy negotiator who helped poor old Simon try to sell the country out, and says:
Mr. Ritchie now acknowledges it is a major flaw in the deal he helped create.
Of course this was supposed to create all these jobs and it did not. But the government does not seem concerned about unemployment. It has done nothing in the budget to assist the unemployed. The article goes on to say:
As well, during the recession 10 years ago, only 22 per cent of those left unemployed in Ontario lost their jobs because of permanent factory closings. Today the figure is 65 per cent.
That was the 1981-82 recession that we hear so much about from this government. Twenty-two per cent of those left unemployed in Ontario lost their jobs because of permanent factory closings. Today the figure is 65 per cent. It is 65 per cent who are out of work because of permanent factory closings.
I suggest to the minister-and he knows this probably better than I but does not want to admit it-the reason that all those factories have closed is because of the free trade deal. It has been a disaster, and it is a cornerstone of Tory policy under this government.
The second cornerstone is tax reform, Tory-style. By that I refer of course to the goods and services tax. We have had a massive tax shift in Canada since this government took office in 1984, and it is a tax shift that I suggest to you is the reason Canadians all across Canada are complaining that taxes are too high. The government does not heed these complaints. It has lowered them very slightly in this budget, but the reduction is so minuscule that it is difficult to measure in most Canadian pocketbooks.
Canadians know they are paying a lot more in taxes, and they are right. What has happened is that we have had a change from the world of corporate tax as a means
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of raising revenue to the field of personal tax. The Tories are hitting the people who are least able to pay. That is what is going on, and I have some figures to support that.
First of all, in a recent Maclean's article, I think it was just a week or two ago, there was a graph showing budgetary revenues as a percentage of total federal spending. Where does the money come from?
In 1984, 41 per cent of the revenue came from personal income tax. Forty-one per cent of federal spending was raised by means of personal income tax. Today, it is 47.7 per cent, a very significant increase.
Corporate income taxes in 1984 accounted for 13.2 per cent of the revenues used for government spending. Today, it is 7.2 per cent, a very significant reduction. What the government has done is it has taken the taxes off the corporations and has transferred the tax to the individuals. That is exactly what it has done.
The minister shakes his head. He knows this is accurate. There is nothing inaccurate about this. If he pulls out the government's own taxation figures from the raw figures he will see that there has been a reduction in corporate taxes as a percentage. It is not difficult to see that and this graph, I suggest, has shown this. It shows that that is the case and it is an accurate graph.
Sales and excise tax revenues have actually decreased over the period. The graph is based on an estimate of the GST revenues for 1992-93. One suspects that if the GST were applied in a normal economic year, not one where there is a recession, the revenues would be much higher. But time will tell, time will tell.


John Horton McDermid: Oh, we are up to 40 now.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Yes, but as a percentage of the total grab I think the member knows the GST would be higher.


An hon. member:: What about corporate income taxes?


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: So would corporate income taxes, so would personal income tax, but as a percentage of the total I am suggesting to the member that the GST would in fact be more.


John Horton McDermid: Liberal economics.

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Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: The hon. member says: "Liberal economics". I can tell him that Canadians would much prefer Liberal economics at this stage, and all the polls indicate it.


An hon. member:: Oh, oh.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: If the hon. member is so sure that is not true, I urge him to advise the Prime Minister to call an election and we will find out.
The Conservatives would like Canadians to believe that this latest budget offers Canadians a significant tax break when in fact we all know it does not. Thming to the reduction in the personal income surtax, that tax was originally brought in by this government in 1986 and was subsequently increased on two occasions. It was one of the 40 changes in personal income tax the government has brought in to soak Canadian taxpayers.


John Horton McDermid: We are up to 40 now.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Forty changes to personal income tax which have resulted in increases for Canadians. The change in this tax offers virtually no relief. The reduction in the surtax actually benefits high income earners more than low income earners. For a family of four-


John Horton McDermid: Oh, oh.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: I see the minister is laughing. He should listen to these figures because maybe it would make him sing a different tune in cabinet meetings where they discuss these matters.
For a family of four with a combined income of $15,000, this tax cut will result in a savings of $2 for 1992. If the same family had an income of $75,000, it would save $74 in 1992.


John Horton McDermid: How much did the ones with $15,000 pay?


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: The hon. member probably knows that answer better than I do. After all, he is a minister of the Crown who has at his fingertips all the figures he should need for answering those kinds of questions.


John Horton McDermid: Very little, if any.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: The goods and services tax, as well as being the most unpopular tax in Canadian history, has contributed to inflation in this country. The figures are all out on that. Over one per cent of last year's inflation was attributed directly to the goods and services tax and it has cost Canadians dearly. It has driven Canadians
across the border in a cross-border shopping revolt, which has driven more Canadians out of business, exacerbating the recession created by the high interest rate policy of the government.
I turn to that as the third tenet of Tory economic mismanagement in Canada. They have pursued a policy of high interest rates and it has been a disaster. It was the high interest rate policy that initially caused the recession in the first place. It was one of the major contributing causes to the recession. It is the thing that slowed Canada down and brought Canadian industry to its knees at a time when the rest of the world was not yet experiencing this kind of slow-down. The fact that high interest rates have continued throughout the time that we have lingered in this recession has only served to make matters worse.
Canadians may be easily deceived into thinking that because interest rates have dropped they are somehow low. But in fact if we accept the government's figures that the year-over-year inflation rate is 1.6 per cent in January and 1.7 per cent in February, and if the bank rate is at 7 per cent or 7.5 per cent or 7.75 per cent, then clearly the real interest rate being paid by Canadians is still over 5 per cent, and that is unacceptable. It is too high. It is costing Canadians much more than any other group in the industrialized world is paying in terms of real interest costs.
That high interest cost is a disaster for Canadian business. It means that anybody seeking to carry on or operate a business in Canada and borrow money in the process, pays more than his or her American counterpart. It means that anybody seeking to borrow money for any purpose is going to pay higher rates than his or her American counterpart. The high interest rate keeps the dollar high so that Canadian exports are more expensive than they would otherwise be. If the dollar were allowed to drop to a more reasonable level, closer to where it should be, then Canadian exports would flourish. There would be generation of new jobs in Canada and prosperity could be restored. But the government persists in this high interest rate policy led by the Governor of the Bank of Canada.
The fact that the governor is intent on wrestling inflation to the ground is his supposed justification for this ridiculous policy. Frankly we have always managed with some inflation throughout this century. At times it has been unacceptably high, but we have had inflation
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for a long time. Not since the 1930s have we had deflation. The governor of the bank backed by the Minister of Finance and the Minister of State for Finance have been supporting this high interest policy which I suggest is unacceptable. The result of it is high unemployment, lost business opportunities, the loss of businesses to the United States, and a difficult market for Canada's export commodities.
I would like to quote from an article that appeared in The Globe and Mail on December 5 by Mario Dalla-Vicenza from Regina. He is senior vice-president and chief financial officer of Ipsco. Here is what he had to say about the government's disastrous high interest rate policy:
Stable prices may be a legitimate and necessary goal of the Bank of Canada, but the short-sighted and overzealous tactics it is using to achieve this goal are cause for concern. In fact, these tactics are bringing the economy of Canada to its knees.
That is what he said. The minister and the other members of his government clearly ignored this kind of advice. He went on:
The bank's policy of high interest rates, which brings with it an artificially high value of the Canadian dollar, has crucified the mining, forestry, farming and goods producing sectors of the Canadian economy.
That is the opinion of a respected businessman in western Canada, and we know the government loves to listen to businessmen. The Tories always claim they are running the Government of Canada like a business, but if anybody else ran a business the way they run the Government of Canada they would be out of business.
Don McGillivray, a respected financial journalist, wrote a column on February 25 in The Ottawa Citizen in which he said:
There never has been political support in Canada for an attempt to wrestle inflation to the ground, no matter what unemployment resulted. There is less support for such a policy now near the end of the second year of a painful recession for which the Bank of Canada must bear part of the blame.
That doesn't alter the fact that the governor believes himself to be correct. He told the Commons committee that there is no basis for believing that monetary policy can focus on a number of different targets at the same time.
He seems to live in a more neat and tidy world than the rest of us.
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I think everybody in the House would agree with that statement. He continued:
It's a world where action to achieve one simple goal is unrelentingly pursued, where action can deal with what ails the economy.
The governor has overreached himself and suffered a rebuke. His policies did not command much confidence on the part of Canadians before. They command less support now.
Canadians have seen how a single minded pursuit of zero inflation hurts things they care deeply about. They want the central bank to worry too.
"They want the government to worry too", he might have added to the article. The government ignores this problem and has allowed the governor to continue on this ridiculous course that has cost Canadians and has cost Canadians dearly.
It is part of a three-pronged effort on the part of the government to destroy the Canadian economy, it would appear. It does not listen to anybody who has any criticisms or sensible suggestions for improving the situation. I may say that includes the suggestions coming from me in this speech. However the minister may be paying closer attention than he lets on.
The minister brought in a budget that he claimed was a good news budget. The minister sounded optimistic and rosy: everything was going to be fine by 1993 and in 1992 we would get by and with the tax breaks he was offering Canadians everybody would feel good.
Let us just see how the budget was received by Canadians. I suggest Canadians know this budget was not what the government trumped it up to be. It was not all the good news that the government said it was.
I would like to quote first from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. One would think this group, being a group of businessmen, would be one the government would listen to. After all, the government says it is running the Government of Canada like a business. These people are businessmen. I presume they know what they are doing. They certainly know a lot more of what they are doing than the government does.
Let us look at what the Chamber said:
The chamber, Canada's largest business group, expressed disappointment that the government had once again strayed from its commitment to serious deficit reduction, delaying harsh action for at least another year.

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We heard the minister in his speech say how they had cut back and how we were going to have the deficit reduced. Well time will tell. It has gone up for four years, as I said, but it may go down this year.
The news release quotes Tim Reid, president of the chamber, in case the minister did not know. It continued:
First, he noted that the government's program expenditures are forecast to rise by 4.7 per cent in fiscal 1992-93, well in excess of the 2.7 per cent inflation rate. "That doesn't tell us there's a very firm commitment to containing spending in areas where it counts", said Reid.
A good quote, I thought, and a valid criticism. If the government says it is doing one thing and doing another, there is something wrong. It goes on:
Secondly, the 1992-93 deficit (now forecast at $27.5 billion) is "significantly higher than had been predicted in earlier budgets"-
It certainly is. My recollection of the 1985 budget was that by this year the deficit would be down to something like $10 billion. Perhaps the hon. member for Oshawa can remember the figures better. I think $8 billion or $10 billion was what it was supposed to be. Now it is at $27 billion. Last year the government told us that it was going to be $24 billion, but I do not want to go through all those figures. I know the minister finds them very tedious.
It continued:
-is significantly higher than had been predicted in earlier budgets"-"and far too high when you consider that it will be added to an accumulated debt load that already stands at $420 billion, and is the most severe in the industrial world with the exception of Italy."
Of course the minister and his colleagues like to blame the previous Liberal government for the deficit. They do not know what else to do. After all they have doubled it, but they all say: "Of course it is not our fault. It is all somebody else's fault". Everything is somebody else's fault.
Going back to the news release, it continued:
Thirdly, there is the debt to GDP ratio, the relationship between the debt and our ability to pay it. Noted Reid, "In the last budget, they promised us that it would fall next year-for the first time in this government's mandate-to under 60 per cent. Now they admit it will rise to over 62 per cent, and that's also one of the worst in the industrialized world".
I have more quotes on that, because for years the government has been planning to get some control on this debt to GDP ratio. One of the things it boasts about is how the debt to GDP ratio is something that it can bring under control. It always puts in figures about how the annual deficit is shrinking as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product. Of course it is, when we consider that the Gross Domestic Product is usually growing and the government has managed to keep the deficit size a fairly level one. It has gone up, but very slowly.
Let us hear what the government said in its economic and fiscal statement in November 1984. It said:
A continuously rising ratio of debt to income threatens growth in three ways. It puts upward pressure on interest rates by raising expectations of future inflation and by competing for private savings. It limits the government's ability to meet priority economic and social needs. And it symbolizes a state of economic mismanagement that undermines confidence and threatens the job creating private investment that Canada needs.
Fiscal policy must ease the burden on monetary policy and contribute directly to increased confidence and to lower interest rates.
That is what they said in 1984. One does wish they had heeded their own advice. They have maintained a large deficit, have continually put upward pressure on interest rates, have raised expectations of future inflation and have competed with private savings. They have ignored their own policy statement for seven or eight years.
In 1989 the minister said:
The actions taken in this budget are designed first to stabilize, and then to lower the debt to GDP ratio. It stabilizes at just over 56 per cent of GDP in 1990-91.
Well, it did not. It is going to 62 per cent in 1992-93. But the government ignores that: it is just a change and is not a case of incompetent management. It would not admit to that. Everybody in Canada, I would suggest, knows it is.
In the fiscal plan in 1988, the government said:
By 1991-92 the debt to GDP ratio declines.
It does not. In the February 1991 budget the government said:
The growth in public debt as a proportion of GDP is halted in 1991-92, the first time its upward trend has been arrested since 1974-75.
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Of course that was wrong. It was not. Thereafter, it declines steadily throughout the fiscal framework period.
In other words, the government has been consistently wrong in its dealings with the public debt problems and with deficit problems. It has not been able to get a grip on the subject, despite the rhetoric and statements that it was bringing the debt, the GDP ratio, under control and was bringing it under control right away.
I see the hon. member for Winnipeg South has floated in. I hope that she is enjoying my comments because she is a person who has some influence on the government and could perhaps go to the cabinet meeting some day and urge these ministers to do something to clean up the mess they have created after seven years of mismanagement.
In case anybody thinks that by quoting only the chamber I am giving a distorted view of Canadians' ideas about this budget, I want to quote from a Gallup poll.
[Translation}
Fewer than one out of four Canadians (23 per cent) who were familiar with the latest federal Budget felt that it would strengthen Canada's economy. Most respondents (59 per cent) felt that the measures announced in the February 25 Budget by the Minister of Finance, Don Mazankowski, would do nothing for the economy, while 18 per cent had no opinion.
This is a poll that was published in today's La Presse. [English]
Only 23 per cent of Canadians think that the budget is going to do something to help the economy. Everybody else, the vast majority of Canadians, thinks it will do absolutely nothing.
The hon. minister asks if the 1982 results are in it. I do not see the 1982 results in it.
I have another quotation from Don McGillivray. The minister groans. Obviously he does not agree with what Mr. McGillivray writes, but most Canadians realize that Mr. McGillivray is a fair, honest and objective commentator on the government's economic performance. In a recent article he said: "We have lost two years of normal growth in the economy. We have lost the output of about two million workers. We have told this army of Canadians that their country has no use for them. They will bear the scars of this recession for the rest of their lives.
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If that is not a good reason to kick up a bit of a fuss about the economy, what is?"
That is exactly what we have been trying to do; to get the government to do something to alleviate the unemployment that it has created by these three disastrous policy initiatives.
I am tempted to quote from another very capable source, the hon. member for Ottawa South, my learned and very competent colleague. He made a speech in this House on second reading of this bill on February 28. It was an excellent speech. I would have thought that after hearing a speech as the hon. member for Ottawa South made, the government would have packed its bags and left office right away. It was such a devastating condemnation of its policies that you would think the government would get out. It was obvious that there was something seriously wrong with the Government of Canada.
He said: "This is the tired budget of a tired government, perplexed by the problems that confront it, though many are of its own making; showing no vision, no imagination, not even comprehension of the difficulties Canada must tackle before the end of the century".
That is a fair comment on the budget and one that reflects the views of hundreds of thousands of Canadians across this country. They are appalled at the government's callous attitude.
Finally, I would like to quote from another extremely competent writer on these matters, Bruce Little, an economics reporter for The Globe and Mail. He has had a distinguished career in writing for financial publications in Canada. I believe he was managing editor for The Globe and Mail at one time.
In a recent article he said: "This recession is different. Canada's last downturn was deep, but when it was over, the economy rebounded smartly and cleanly into what turned out to be the long expansion of the 1980s.
This downturn has been shallower but far messier. Almost two full years after the recession began, the economy is still scuttling crab-like across the landscape, unable to set a clear course".

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He went on to say: "Corporate profits have been scoured like never before. Last time, pre-tax profits fell 40 per cent in the first year of the recession. In less than two years, they bounced back to pre-recession levels. In this recession, they followed the same track for five quarters, then parted company. In the final three months of 1991, they were 44 per cent below levels reached two years ago".
In other words, corporate profits just bottomed out. Going into the last recession, profits were 11.8 per cent of GDP and went as low as 7 per cent before recovering. This time, profits were only 7.5 per cent of GDP on the way in and have since fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since the great depression of the 1930s.
It is that kind of grim economic picture painted by economic writers across Canada that one might have thought would be reflected in the budget. One would think that the Minister of Finance would have said that the government has to do something to try to ease this crisis. Instead, the government has done nothing.
The Liberal Party has put forward a series of proposals to the government to suggest that it do something to get the economy rolling again. Two of the proposals have been adopted: the change in the down payment requirements for new housing, and the allowance for the RRSP moneys to be used to finance the purchase of a house. Those are both suggestions put forward by the Leader of the Opposition in the course of a recent pre-budget speech urging the government to take these steps. The government has seen fit to do both.
The other two major parts of the platform have been ignored, namely the assistance for municipalities and assistance for food banks.


Mr. Mike Breaugh (Oshawa):: Mr. Speaker, I am interested in what has transpired here this morning and I want to congratulate the minister. Essentially the minister had nothing to say this morning and he managed to do that in four pages. We should all be immensely grateful that he at least was concise.
To the member for Kingston and the Islands, we should all thank his press clipping service. The clippings expanded substantially on the quality of the speech and they certainly added to the quantity of his speech. The problem is that there is a gem of truth there, but at this time of year the seeds are covered in a certain layer of
horse manure, and it will take at lot of heat and light before they germinate. The hope will be that sometime later this year we will actually have a spring in Ottawa and there will be some germination and some growth.
My problem is that the member presents life in a caricature form. He pretends that by reading extensively from newspapers across the country, one can get some sense of the conditions under which most Canadians labour at the moment. I do not believe you can. I believe that those people who write newspaper columns are doing the best they can to present accurately their opinions, the facts as they see them, the effect of the depression on the Canadian economy at the moment. It is very difficult for them, as it is for us in this Chamber. For most Canadians, there will be no trip to Taiwan. There will be no tour of Europe. There will be no break. There will be no respite from the masses. There will be no free lunch. There will be no chance to be inside and warm this winter. For many of our Canadian people, this is going to be the culmination of a very difficult period and it is not getting any better.
That cry of frustration is there and very strong. Some have used the episode of food banks and the fact that they are being used more extensively now, even more perhaps than during the Great Depression in Canada. They are being used by different people. The poor are not quite so easily identified anymore. It is easy to identify those who are homeless. It is not so easy to identify the reasons why people who used to think of themselves as good productive taxpayers in Canada, part of the mainstream fabric of our society, do not have a job anymore.
It is very difficult to listen to the frustration of those people who have done all of the things that their society said they have to do to get a good job and the job is not there any more.
It is difficult to explain to them that when their factory closes these days, it is most likely not to be a lay-off or a downturn or a change in our economy. It is difficult to explain to them why the whole plant has left Canada.
Some will attribute this as being the fault of the global market, the fault of any particular government. It really does not matter to most Canadians who is at fault here. They do not care whether it is this government or that government or somebody in Geneva or somebody in
March 23, 1992

Taiwan. What they care about is their own human condition; that in their own self-interest, having done what society said they ought to do, they do not even have the opportunity to seek gainful employment any more. That is a tragedy that is not carried very often in our public media, not carried very often in our popular press.
It is one of those things worthy of a story once a year, or if someone gets really serious about it, a series of seven or eight stories on how the poor are surviving the depression. I watch the media every day. Members have this fault. We are obsessed by what the media has to say. Every once in a while some television station in some major city will hear of a lay-off, a shut-down. It will rush out there and for about one or two minutes, or if it gets real excited, four or five minutes, it will run a story about people's lives, about the impact of the shutting down of that plant on the economy of Cornwall, Kingston, Oshawa or any other community.
I have yet to see it go back the second day when the cameras are not around and ask people what it is like that day, the third day, the fourth day, and after five and six months. That is the difference in perspective. The Canadian people do not have the luxury of watching their lives fall apart for 30 seconds at a time. For them, it lasts for a much longer period and the ramifications are much worse.
Part of what I would object to in this budget, as I would with the province of Ontario, any of the other provinces or any other budget that I have ever seen, is that the version of restraint that is sometimes preached in this Chamber is a lot different than the one that is reality back home. It is fine for ministers of the Crown to say they spent to much money, so they are going to have to chop this and chop that. It is fine for this government in its latest budget proposal to say it cannot do the things it wants to do, so it will not have a child care program. For a government, that is an economic decision on how to put together a budget, an expression of political priorities. Once the decision is reached, it is over with.
The ministers of the Crown simply have to explain for two or three days, if the reporters are insistent, why it is that children are in poverty in this great wealth called Canada. The ministers of the Crown at best will have to spend a few hours of their time explaining to interest groups and to members of the House of Commons why
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children cannot have child care, why children will have to live the rest of their lives without it.
To a minister who has to defend this government policy, this is awkward, this is painful, but only for a short period of time. While they do that and while they explain that and while they rationalize all of that, they are mindful, as we all would be, that this will go away. For the child, for the mother, for the parent and for the nation, this will not go away.
I read with interest that the government is considering a few other changes. Excuse me for being cynical, but I heard a minister of the Crown say that medicare is a sacred trust. Some days I wish I had just started in politics. I wish that I did not know any better. I wish that when some minister of the Crown said something was a sacred trust the little alarms did not go off in my head. I have heard that far too many times.
Whenever someone says something is a sacred trust, it is a real good gamble that it is going, that it is in trouble, that somebody somewhere is thinking about really cutting this one.
As someone who has been involved in political life in Canada, it bothers me somewhat that at the end of 20 years, when a minister of the Crown says something is a sacred trust, I get worried. I become concerned about what is really on the agenda. What is going on here? What do they really mean? I have been through it long enough to know that when they start using that kind of language up front, something really dastardly is happening down near the other end. It is similar to the middle of a political campaign when people are stupid enough-I use those words advisedly-to accept anybody from any political stripe when they say: "We are going to institute a national child care policy. We are going to provide child care to people all over Canada". People should say: "Wait a minute. Who are you? Have you every done that before in your lives? Is that really what you want to do? Is that your priority? Did you do the same thing with some other promise that you made and not questioned or not challenged that".
I think the faults in politics are many. Some are inside this Chamber. More of them are outside this Chamber. There are people who say: "I liked the look of his jaw. I liked their campaign jingle. I liked the way their literature is designed. They have a snappy ad that says I should

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vote this way or that way". The Canadian people have to learn how to make their political judgments in a much tougher way.
There are those who relish the notion that this government is bottoming out in the polls, as they say. It has been at the bottom before. That does not bother it at all. The election is not on at the moment.
I noticed that the minister, in his introductory remarks, said that by 1996 the need to borrow money is going to be reduced to zero. If the Canadian people get a chance to intervene somewhere between now and 1996, it will be reduced to zero a lot earlier than that. I hope that the Canadian people never make this kind of a mistake again.
To be as blunt as I can, this is a political government that has made its priorities clear. It has established who it represents, where its political priorities are, and it did it again with this budget. The new catch phrase is "targeting". The Minister of Finance says he wants to target the moneys a little better. That is exactly what the government did. Let me give an example.
In the field of housing, several people suggested that first time homeowners are having some trouble. Maybe if they had RRSPs you could let them use that money to buy their first home. A small perversion of that scheme is to broaden it just a little bit and say that anybody who has RRSPs can use their money to buy any house. It does not have to be their first house. It does not have to be modest. The government knows that people who have money put away in these kinds of savings plans are also likely to have a house. Therefore, when you read the fine print in the proposals the government made in its budget, you begin to get some understanding that it does not care a hoot whether it is a first time homeowner or not. It knows that it most likely will not be.
If they have money in that kind of a savings plan, they probably are not looking at buying their first house. The early trends in the real estate industry are that it is not first time homeowners, it is second and third time homeowners, and they are buying larger houses and there is a heck of a good tax break for them to do that. Would we not all be stupid if we thought the Canadian people would not read the fine print before they made that kind of an investment? That is exactly what they are doing.
Who is it helping? It is helping the upper and middle-income groups to get into the larger houses. There is nothing wrong with that at all, but to pretend somehow that it is other than a real estate gimmick would be quite wrong. As one who said it was an idea worth considering, I am a little unhappy on how that got targeted at the end of the process to a group that was not asking for more help and away from a group that really needed some help. It bothers me somewhat that they did that.
Here is one of the things I object to in politics these days. The government said, prior to the throne speech, that it was going to allow people to have 5 per cent down payments. That will stimulate sales in real estate somewhat and there is nothing wrong with that at all. It should also have said: "Consumer alert. There are people who should not be getting into 95 per cent mortgages. Take a good look at this. Here is an option you did not have before that you do have now". In the hot real estate markets, real estate companies and those who build homes were already doing some of these things.
In a place called Cookstown, Ontario, just north of Toronto, as an example, let me show the end effects of this. Once the government had established that the 5 per cent limit was right, then it had to turn it over to its bureaucracy at CMHC, very find, hard working, diligent, honest and intelligent civil servants.
Somebody had to decide that there would be regulations. You cannot have laws any more without regulations, and they have to be applied in different ways.
When you go to Cookstown, Ontario, and if you stand on the four comers, you will be standing on the division point between three different areas. On one comer the upper limit for the houses that can have a 5 per cent down payment is $125,000. That was the original idea. Across the street it is $175,000. On the other comer it is $250,000.
That is the same comer. There are three houses and three different parts to that little intersection. People in Canada look at that and say: "What is going on down there? Do these people not know this is all in one small town in central Ontario?" They do, but we see the configuration of the mindset that sets in here so that a program which perhaps makes good sense, when it is announced, when it is translated on the ground, does not make quite such imminent good sense.
March 23, 1992

The Canadian people are beginning to understand a little bit better. This is a government that, in its budget this year, did not just target the way that it will apply benefits to people, but targeted the way there would be income tax reduction for those whom it thinks are worthwhile in our society, those in upper income groups.
It was interesting that when it looked at the area of Canadian manufacturers, the government thought that offshore manufacturers, offshore investment, ought to get a little better break than Canadians. That is strange for this government, purporting to be a national Canadian government.
I have been interested in following all the arguments around the free trade agreement and the expansion of that agreement into Mexico. I have watched some who have been fierce advocates of free trade with the United States now saying: "Wait a minute. That is foul. The Americans are not playing fair. This is doing bad things to the Honda plant in Alliston. This is doing bad things to the softwood lumber industry in Canada".
Here is what I do not understand. If the government of the day is such a great manager, if it understands industry and manufacturing so well, when did the Americans ever work not in their own best self-interest? I do not remember a time in history when they ever refused to do that, when they ever said otherwise.
An American entrepreneur is not necessarily in business to do good things all around the world. There are lots of Americans who do that, but those who are entrepreneurial in scope, who are in the business manufacturing sector, never pretended that the reason they run a manufacturing plant somewhere in the United States is to benefit Canada. They never pretended that for a moment.
People say that they are interpreting regulations the wrong way. Why would they not? It is in their best interests to do that. That is what they have always done. That is what they are continuing to do.
I saw a very interesting analysis of free trade with Canada and the United States and extending that into Mexico. It essentially said that the purpose of the
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exercise was simply to provide American manufacturers with unfettered access into Canada and Mexico. That is what the free trade agreement with Canada did, and that is what the one with Mexico purports to do.
If you look at it from that perspective, that is a pretty good deal for an American manufacturer; take away all the restrictions that would come north into Canada, take away all the restrictions that might apply south into Mexico, make sure that you can use all the raw material, all the resources and pit one part of the North American continent against another and then sell madly to both markets.
It is oversimplification. In many ways that is what I see happening with the current free trade agreement with the United States. I see a simple extension of that into Mexico. From an American perspective, it makes eminent, good sense. Americans ought to be enthusiastic about that kind of a trade deal.
Canadians would be stupid to accept that. More and more Canadians are beginning now to say: "Wait a minute. The last time around, when you talked about free trade with the United States, we accepted that the Americans, by and large, are our friends, that we constantly work back and forth between Canada and the United States. Many of our industries here in Canada are branch plants of American industries. Okay, maybe we will try this thing and see whether it works out".
For the part of Canada that I come from in southern Ontario, the manufacturing heartland for Canada, the results have been disastrous.
To go back to that targeting theme that I was talking about a little bit earlier, it is not for everybody.
There are some entrepreneurs who have done quite nicely under the free trade agreement with the United States. The people who have paid the price are the people who generate the wealth, the workers in those plants. They are not there any more. People have been exercising their options to move their plants into the southern United States. It is not quite as rosy as it first

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looked. It is not quite as good as you might have thought. The benefits are not exactly there. Once you are in place and manufacturing in the States, it is not quite as good as it looks in the brochure but it is kind of late in the day to talk about coming back into Canada. Therein lies the tragedy for this budgetary process.


John Horton McDermid: Some of them are coming back.


Michael James Breaugh: The minister interjects that some of them are coming back, but they will have trouble getting through the borders with all the cross-border shopping. We will wait and see. I am a fair person. I am quite prepared to take a look at the analysis of a free trade agreement and see what the good side is and what the bad side is. Where I come from and for the area I represent, times are tough and we are getting hammered by a free trade agreement that is not stupid from an American perspective. It is a very good agreement from that perspective. It is only stupid from our side of the bargaining table.
I come from Oshawa, a town that has had difficult times this winter. Some people will look at the manufacturing sector, particularly automobiles, and say we kind of weathered the storm there a little bit in Oshawa. We have not, not by a long shot, and we know that. We are being pressured, as a lot of communities are in Canada, by General Motors to take a look at how we operate and what our trade union agreements are and what the community can do and just exactly what can happen that would make General Motors continue to function in our community.
We are looking at all of those things. A lot of these things are not very pleasant for us. A lot of them involve taking apart some of the things on which our successful economic union in Oshawa has been built on over the years: a trade union that can freely bargain for its membership; a company that can produce a quality product and that has access to a market in the United States. These are not simple things that you kind of pull apart.
We are working each and every day to see whether we can come to an agreement with General Motors that will make the Oshawa plants competitive in exactly the same way as the American plants are. We understand that is important, but that is not going to do us much good if we lose our jobs in the process.
In conclusion, I want to say that this is a government that has made its intentions clear. Surely there can be nobody left in Canada who doubts what this government
wants to do. It is the obligation of members on this side and the Canadian people to tell it what we think of it.


Mrs. Diane Marleau (Sudbury):: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member made reference to promises that were made, glossy brochures, all of these wild and wonderful things that happened during election campaigns, and how the people of Canada should not believe these things. Is he in essence saying that the people of Ontario should not have believed what the NDP promised in Ontario during the last election in its beautiful brochures? Mind you, he may be right, because the NDP in Ontario certainly has not followed through on many of its promises, if any at all.


Michael James Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, I watched a motion picture on the weekend called Blaze. It is a motion picture about a gentleman by the name of Earl K. Long, Governor of Louisiana at one time. One of the characters was told by her mother, before she went to New Orleans, that she should never trust a person who says "trust me." One of the first questions she put to Earl K. Long, Governor of the great State of Louisiana, was: "Can I trust you, Governor?" His response was: "Hell, no". It struck me that was a pretty good credo for modem politics. Most politicians, if they were honest, would say: "Wait a minute, this is not about you trusting me, this is about you analysing what I am all about. This is about you analysing my track record. You should understand that I may have all the good intentions in the world today, but if there is no money in the kitty tomorrow I am not going to be able to do the things I want to do".
It is not about reading brochures. It should not be about simply listening to commercials. It should not be about who has the best cosmetician to give them the best look for television. It should not be about who has the best press clipping service. It should be a careful, rational analysis about who works in my best interest, and I mean that in a very warm and personal way.
I suggest that those who would say otherwise have come to learn the grim lesson that my friends in the province of Ontario have had to leam since they took over from my good friends the Liberals. When we went through that election campaign, we began it with my good friend Bob Nixon, a very nice man, Treasurer of Ontario, a longstanding member of the Ontario legislature. Bob said: "Gee, things are great in Ontario. We have got like a $28 million surplus". Imagine that, in six short weeks it dropped to about a $200 million deficit. Was Bob Nixon misleading the people of Ontario? No,
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he was not. I know the man. Bob Nixon was giving the people of Ontario the best information he had. He was wrong, very wrong, and we all regret that, but he did not mean to mislead anybody. He told them the information he had at that given moment in time, but circumstances change.
All of us had better get used to the idea that we are living in a very volatile society. I remind those Liberals who are gloating just a touch over here. When you get up to 54 per cent, right where David Peterson was at the beginning of that provincial election campaign and you are fighting like mad to cause the folks on this side of the aisle to start up a general election, before you start that chant in this Chamber, why do you not read a little bit about what happened to David Peterson, one of the most popular premiers that Ontario ever had, sitting at 54 per cent at the beginning of the election, and see what happened to him at the end of the process. That is the lesson all of us have to learn.


Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Mr. Speaker, I was quite amused to hear the hon. member at the outset of his remarks say that he wanted us to set aside in effect-he did not use these words-partisan considerations in looking at our assessment of policies and try to look at it from the point of view of what the average Canadian wants or expects from his government. It is of course a perfectly good objective.
I guess what I was trying to say in my speech, and that I know he tried to in his in a different way, was: " If this is what the average Canadian wants, where are you best going to get it". Really in an election campaign, which he talked about last, we come down to a choice. The electorate gets a choice between the group of men and women that the electorate thinks are best able to provide the kind of Canada that the electorate wants, that they are able to provide the kind of policies, the programs, the jobs, the opportunities that the Canadian voter at least wants when he or she makes his or her choice at the polls.
What I think he was trying to say in a different way was support the policies that the New Democratic Party is putting forward as a reasonable alternative to the policies that the Government of Canada is now doing. What he was trying to do was pretend that this was a non-partisan approach to government decision making or elector-
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al decision making and of course, we all know that it is not.
I was a little more open in my comments. It was not any of this cloak and dagger stuff that perhaps he has been using a little facetiously here today in that I made it very clear that the choice of this government was a bad choice for Canada and Canadians across the country regret having chosen this group to be the government.
I wonder if he could tell us if he agrees that perhaps Ontario electors have ended up with a bad choice on two rounds now, both by choosing this government here, which has introduced policies that are inimical to the interests of Ontario, and in the choice of the New Democratic Party government which has adopted policies in the province and has scared investors in the province in a way that is inimical to the best interests of Ontarians.


Michael James Breaugh: Mr. Speaker, let me try to correct my friend on a couple of counts here. I am never non-partisan. I am probably the most fiercely partisan person you have ever met in your life. I have only belonged to one political party all my life. Warts and all, I am with them until the end.
I am not stupid enough to believe that my party is without sin and has never made mistakes. I am one of the few who says that very publicly on as many occasions as I can. I have been elected for 20 years. I have never asked anybody to vote for me yet. I tell them what I think. They match that up against their own best self-interest and they make the decisions.
The member is inviting me to castigate my friends at Queen's Park. I have already done that. It would not be new if I said something nasty about Bob Rae. I will offer this as a matter for your consideration.
I spoke last week to the Treasurer of Ontario briefly, an old friend of mine. He admits quite readily this is the worst possible time for anybody to try to run a government anywhere in the world. At the end of our conversation my friend, Floyd Laughren, the guy they call Pink Floyd, made some decisions that I know are choking him. I know the man well. I know that he has offered some proposals and that his whole heart is not right in there. He is going to have to make some decisions that he really does not want to have to make. At the end of it all I asked him how he was making out. He said: "Mike, I love it. This is what it is all about. This is what I worked all my political life to do, to try to form a government. I do not

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control what kind of situation we get, good times, bad times, whatever. I am here doing the things I believe in. The people will judge us. They will say whether you are right or wrong, whether you gave it your best shot or not, and that is what it is all about. That is as good as it gets and no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter how nifty your jingo is, that is the truth of it all. We all just have to give it the best shot we can. The people will decide".


Ms. Mary Clancy (Halifax):: Mr. Speaker, before I get into the serious matter of this budget I feel I have to make a comment on the statements of my hon. friend from Oshawa when he said he has never asked anyone to vote for him. I noticed the surprise on the faces of some of my colleagues across the way. I can only say that I certainly do ask the people of Halifax to vote for me. I consider it only polite to do so.
To the business at hand which is the business of this year's budget.
The finance minister said that he wanted to deliver a strong bottom line to Canadians. That is indeed what he has done, particularly to our 1.5 million unemployed Canadians by making unemployment a part of this government's economic policy. In spite of promises made in the last budget by the member from Etobicoke Centre-and the promises were for jobs, jobs, jobs- there is still nothing in this budget to improve job prospects for the 1.5 million Canadians who are unemployed. In fact this government actually admits that unemployment will remain at 10 per cent in this country for two more years, and that is nationally.
I look at two of my colleagues on the other side, one from St. John's East and the other from the South Shore. I know, as do they, that unemployment in their ridings is a whole lot higher than 10 per cent.
What this government is essentially asking Canadians is to put their lives on hold. Even worse than putting their lives on hold, it is asking Canadians to watch their lives go down the tubes.
There was no mention of training-


Mr. McCreath:: It won't work in Halifax with that nice new contract.


Mary Catherine Clancy: The contract that begins in 1993? My hon. friend talks about the new contract for Halifax. I presume he is talking about the contract to build the coastal patrol vessel. They are supposed to commence in 1993 and heaven knows, that every loyal Nova Scotian prays that that contract will come into being. Indeed that contract should have been given out six or seven years ago. We might now have a coastal patrol vessel that could go out and do some good work on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks, as my hon. friend from St. John's East knows.
As my hon. friend from the South Shore knows the problems on the nose and tail of the Grand Banks relate not too distantly to the fact that we do not have the ships that can go out there to enforce our fisheries law.


Peter L. McCreath: Tell us about the cuts in the Armed Forces that the Liberals made.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Oh, for the Trudeau years, if only they were back, and back they will be very soon.


Peter L. McCreath: They are still with us.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Yes, indeed, the only good thing left in this country are the remnants from those years.
There was no mention of training for the unemployed to allow them to re-enter the work force. For those of us who represent Atlantic Canada where we have seen the fish plants close, where we have seen in my usually economically fairly sound riding of Halifax 800 jobs gone with the closure of the Sears catalogue shopping centre, with the threatened closures at Imperial Oil in Dartmouth, with closures up and down the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland, one would have thought that somebody in this government might have given a moment's consideration to people who not only have no jobs but who have under this government's policy no reasonable hope for a job in the near future.
You know what the theory is, Mr. Speaker? I will tell you what the theory of this government is. The theory of this government is move or starve. That theory is the one they want to put into force in Atlantic Canada. I should think that my colleagues on the other side of this Chamber who represent Atlantic Canadian constituencies would feel just as bad about this as I do. I would not mind hearing from them on that score.
March 23, 1992

In fact, the federal government, in not mentioning training for the unemployed to allow them to re-enter the work force, cut $100 million from the Canadian Jobs Strategy Program, this strategy which is aimed at improving employment training to immigrants, to the disabled and to those people who have been forced upon the welfare rolls in this country. Those are the people, those are the ones with the least hope and this government has cut out for them any possibility of hope for a job in the near future or even, at least until an election, the distant future.


An hon. member:: Poppycock.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Codswallop is better.


Peter L. McCreath: Who wrote your speech?


Mary Catherine Clancy: I write my own speeches, unlike the member for South Shore.
A lot of these people are now relying on social assistance because their eligibility under unemployment insurance has been exhausted. Why has their eligibility under unemployment insurance been exhausted? I will tell you why. Because this government has taken the unemployment insurance program, particularly in Atlantic Canada, where Atlantic Canadians from the South Shore and from Newfoundland depend upon a seasonal economy and depend upon unemployment insurance for part of their yearly income, and it has gutted it. Gutted it. That is what this government has done. It has gutted it. That number of Canadians forced upon the unemployment rolls and then upon the social assistance rolls can only rise. That is the tragedy that we are facing in this country in 1992. Tory times are tough times.
Coupled with this, there is nothing in the budget to get the economy going again, no strategy to improve our competitiveness. What do we hear from this government all the time? We hear about being competitive. We hear about Canadians being challenged to be competitive. No one in this House, I think, denies that Canadians, given a true level playing field, can be as competitive as people in any other country. It does not mean being competitive with the thought of going into some kind of continental free trade deal with workers who work under ghastly conditions for $1 a day or 30 cents an hour.
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John Horton McDermid: You sound like a socialist. What nonsense.


Mary Catherine Clancy: The hon. minister says: "What nonsense".
I wish the hon. minister would put his money where his mouth is and tell me what his plans are to start this economy moving again. It is stalled and he knows it is stalled.


John Horton McDermid: It has moved. It has moved.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Yes, moving down. That is where it is moving.
The government speaks of an ever-changing global economy and the need for a highly skilled work force, but it has chosen to abandon those programs that would set us on the road to becoming a truly competitive nation. Thousands of Canadian jobs are moving south of the border, thousands. In the province of Ontario, in the province of Quebec, they are moving, they are gone. In the other provinces, thousands of people are going as well.
Last week I talked to a young doctor in Halifax who would be a stellar addition to the medical profession wherever she chose to practice. She came to see me, among other things, to tell me that she was leaving to go to the United States. Why is she leaving to go to the United States? Because she is overtaxed, because her equally well educated husband cannot find a job. She is working 18 hours a day and, as she says, has no time to see her children. It is no life, so she is leaving for the United States where she can have a more normal life, where her husband will find employment and where she will see her children.
What is this government doing about this kind of brain drain? Not one thing. Thousands of jobs are moving south of the border, thousands of jobs out of Atlantic Canada moving to central Canada or south of the border. Agencies shut down. ICOT in Nova Scotia shut down. The Science Council shut down, the Economic Council shut down. If we are so concerned about training and education and competitiveness, why is this government cutting off its own nose to spite its face?
It is not sensible. It is not rational and it does not portray any kind of foresight on the part of this government. The government has done major damage to post-secondary education in this country by its cuts to

March 23, 1992
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Established Programs Financing. Universities in this country-I spoke on this last week-are suffering. My hon. colleague from St. John's knows that the universities in Atlantic Canada are suffering particularly. Dal-housie University had to raise the tuition for its hard-pressed students by 10 per cent this year. Students no longer can make anything close to the money they used to be able to make in the summertimes to even begin to pay their tuition fees, if there were any jobs, which there aren't, so there is no chance for them at all.
I turn to housing in this budget. The home buyers plan, modelled, I must congratulate the government, after the Liberal Party's own proposals, allows first-time home buyers to withdraw up to $20,000 from their RRSPs for down payments on a home. It is expected that the purchase of a home will have an important ripple effect in the manufacturing and construction industry. Approximately 100,000 holders of RRSPs are expected to take advantage of this opportunity. However this move, good as it is in the sector that it helps, will do nothing to improve the housing situation for those that do not have RRSPs and depend on federal aid.
Cuts to the social housing budget mean that funds available for new units will decrease by 50 per cent in three years.
Who of us in this House has not seen on the streets of our major cities the homeless. Who of us, in our constituency offices, has not dealt with single parents looking for decent, affordable housing for themselves and their children? Who of us has not seen women, having left an abusive situation, desperately seeking second stage housing for themselves and for their children to maintain a safe environment.
What is this government doing? It is decreasing the funds available for new units by 50 per cent. Where is the compassion? Where is even the rationale? Is it just throw everybody out on the heap and hope that the fittest will survive?
I suggest that the members of the government should look to their laurels because their own survival is pretty shaky, based on this kind of government policy.
In 1991, $91 million was available for new social housing units. In 1992-93 that went down to $70 million. In 1993 to 1996, only $45 million will be available.
To a lot of people that sounds like a huge amount of money. But it is less than half of what was available last year. We still see more and more of the homeless on the streets of our cities. We still see the under-housed, we hear the complaints, the pleas from people looking for a decent place to live.
Is there anyone in this House who does not believe that all Canadians deserve a decent place to live? Or is their response "let them eat cake"? I am afraid that we know what the response is.
Another casualty of this year's budget on housing is the elimination of the co-operative housing program, which provided non-profit co-operative housing to low and moderate income families. In Nova Scotia alone, this program enabled 2,000 families to secure housing.
Co-operative housing got its start in the province of Nova Scotia, through the efforts of Monsignor Moses Coady and Father James Tompkins of the famed Anti-gonish movement. Co-operative housing and the co-operatives in Canada in general started in Antigonish many years ago, and it is something that all Canadians have come to understand. It is a good program, it is a solid program, it gives people the opportunity to own their own houses and to have the right and pride of ownership.
What has this government done? It has decimated this program. It has obliterated this program. It says: "Nope, sorry, we don't care any more and we are not going to give you this opportunity".
The members on the opposite side should hang their heads in shame. But, mind you, their heads have been hanging so low for so long it's probably hard to tell. It is all in the degree of angle.
This government claims that the lowering of the personal surtax will result in lower taxes. Certainly it will, for high income earners. This only translates into a $2 dollar a year saving for a family of four with a combined income of $15,000. For families with incomes above $40,000, the so-called tax cut amounts to $44 a year. Some tax break.
Canada is facing serious problems and this budget leaves me wondering if the government is even aware of what it is doing. Unemployment, overfishing, low com-
March 23, 1992

modity prices, plant closures, violent crime, drug abuse, hunger, homelessness and more; the list goes on. There is nothing in this budget that deals with any of these problems. This is a government that says: "Do not tell me about it. I do not want to deal with it. I do not want to know about it. Canadians can fish or cut bait". That is not the only thing they are going to cut come the next election.
We have another thing in this budget that relates to education and it is the fact that this government is trying to deceive Canadians by reducing the student's taxable income by $20 a month while at the same time increasing student debt loads. Continuing to charge the GST on books-GST on books, imagine. Let us just stop and think about that for a minute. A tax on learning, a tax on reading in Canada-appalling. It is no wonder I cannot catch the eye of anybody on the other side of the House. They must be ashamed and rightly so.
The government is continuing the regressive 3 per cent surcharge on student loans. That, in particular, is a scandal. As I said before, it is impossible for students in this country today to earn the money during vacation or with part-time jobs to pay their tuition, to keep themselves going. Therefore, what is post-secondary education becoming in this country? It is becoming a privilege of the wealthy.
I come from a part of the country where there are wealthy people, middle income people and poor people. But I also come from a part of the country where for many years, most of them under Liberal governments, post-secondary education was a viable goal for the children of fishermen, the children of farmers and the children of coal miners and steelworkers in every region of Atlantic Canada, the children of plant workers in northern New Brunswick. Is it a viable goal today? No it is not. It is a viable goal for the children of the upper middle class and even then it is a pretty rough go.
Putting a tax of 3 per cent on student loans is shocking. It is absolutely shocking on the part of a government that talks about competitiveness, training and then in the end pays little more than lip service to the exigencies of getting an education in Canada in the 1990s. Starting with the new loans made for the 1992-93 academic year, the government will cancel the sue month interest free
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post-graduation period for students with Canada student loans.
I would make a bet that for a significant number of people in this House, the baby-boomers in this House and there are a fair number of us, we all took advantage of that six-month post-graduation period in which to get ourselves started and under way before we started paying the interest on our student loans. Are the graduates of today less worthy than we were of getting a small break from their government, especially when they have the 3 per cent surcharge to deal with currently?
This regressive measure will increase the debt load of poorer students who rely on Canada student loans to get an education. It will probably put a university education beyond their grasp, absolutely. Some ability to compete! Some ability to make Canada and give Canadian students a level playing field.
Measures introduced by this government since 1986 will result in a $1.6 billion cut in federal support for post-secondary education in 1992-93 and a cumulative cut from 1986 to 1993 of $4.9 billion. Let us look at this compared with the reality of obtaining a post-secondary education. In Nova Scotia, tuition fees have jumped 24 per cent in 1991, and as I mentioned before, are set to rise another 10 per cent this coming fall.
Since 1985-86, tuition fees at Dalhousie have risen by
49.7	per cent. The average cost of room and board rose by $1,200.1 could go on and on and on. We all could go on and on and on, but the bottom line-the Minister of Finance has talked about a bottom line budget-is that this budget does nothing to help Canadians who need it most.
It does nothing to jump-start the economy. It does nothing to retrain people crying for jobs, and it does nothing to make Canada competitive and to give Canadians a level playing field in a down-sized economy. This budget is a sham, a scandal and a disgrace.


Mrs. Dorothy Dobbie (Winnipeg South):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her lesson in economics. It was a most interesting one.
She left out some details however. It may, indeed, be true that we do not have enough dollars to pay for every whim and fancy of every single Canadian across the country. The member also mentioned that she would like

March 23, 1992
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to see us kick-start the economy, but what she did not tell us is how much she would like to borrow in order to do some of the things that she talked about.
How much money would she borrow, where would she get it from and at what cost to Canadian taxpayers? They are already paying 35 cents out of every tax dollar they send to Ottawa to service the debt accumulated by previous governments that the hon. member is very, very familiar with. They are from the past, before 1984.
I guess my question would be: Where does this money come from to pay for all of the things that Canadians would dearly like to have and to pay for all the things that Canadians enjoyed even though they could not afford them in the past? How would the hon. member raise the funds for this? Would she raise taxes?
This government in its recent budget reduced taxes. At least, if it is not a huge amount of money, it is a step in the right direction. It shows a commitment that this government has to reducing the over-all tax burden on ordinary Canadians, a tax burden that Canadians are telling us they no longer can support.
It is not a matter any longer of governments using politically popular programs to re-elect themselves by spending taxpayers' dollars. Taxpayers simply will not accept that.
Perhaps the hon. member could tell us how she would support all of these programs without increasing taxes, without increasing the burden of debt on the taxpayer and somehow, without being cynical and buying votes, how she would do these things?


Mary Catherine Clancy: Mr. Speaker, I am delighted that the hon. member for Winnipeg has asked me those questions.
I would just like to begin with a comment that I think Canadians know what it is they can no longer support. They are not some of the things that the hon. member was talking about.
I would also like to make a comment on her statement about education being a whim and a fancy. If she thinks that young people, desiring to get a higher education in this country, are the subjects of whim and fancy, then I
am even more frightened for the future of this country while this government stays in power.
Let us get to the meat of the question. The question was: What would I do? How would I pay for it? First of all, we have an unfair tax system in this country. The tax system is all skewed up. This government's people said that when they were in opposition, lo these eight years ago. It is a terrible tax system. It is all fouled up and it is all wrong. It ought to be changed.
This government is in power and has been in power for eight years. What has it done to change the unfairness of the tax system in this country? Zippo. Nothing. This is the government that brought us the GST. That is what it did to change things. It put a tax on the poor and on children. It put a tax on reading, it put a tax on essentials. What did it do to make the tax system in Canada fairer? Not one thing. Nothing.
Make the tax system fairer, that is what my hon. friend needs to do. If she has influence with this government of hers, let us see it done before the next election.
The other thing she said is that the government cut taxes. I thought I dealt with that in my speech. I am sure my colleague from Cape Breton Highlands-Canso heard me do so. I am sure I did.
I will repeat this very slowly so that the hon. member hears me.
If you have an income of $15,000 per year and a family of four, you are part of a group into which all too many Canadians fall. This step in the right direction that my hon. friend talks about is worth $2 per year. I am not sure what exactly you could buy for a family of four, GST included, for $2. Perhaps the hon. member can enlighten me. If you have an income of over $40,000, a median income for a family of four, you get $44. I wonder if anybody, including the hon. member, could enlighten me as to what kind of a spending spree you could go on with $44, again GST included.
This goes past the realm of incompetence. I am shocked that the hon. member would put such a naive question. I am shocked that she would insult the intelligence of Canadians to such a degree.
I for once am speechless.
March 23, 1992


Dorothy I. Dobbie: Mr. Speaker, I just want to mention that the hon. member did not answer the question about how she would pay for additional programs spending. She talks about a fairer tax system but I wonder. She does not tell us what that might be. She does not tell us why her government in previous years did not create that system when it had control of this country for most of this century.
I would also suggest to the hon. member that in addition to cutting taxes in this recent budget, the federal government created better opportunities for lower income families through a new child tax credit that gives the lowest income families about $1,700 per year, which is quite a bit of money. You could do quite a bit more than the hon. member pretends. Those people benefit all the way round, lower taxes plus a higher child credit.
The hon. member could perhaps answer my question. Perhaps she does not have an answer. If she does not, maybe she does not want to stand up. She has said she is speechless and perhaps she will remain that way. My question was: How would the hon. member raise the kind of money that it would take to do some of the things that she has suggested in her speech and that Canadians would like to see done? She should share this with us. All members in this House would like to be able to provide all kinds of services to Canadians, but we need to have the money to do this.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Fix the tax system.


Dorothy I. Dobbie: Simply saying a fairer tax system is not going to provide that kind of money. If you take from one part of the tax system and add burdens to the other part of the tax system, you do not raise more money. Perhaps the hon. member has a magical solution, a magical formula that she has not told anybody yet. We have not been able to find this answer anywhere else.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Mr. Speaker, I can tell my hon. friend from Winnipeg South that step one in the magical formula is issue the writ.
Step two in the magical formula is bring on-


Mr. Walter Van  De Walle@St. Albert: You haven't any.


Mary Catherine Clancy: Absolutely. Step two is the change in the tax system. The hon. member's party has been eight years in government. I realize that she like myself
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arrived in 1988. If the hon. member has no ideas as to how to reform the tax system and she wants to know what the Liberal ideas are about reforming the tax system, can I tell her that should she wish to cross the floor, we will take it under advisement and consider it. I am sure my hon. colleague the Whip could give her a decision. Then she could become privy to the stellar policies of the Liberal Party of Canada.
She wants to talk about jump-starting the economy. I will say this very slowly so that I will not be misunderstood and so everyone, even the hon. member for St. John's East, can understand it. Hear me. We have been telling this government for months now of one, only one project, that would make a difference to this economy, that would jump-start it and start pumping some money into it. That is the infrastructure project. How many times I ask my hon. colleague for Cape Breton Highlands-Canso, how many times I ask my hon. colleague for Sudbury, have we suggested this to the government, how many times have we said that this is a major giant step to turning this country and its economy around?
I do not know what we can do, not having the government's budget for self-aggrandizement through advertising in newspapers. Again I say it. I say it now. The infrastructure project, think about it. It is a good idea, just like the RRSP idea was a good idea as long as you do not kill it in the second half of the puzzle.
The hon. member says to me: "What ideas?" Our ideas are put forward every day. I have given a few here and now. I have said what can be done. I have spent three and one-half years telling this government what it can do. Is it any wonder I am depressed when it does not listen to me and when it does not take my advice. Even someone as effervescent as myself can get depressed at the response from this government.


Mr. Alfonso Gagliano (Saint-Leonard):: Mr. Speaker, I want to take part in this debate of third reading of Bill C-61, an act to provide borrowing authority for the government.
When Canadians go to the bank and ask to have credit extended, the banker wants to know how they are doing financially and what their intentions are for repayment. It is important that we parliamentarians, before we authorize the government to borrow money, see what

March 23, 1992
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the government is doing and where the government is going with their economic and financial policies.
In fact, in the past two weeks Canadians have witnessed both the presentation of the budget and the tabling of the estimates. Together they are the primary tools used by the government to enunciate its fiscal, economic and social policies.
The budget is the major statement of the economic direction which the government intends to follow. Last February in this House the government demonstrated to Canadians its intent to continue to follow the road to economic hardship and high unemployment.
We do not have to go through the whole book; we just have to look, for example, at unemployment predictions. For the coming year the government is predicting the same high unemployment rate that we have right now. Therefore, that concludes that the government intends to follow the same direction that produced record layoffs and record bankruptcies.
Just prior to tabling his budget, the Minister of Finance qualified his budget as being realistic, in other words, a budget conceived with today's economic reality in mind. Canadians can only conclude that the minister must have been in another world when he dreamed up his latest budget.
Today a Gallup poll came out on the budget. Only 23 per cent of Canadians believe that the budget is going to do something to help the economy.
If the minister wants to discuss reality, I would tell him that the reality is that 1.5 million Canadians are out of work. The reality is that over 13,000 businesses and
62,000	consumers went bankrupt in 1991. The reality is that Canadians are taxed more today than in any other period in history. The reality is that both business and consumer confidence in the economy is at an all-time low. That is the economic reality in which we find ourselves today.
The problem is that the Conservative government has failed once again to face the reality and address the most important issues. For the minister to acknowledge that the unemployment rate would remain over 10 per cent, as I said before, for the next fiscal period is irresponsible.

Obviously Canadians are going to be suspicious when the Minister of Finance says he intends to follow the same path as his predecessor. Consider what happened since last year's budget was brought down. A year ago the Minister of Finance at the time rose in the House to read his budget speech. I would like to quote just one sentence from Hansard of February 26, 1991. The minister said:
This budget sets out a Plan for Economic Recovery-a strong,
confident recovery that not only puts the recession behind us but
leads us forward to continuing growth and renewed prosperity.
Let us look at the programs set out in this budget, the one used by the Minister of Finance today, and we will see that he has not succeeded in leading us to a period of renewed prosperity. We will see that we are far from prosperity. All that the Conservative government's economic program has been able to create is a long list of victims. The victims to whom I refer are the 62,277 Canadian consumers and 13,495 Canadian companies that went bankrupt in 1991. That is an increase of 39 per cent over the previous year. That is far from the road to prosperity promised by the Minister of Finance.
I also refer to the 1.5 million unemployed Canadians and I do not count those who are no longer looking for work because they are discouraged, like many jobless people. The Conservatives' economic policies have not been able to create prosperity in Quebec either. Indeed the province of Quebec lost 68,000 jobs in 1991 and another 4,000 in January 1992. In Quebec 18,319 consumers and 5,217 businesses went bankrupt in 1991. Officially Quebec now has 405,000 unemployed, not counting those who have given up looking for work.
In Montreal the average unemployment rate in 1991 was 12.2 per cent, an increase of 2 per cent over the year before. This negative trend does not seem to end, since unemployment in Montreal rose to 12.4 per cent in February 1992. The government is ignoring the importance of Montreal's economic well-being for Quebec and all of Canada.
The metropolitan area provides nearly half the employment in the province. Unfortunately, according to a recent report, one adult in two in the Montreal region does not work. This is intolerable, in what is one of Canada's major metropolitan areas.
March 23, 1992

Last year was one of the worst for tourism in the Montreal area, and tourism is not the only sector that is crumbling under the Conservatives. The manufacturing sector in Montreal has also been hard hit.
As the member for Saint-Leonard, a riding where manufacturing plays an important role, I know that eastern Montreal is dying. For 10 years, the number of plant closings and job losses has been very high. We lost 900 jobs when Angus closed down; 380 at Vickers; 900 at Welfab steel products; 500 at Esso; 450 at Gulf; 591 at Steinberg, and the list goes on, Mr. Speaker.
Montreal is on its death bed, with 10,000 more unemployed workers than in 1986. Despair, that is what the Conservative path has led to.
And on top of that, the latest budget does nothing to stimulate job creation in this country. How can we get the economy back on track, when more than 10 per cent of the community is not working, according to official statistics? We proposed a plan to modernize infrastructures. It was a five-point plan, and the government is to be commended for having accepted and implemented two of them, but a week later, interest rates went up again. When people are ready to withdraw $20,000 from their Registered Retirement Savings Plan to buy a house, do you really expect them to when all of a sudden interest rates go up again? This has just destroyed any motivation they had. That is why the economic situation in Montreal continues to be a disaster.
Everyone agrees that to get the country out of this slump we must get consumers to spend. However they are not spending, either because they are unemployed or they are working but their purchasing power is going down. Every weekend we see people cross the border because it is cheaper. Of course the government's high dollar policy does not help.
In fact what the minister gives with one hand he takes away with the other. For instance, a couple with a combined income of $40,000 and two children will receive $44 annually in family allowance. Lest we forget, on January 1, 1991 the GST came into effect. On July 1 our unemployment insurance premiums went up by 24 per cent. According to Statistics Canada we are more heavily taxed today than at any time in our history. I do not remember exactly how many new taxes this government introduced.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: It being two o'clock, the House will now proceed with statements by members pursuant to Standing Order 31.


STATEMENTS PURSUANT TO S. O. 31
Mr. Yvon Cote (Richmond-Wolfe):: Mr. Speaker, certain documents released last week, which had been kept secret since 1970, confirmed that clandestine action was taken by Pierre-Elliott Trudeau's Liberal cabinet against Quebec and many Quebec citizens who at the time were considered to be dangerous nationalists.
This unworthy behaviour was an insult to the good faith and intelligence of Quebecers and all Canadians who expected dignity, integrity and justice from their elected representatives.
It is not surprising that these same leaders arbitrarily implemented the War Measures Act that violated the rights of hundreds of Quebecers and stained Canada's reputation as a democracy. It is inconceivable that such leaders held such an attitude against Canadians, all the while claiming to defend democracy.
I do not accept that.


GOODS AND SERVICES TAX
Ms. Beth Phinney (Hamilton Mountain):: Mr. Speaker, many of my constituents in Hamilton Mountain have been asking me about the GST, the debt and the deficit. They would like to be assured that GST revenues will not be spent on pre-election goodies.
Last year the government introduced Bill C-21 which calls for all GST revenues to be directed toward deficit reduction. After receiving second reading this bill has been sitting in committee for quite some time. We are waiting to see if the Conservatives practise what they preach on the importance of reducing the deficit. Canadians what to know: Is the government still committed to this legislation?

March 23, 1992


TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT
Mr. Garth Turner (Halton-Peel):: Recently released documents have linked the cabinet of Pierre Trudeau to the RCMP theft of Parti Quebecois lists. This is as shocking as it is appalling, to think that any government would use a national police force in this fashion.
In this new age of constitutional committees and conferences, royal commissions and the involvement of ordinary Canadians in nation building by the Prime Minister, Gestapo tactics like those used by the Tru-deauites are unthinkable; the October crisis, falsely arresting people, using the RCMP to steal, gathering political information through criminal tactics. Remember what Trudeau said when asked how far he would go: "Watch me", he said. We are still watching, and it makes you wonder what other dirty secrets are in the closet of history.
When Trudeau comes to comment on today's attempts to heal Canada, fractured in 1980, Canadians will wonder how a man who used his office to abuse and deny Canadians their rights could now possibly utter a single word in defence of either rights or freedoms.


THE ENVIRONMENT
Mr. Jim Fulton (Skeena):: Environmental assessment became a hot potato in Quebec over the weekend. Development, regardless of its impact on the environment, has been the trademark of Liberals in Quebec for decades. Take, for example, the flooding caused by the hydroelectric projects James Bay I and H, a total of 25,824 square kilometres. This is six times as much land flooded by one project as is protected by all the provincial and national parks in Quebec combined.
The Brundtland World Commission on the Environment recommends 12 per cent protection as a minimum. Quebec has 0.3 per cent protected lands.
The Quebec Liberal Party voted unanimously over the weekend to "denounce and condemn federal environmental assessment Bill C-13". The great Liberal tradition of being firmly on both sides of every issue was confirmed by all Liberal MPs voting for Bill C-13. Not
unlike the weekend remarks of former Prime Minister Trudeau about the Liberal decision to steal the membership lists of the Parti Quebecois, "the record is there; that is all I can say". The member for Vancouver Quadra was the Minister of Justice at the time and Leader of the Opposition was in cabinet. Let us hear from them today.



Godfrey Stanley (Stan) Wilbee: Mr. Speaker, this past week a very significant group of parliamentarians met in Vancouver to discuss our role as parliamentarians in relationship to the environment, particularly as it relates to increasing urbanization and development of megacities. There were about 150 delegates representing 60 countries from both developed and developing countries. The meeting resulted in acceptance and publication of the Vancouver Declaration of Global Parliamentarians and Habitat on Human Settlements and Sustainable Development.
I congratulate the hon. member for Fraser Valley West on his election as chairman of this body and also the member for Ottawa West on her selection as a member of the executive because of her hard work and leadership on women's issues.
We anticipate more good work from this exciting body.


SEX OFFENDERS
Peter Andrew Stewart Milliken: Mr. Speaker, the problem of dangerous sexual offenders is one that requires action on the part of the government. Convicted sex offenders are sentenced to a term in penitentiary at the conclusion of which they are released into the community. Psychologists and specialists in deviant behaviour know that the likelihood of repetition of the offence is very great. The police know that nothing can be done to restrain the offender until he has reoffended. Another victim and another penitentiary sentence.
Surely it is time to devise a new means of dealing with and treating these offenders. Surely the criminal justice system is ill equipped to protect our children and stop these crimes.
March 23, 1992

I urge the government to look at the possibility of special treatment facilities for such individuals to protect the defenceless in our society and try to provide some help for these disfigured criminals who cause us all such anguish and hurt.


SEARCH AND RESCUE
Peter L. McCreath: Mr. Speaker, I have with me today a petition signed by some 14,700 residents of southwest Nova Scotia from Shelburne County through to Digby County. It is my intention to present this petition later today to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
They express a concern of the people of southwest Nova Scotia over the possibility that the search and rescue helicopter service which has saved over 40 lives over the course of the past three years will be removed from Yarmouth.
Yesterday some 300 people met at the Yarmouth airport together with municipal, provincial and federal politicians to express their concern and to urge the government not to allow an end to the vitally important search and rescue and fisheries surveillance service.
I join with those residents in urging the government to find the means to ensure that this service remains in place for the benefit of fishermen and their families in southwestern Nova Scotia.


RIVERTON
Mary Catherine Clancy: Mr. Speaker, something must be done about the terrible plight of the Canadian forces auxiliary vessel Riverton based in Halifax and crewed by civilian employees of DND.
Repeated pleas by the crew of this vessel have fallen on deaf ears and they paint a sad picture. Cramped quarters, obsolete machinery and inhuman working conditions face these men on the Riverton every minute they are at sea. They have consulted with management and heard nothing. They have complained to management and were told that if they continued to complain they might lose their jobs.
Eight men live in a space that is suitable for two people. There is no recreational space. Fourteen men
must eat in a mess the size of a closet. How long will the government allow this situation to continue?
The Riverton is vital to the TRUMP program and to the frigate program but the government makes repeated promises for a refit that never takes place.
The government must keep its promise to refit the Riverton this spring. The top priority must be the installation of adequate crew facilities so that the crew can feel like humans rather than animals.


HELICOPTER PURCHASE
Mr. Bill Casey (Cumberland-Colchester):: Mr. Speaker, the federal government is currently negotiating to buy 50 EHI 101 helicopters from European Helicopters Industries Ltd. in England. Part of the negotiations include a requirement that EHI contract out to Canadian manufacturers for components of equal value to the main contract. Further, Atlantic Canada is to receive 10 per cent of the opportunities provided from these industrial benefits.
It is very important that these guidelines be met and that companies like IMP Aerospace in Amherst, Nova Scotia be given the opportunity to contract for these helicopter components. IMP was recently awarded the AQAP-1 quality recognition from the Department of National Defence which qualifies it as an outstanding manufacturer of airplane components and is now recognized world-wide. In addition, IMP Aerospace from Amherst has also qualified for the Boeing D1900 quality approval certification.
It is most appropriate that this factory have the opportunity to bid on this work considering that it was one of the industries most severely impacted from the termination of the tracker program.
I call on the various departments of government involved to ensure that Atlantic Canada gets its fair share.


STONE CONSOLIDATED PAPER MILL
Mr. Brian L. Gardiner (Prince George-Bulkley Valley):: Mr. Speaker, this past week the New Brunswick NDP Federal Council of Ridings, while meeting in Moncton, passed a resolution congratulating the workers at the Stone Consolidated Paper Mill in Bathurst. I was

March 23, 1992
pleased to attend this meeting along with our New Brunswick leader, MLA Elizabeth Weir.
Threatened with wage rollbacks and closure, with no guarantees, the workers headed by Mr. Rick Doucet of the Canadian Paperworkers Union held to their position. Their fear was that to capitulate to Stone would have given this industry a beachhead on which to attack the workers who work in this industry which is facing many problems today.
In a statement the union says that this is not a problem created by workers. The New Brunswick workers are well qualified and hard working. We ask that corporate Canada be as responsible as the workers of Bathurst.


NUCLEAR INDUSTRY
Mr. J. W. Bud Bird (Fredericton-York-Sunbury):: Mr. Speaker, the world is rapidly recognizing that atmospheric pollution must be stopped. It is also recognizing that nuclear power will play a major role in achieving that result.
Canada has a significant contribution to offer through our global leadership in nuclear plant design and operation, particularly with development of the Candu III reactor.
In turn my own province of New Brunswick is in a position to create lasting industrial development by seizing the opportunity to build our existing nuclear energy experience to become Canada's centre of excellence in Candu III manufacturing and marketing. This is potential of a world scale.
The nuclear opportunity for New Brunswick may be fleeting. Competition is already in the wings. New Brunswick should act now.


RACIAL DISCRIMINATION
Hon. Lloyd Axworthy (Winnipeg South Centre):: Mr. Speaker, March 21 marked the anniversary of the Shar-peville massacre and as a result was proclaimed as the international day for the elimination of racial discrimination by the United Nations.
It is celebrated this year at a very timely moment with the encouraging results in the South African referendum.
But we need not go as far as Africa to look at how we correct racial discrimination. We must look at ourselves at home. We can look at the police files against Haitians. We can look at the difficulties experienced by visible minorities in their job search. We can look at the attacks on refugees and immigrants. We can look at the notorious hate literature campaign and certainly the discrimination experienced by aboriginals in our court system.
As an antidote to these events I would like to commend the constructive initial responses by the Citizenship Council of Manitoba which this year distributed
130,000	"No to Racism" stickers throughout the schools and among 90 citizens' groups.
It is a way of showing how the community can draw awareness to the issue of racism and giving individuals the opportunity to express their personal opposition.
In a recent survey multiculture-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Order, please. Your time has now expired.


UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Mr. Lee Richardson (Calgary Southeast):: Mr. Speaker, I rise to congratulate the University of Calgary law school team which won first place in the Canadian division of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. The competition involved nearly all the law schools in Canada. It was held in Saskatoon on February 1 and 2. Members of the University of Calgary team are Jonathan Blakey, Leslie Morris, Hilary Stout, Kerri-Anne Thomas, and Kevin Zemp.
The Jessup competition presents students with an international law problem which they are then required to debate in front of the International Court of Justice. To score well takes considerable finesse and skill. The competition provides a forum for students to practise their debating and analytical skills.
As the Canadian champions the University of Calgary team will travel to Washington, D.C., on March 28 to April 4 for the international round of competition. Approximately 30 countries will be participating.
March 23, 1992

As second place winner of the Canadian finals, the team from McGill University will also be going to Washington.
On behalf of my constituents in Calgary Southeast and my hon. colleagues here today in the House I would like to wish both teams the best of luck.


CHALLENGE '92
Mr. Howard McCurdy (Windsor-St. Clair):: Mr. Speaker, there is another nail in the coffin of the government's so-called prosperity initiative. Remember that one? It included promoting education and training, doubling the number of scientists, mathematicians and engineers and so on.
Friday when he thought no one was looking the Minister of State for Youth, instead of the usual press conference, sneaked out a bad news news release on the summer employment program called Challenge '92.
After $9 billion in cutbacks have increased college and university fees by as much as 150 per cent, after making student loans more difficult and expensive to repay, and after engineering a recession where youth unemployment has risen to almost 20 per cent, the government announced another cut in real dollars for student summer jobs.
Now funding is only 40 per cent of what it was in 1985 in real dollars and only half as many students will be supported.
Now instead of filling classrooms more youth are filling unemployment lines. That is really some prosperity initiative.


MADE IN CANADA
Mr. Walter Van  De Walle@St. Albert: Mr. Speaker, the three words made in Canada mean quality. Made in Canada creates jobs. Made in Canada shows the world that we mean business.
I urge the federal government to initiate a nation-wide program promoting made-in-Canada products. This campaign, supported by retailers, manufacturers and government is to remind consumers that first-rate prod-
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ucts are available and being produced here in Canada. A campaign to buy made in Canada will create and maintain jobs for Canadians and boost the economy. This would be a win-win situation.
I urge all Canadians to support made-in-Canada products and look for these three words when they shop.


VIA RAIL
Diane Marleau: Mr. Speaker, in 1989 when the Minister of Transport announced huge cuts to VIA Rail services, he promised that for the particularly remote regions we would maintain nine so-called remote routes in the national transportation system so that citizens who do not have other means of transport could still travel.
Now we are seeing the same government go back on that promise. VIA Rail has decided not service some stops between Capreol and Armstrong, Ontario. These stops are valued by tourist operators, cottagers, out-doorsmen and native people who have no other access to the lands.
These cuts are negatively affecting the people who least deserve it. For one tourist resort owner, this cut in service means the train will stop two miles past his resort. Customers must walk back along the track two miles winter and summer. This inconvenience is occurring all along the track and is just one more example of how the chances for northern development have been weakened at a time when they should be strengthened.



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD

['Mr. Speaker, I would like to designate tomorrow, March 24, an allotted day.']
Ms. Sheila Copps (Hamilton East):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
Two weeks ago in Toronto, speaking of trade disputes, the Prime Minister accused the United States of acting like a tin pot dictator. We all saw him on television and boy, was he going to be tough. He told Canadian auto workers that he would stand up for them. Last week, when he was in New York, he said that trade disputes

March 23, 1992
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were "low-level harassment by functionaries in the administration".
Why did the Prime Minister talk tough in Toronto and wimp out on Wall Street?


Right Hon. Brian Mulroney (Prime Minister):: Speaking of wimps, how have you all been while I was away?


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend has of course again, and no doubt inadvertently mislead the House. What I indicated in Toronto was exactly what I indicated in New York. There was no change at all in a statement made in Toronto as opposed to a statement made in New York.
If my hon. friend would like to take the time before she asks her next question to consult and then table both transcripts, I know she would want to do so with an apology.


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, the person who should be tendering an apology is the Prime Minister who did not stand up for Canadian jobs when he was in New York.
I would like to quote him directly. This is what he said: "I said low-level functionaries. I won't go any further than that. It's not President Bush. It's not his cabinet".
I want to ask the Prime Minister this question. If it is just a couple of low-level functionaries, why have the issues not been resolved and why has the American government not dropped actions on softwood lumber and Hondas?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I have indicated from the very beginning-my hon. friend has made my point. That statement was one I made both in Toronto and New York, that the action taken in the United States was not an action initiated by the President of the United States.
My hon. friend from Newfoundland is chuckling. That just indicates ignorance. The fact of the matter is that this action was not initiated by the President of the United States. It was initiated by lobby groups who attacked the American administration which then, at the level of low-level functionaries, responded with an action that damaged very seriously the interests of Canada. It was at that point I indicated that if this kind of action had come from a small country with a tin pot
dictator, that would be one thing but coming from a great trading nation like the United States, this was most unworthy. That I said in Toronto, that I said here and in New York.
Thanks to the free trade agreement, we have initiated-


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Had it not been for the free trade agreement which gives us-


Lloyd Axworthy: We are taking it on the chin.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, the member for Winnipeg is finding this so entertaining, it is the first laugh he has had in a long time. I will keep it up.


Some hon. members:: Oh, oh.


Mr. Speaker:: Somebody should probably put a stop to that. The right hon. Prime Minister may wish to complete his answer.


Lloyd Axworthy: He's too embarrassed.


Martin Brian Mulroney: My hon. friend from Winnipeg says that I am too embarrassed. I will acknowledge to him that I would be very embarrassed today if this was the final word in the United States.
That would have been the final word in the United States prior to 1988, but under the free trade agreement we have access to a dispute settlement mechanism, whereas we would have been dead as doornails under the Liberal policy. Under the dispute settlement mechanism, we have won these cases and we will win these cases on behalf of Canada.
Most recently we had a pork decision which affected so vitally the interests of western producers. Had the hon. member from Winnipeg's view prevailed, the western pork producers would have been down the drain. As it was, their case was safe.


Mr. Speaker:: Perhaps we should move on. [Translation]


Sheila Maureen Copps: Mr. Speaker, I understand that the Prime Minister is very embarrassed about his change of position between Toronto and New York.

I will ask him a very specific question. He pretends that it is only bureaucrats and functionaries. However, it is the Commerce Department, headed by Carla Hills who is in cabinet with George Bush. So I ask him again why he was not able to solve this problem with his great friend George Bush, since it comes from the U.S. Commerce Department and directly from Carla Hills.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is again mistaken. The U.S. Commerce Department is not headed by Carla Hills. That is another mistake from the hon. member for Hamilton East.
She was wrong to talk about a flip-flop. It was an error and a lie when she said it in English and it is the same in French.


Mr. Speaker:: One moment, please.

The right hon. Prime Minister is suggesting that the question was a lie. I may have misheard it but I would hope that the right hon. gentleman would certainly correct that immediately.


Martin Brian Mulroney: I will be happy. I have already indicated that the statement made by my hon. friend in regard to a quotation was false. It was false when she made it in her first question. It was false in her second and it is false in French.
It is not a direct quote. I have invited my hon. friend to produce both transcripts. When she produces both transcripts, she will see that contrary to what she has indicated, I have said exactly the same thing in New York as I did in Toronto. That will come as a surprise to a Liberal.


Mr. Speaker:: I think the difficulty is at least in the translation. The Prime Minister is in the position-according to the translation-of having said that the hon. member's statement was a lie.
That may be inadvertent. It may be a mis-translation, but I would ask the right hon. gentleman to make it very clear to the House that that is not what he intended to say.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I indicated in English, and I gave my hon. friend the benefit of the doubt, that I believe that the mistake was inadvertent.
I indicated very clearly that in my judgment the mistake was probably inadvertent. Notwithstanding the
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very important qualification that I gave my hon. friend, the same error was then repeated again in English and was then repeated again in French. Clearly it was not inadvertent, clearly it is an attempt by my hon. friend to impute to me something that I did not say.
Now if the shoe fits, my hon. friend can wear it.


Mr. Speaker:: I wonder if hon. members would leave this to the Chair.
As interpreted, the right hon. gentleman indicated that the member putting the question had said something which is a lie. There is a distinction, of course, between a lie and something that is in error or mistaken or otherwise. All I am asking the right hon. gentleman to do is to assure the House that he did not mean the word "lie".


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I will of course withdraw any comment that is at any time unparliamentary. But when the Speaker is examining the record, I know that the Speaker in rendering judgment will want to examine the fact that three times a statement that I affirmed not to be true was repeated by the acting Leader of the Opposition. That was an abuse of Parliament and for that she ought to withdraw.

OLYMPIA & YORK DEVELOPMENT LIMITED


Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Finance.
The Canadian Press today quotes Tbm Van Dusen, a spokesman for the Minister of Finance, as confirming that the government has been approached by the Olympia & York Development Limited about possible assistance from the government in the restructuring of that company's debt.
In view of the involvement of a number of major Canadian financial institutions in the affairs of that huge Canadian multinational company, will he inform the House and Canadians of the options under consideration by the government in this important matter?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, I can confirm to the hon. member that there have been discussions with stakeholders in the Olympia & York company. We have been involved in discussions with the government of Ontario, with financial institutions, both domestically and internationally.

March 23, 1992
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Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the Minister of Finance.
I ask him if he has also been in discussion with other governments on this matter. Furthermore, in view of the possible implications and extent of this situation, will the minister undertake today to keep Parliament and Canadians fully informed of all the options under consideration as this serious situation evolves?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the hon. member's interest in this and I know he is expressing his genuine concern.
I indicated earlier that there have been discussions with the government of the province of Ontario. The discussions are ongoing with financial institutions, both internationally and domestically. Of course the discussions are at a stage where no definitive decisions have been made, but obviously at the appropriate time the hon. member and others will certainly be fully apprised of the situation.



Hon. Audrey McLaughlin (Yukon):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.
The Minister of National Health and Welfare is quoted today as saying that a social charter as proposed in the Constitution should not be there because we cannot afford it; we cannot afford to provide health care, to feed our citizens, to provide shelter for our citizens.
I want to say that before this government closes the door on the futures of thousands of Canadian children, it should close the door on tax breaks for wealthy Canadians.
We can afford to feed the children of this country. We do not have to give free lunches to corporate executives. Will this government stand up and make a commitment to feeding the poor of this country, the future generations of this country, and cut out the tax breaks for the wealthy who do not need them.


Hon. Benoit Bouchard (Minister of National Health and Welfare):: Mr. Speaker, I answered that question many times last week while the leader of the NDP, I believe for some good reason I suppose, was not in the House of Commons. I can only repeat what I said at the time. I believe we made a good move with the budget and the child benefit. We put in $2 billion over five years. I also said that we should come forward soon with another package concerning children at risk. There are other policies or initiatives which could be announced dealing with the question of children.
In light of what I said with regard to the social charter, I did not say that I was opposed to having a social charter in the Constitution. However, I did say that when we talk about the social charter it is not enough to say that we should guarantee the young people in Canada food and so on, we have to express exactly how we will pay for this because Canadians want to know.
I know that the word resources is not in the vocabulary of the NDP, but it is in mine.


Audrey Marlene McLaughlin: A supplementary, Mr. Speaker, for the Prime Minister.
Surely at this time when we are talking about the unity of our country we have a responsibility, as this Prime Minister and this government committed to in 1989, to eradicate poverty in this country. Yet the Prime Minister's government has abandoned child care, it has abandoned the poor and it has abandoned the unemployed.
I want to ask the Prime Minister now: Will he stand up here today and repudiate the comments that we should not in this country have a social charter that gives some common vision to this country, the common social values that we share, and give some hope to Canadians and hope that we can offer our citizens decency and compassion?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend says that the government has abandoned child care. That is not the case. That we have abandoned the poor. That is not the case either. That we have abandoned the unemployed. That is not the case either. My hon. friend knows that.
March 23, 1992

I think my hon. friend could make her point without indulging in such misleading rhetoric. There is a point to be made without this constant verbal abuse that in no way reflects reality.
My hon. friend asks a question about the minister of health. The minister of health, as I understand it, has indicated many times that he is not in any way opposed to the idea of a social charter, provided that the social charter in the Constitution involves indicating clearly how we are going to pay for it. Now I know that concept is alien to my hon. friend, but that is the only caveat that the minister of health has placed on it. He is saying that all of these socially desirable goals are fair and we could indeed support them provided my hon. friend will join the House in telling the country how all of these will be funded.


Audrey Marlene McLaughlin: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary question for the Prime Minister. Seven hundred thousand children and more than two million Canadians do not have enough to eat in this country. That is reality, not rhetoric.
Is the Prime Minister prepared to ensure that the poor have enough to eat and is he going to change the present tax system? A billion dollars of tax money is now being used to pay for businessmen's free lunches. Is the Prime Minister prepared to end this tax system that favours the well-off and instead use these fiscal resources for the less fortunate? Does the Prime Minister have the political will to do that?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, between 1984 and 1989, the rate of poverty fell from 18.1 to 13.6 per cent in Canada. The deteriorating economic conditions in 1990 resulted in a higher number of low income people for the first time in seven years. Still, there were 576,000 fewer low income Canadians in 1990 than in 1984 and 123,000 fewer low income children.
Since 1984 the average family income, adjusted for inflation, has increased 9.7 per cent or $4,600 in 1990. Of course we have a serious problem of wealth distribution in Canada, but we are making significant progress on it, as the data show.
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In asking such questions, the hon. member should stop overlooking facts and concentrating on rhetoric. Facts in the end are what govern human behaviour.


CN RAIL
Mr. Joe Fontana (London East):: Mr. Speaker, this government's own Crown corporation has gone on a $40 million cross-border shopping binge. CN Rail announced today that it is awarding a multi-million dollar contract to build at least 25 locomotives to the General Electric plant in Erie, Pennsylvania.
This decision will cost 1,442 person-years of employment for London, Ontario workers at General Motors Diesel, the Canadian bidder for the job. This decision does not invest in Canadian technology and Canadian workers.
I want to ask the Prime Minister: Where is the buy Canadian policy for Crown agencies? Why is this government not investing in Canadian jobs instead of U.S. jobs?


Hon. Jean Corbeil (Minister of Transport):: Mr. Speaker, CN went out on a bid for the construction of 25 locomotives and had to consider these two bids according to their value. Clearly the lowest bidder was General Electric to which the contract has been awarded.
Because of the implications of a number of MPs on this side of the House, namely the minister himself, the Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism, as well as the hon. member for London-Middlesex, we worked with CN. As a result of that, there are going to be 50 more locomotives that will be rebuilt by CN for an American railroad and 36 locomotives for export which means that the number of jobs available to Canadians through this contract will be twice as much as it would have been had it been given to GM.


Joseph Frank (Joe) Fontana: Mr. Speaker, I would hope that the minister tables those commitments and documents, especially if it means Canadian jobs.
London's GM locomotives would contain 61 per cent Canadian content. The employment generated from awarding the contract to General Electric in Pennsylvania would not even be comparable, but while this government is offering jobs to U.S. workers, the buy

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American clauses in the U.S. prevent Canadian companies from bidding on some U.S. contracts.
I want to task this government: Why is this government allowing U.S. firms to bid on government contracts when the Americans will not offer us the same opportunity? Why has this government not objected to the buy American clauses in the United States under the free trade agreement?


Jean Corbeil: Mr. Speaker, I clearly understand that the member was not listening to the answer because I indicated as part of this contract, 50 locomotives are going to be rebuilt by GE in Canada for Burlington Northern U.S. Railroad. As a result of the contract that has been awarded, there will be jobs for suppliers in Winnipeg, Calgary, Hamilton, Welland, Stoney Creek, London, Kingston, Prescott, Belleville, Fort Erie, Sherbrooke, Montreal, St. Laurent and Point Claire.
The total number of PYs involved in this contract is 448. It would have been 257 under the GM contract.


POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION
Mr. John Nunziata (York South-Weston):: Mr. Speaker, my question is to the Prime Minister. This year the Canadian government will be paying foreign students and foreign universities $18 million to study Canada. For example, Canadian taxpayers are funding Pennsylvania State University to study social services for senior citizens in metropolitan Toronto. How can the Prime Minister justify funding foreign universities when Canadian colleges and universities are pleading for more money?


Hon. Gerry Weiner (Minister of Multiculturalism and Citizenship):: The minister responsible for the program is away on government business today, but I will certainly bring this matter to his immediate attention on his return.


John V. Nunziata: Mr. Speaker, I will put my supplementary question to the finance minister.
It was his budget that indicates $18 million will be spent to fund foreign students in foreign universities.
How can the Minister of Finance justify eliminating the Court Challenges Program, the Economic Council of Canada, the Science Council of Canada, the Law Reform Commission when it is spending almost the same amount of money to create American jobs and other foreign jobs? Why is his government cross-border shopping for research? Why is he eliminating Canadian jobs and creating foreign jobs?


Gérard (Gerry) Weiner: The question does not seem to revolve around the Canada Student Loans Program, but certainly, the minister has been working very carefully within the confines of that program. As I indicated to the member, we will get back to him at an early opportunity.


ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE
Mr. Lome Nystrom (Yorkton-Melville):: Mr. Speaker, my question is to the right hon. Prime Minister on a different topic.
Over the weekend, the Prime Minister gave notice that there were transcripts made public of secret testimony given in 1978 by the former RCMP security division head, John Starnes to the McDonald royal commission on RCMP wrongdoings. These were made public over the weekend.
Those documents may link the former Trudeau cabinet to the 1973 RCMP theft of PQ membership lists and other confidential information.
My question is the following. In addition to this information, is the Prime Minister aware or is the government aware of any other evidence to substantiate or corroborate Mr. Starnes' claim that there was a link between the government of that day and the RCMP theft? If indeed there is such evidence, would the Prime Minister be willing to make it public?


Mr. Speaker:: Just a moment. I have great doubts whether that question is in order. First of all, it involves a matter of some years ago and it involves a government other than the government which is here today.
March 23, 1992

I think it is out of order. The hon. member may wish to consider the matter and see whether on a supplemental he can bring it within order.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Mr. Speaker, my question is to the right hon. Prime Minister.
Since this is an ongoing concern of Canadians, what actually happened in 1969 to 1973, and in view of the fact the government is responsible for responding in this House to security questions, I want to ask the Prime Minister whether or not there is any other evidence that the Prime Minister can make public regarding what happened back in 1969 to 1973?


Mr. Speaker:: With the greatest respect, it seems to me at the moment that that again is out of order. It may be an issue that can be raised in the House, but it will have to come within the rules.


Mr. Jim Peterson (Willowdale):: Mr. Speaker, my question is to the Right Honourable Prime Minister.
Has the United States consented to binding arbitration of the Honda dispute? Yes or No?


Hon. Michael Wilson (Minister of Industry, Science and Technology and Minister for International TVade):: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend is well aware that I have responded to his question in this regard before.
The matter is subject to discussion between the United States and Canada. It might become a matter of chapter 18 consultation between the federal government and the American government, as is the case with the rules of origin question as it relates to non-mortgage interest with the CAMI operation. If that is the case, then that would be subject to negotiation but it would not be binding.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, once again we see how our present trade deal is so inadequate that it leaves Canada wide open to ongoing U.S. trade harassment and to deindustrialization here in Canada.
With a new trade deal imminent, Canadians have a right to know exactly where this government stands. So I put it to the minister. Will he insist on not only greater North American content rules but also Canadian con-
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tent rules that will ensure Canadian auto workers their fair share of North American jobs?


Michael Holcombe Wilson: Mr. Speaker, on the one hand my hon. friend says that he is anxious to see a satisfactory resolution of the rules of origin question as it relates to Honda, and I am sure the CAMI operation as well.
On the other hand he is saying that we want to have higher rules of origin which would damage those very companies if they were made too high.
The member is shaking his head. If my hon. friend understood the implications of the rules of origin, he would know that if we set the rules of origin in Canada too high they would disqualify some of the transplant operations at this point of their existence.
Possibly down the road that might be appropriate, but this is one of the balances we must take into account in the negotiation of this agreement.


SOFTWOOD LUMBER INDUSTRY
Mr. Brian Tobin (Humber-St. Barbe-Baie Verte):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister. I want to offer him a chance to clarify the confusion about the purpose and intent of his trip last week to New York.
The Prime Minister went to New York supposedly to give major U.S. and Canadian newspapers Canada's view about the trade harassment being visited upon this country by the United States government.
While there the Prime Minister referred to the trade harassment in question in terms of responsibility, and I am quoting the Prime Minister: "It is not President Bush; it is not his cabinet". The Prime Minister absolved the U.S. President and absolved the U.S. cabinet of any responsibility.
Is the Prime Minister aware, as first minister of this country, that indeed the softwood lumber action was taken against Canada by the U.S. commerce department whose secretary is a member of George Bush's cabinet?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, my hon. friend has of course the facts quite wrong.


Lloyd Axworthy: Good point.

March 23, 1992
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Martin Brian Mulroney: Well, he does, Lloyd. He has them completely wrong. The trade harassment issue itself, which we all deplore and which I have denounced very vigorously on behalf of all Canadians, was not initiated by the President of the United States.


Brian Vincent Tobin: Nobody said that.


Martin Brian Mulroney: That is what I said, precisely. If my hon. friend agrees with me that it was not initiated by the President of the United States-


Brian Vincent Tobin: The secretary of commerce.


Martin Brian Mulroney: If it was not initiated by the President of the United States then he is agreeing with the premise of my own statement.


Brian Vincent Tobin: Mr. Speaker, the last time the Prime Minister went to New York it was rumoured he was on a job hunting expedition. This week it looked like he got one as spokesman for the U.S. President, not spokesman for the workers of Canada.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


Brian Vincent Tobin: I want to ask the Prime Minister again. What is at issue here is not what the Prime Minister said. We know what he said. He absolved the U.S. President and he absolved the U.S. cabinet, all members of the cabinet, of any responsibility for U.S. trade harassment of Canada when in fact it was the secretary responsible for the department of commerce who must have authorized the trade action of the department of commerce against Canada on softwood lumber.
A fact is a fact is a fact, and the Prime Minister saying it is not a fact will not change it.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I did not hear all of that last question. My hon. friend has a tendency to diminish a very valid point with unworthy prefatory comments most times. Because I know him well, I know he will regret it and want to withdraw as soon as he leaves the House.
We are on all fours with my hon. friend. We have taken a vigorous stand on behalf of Canadian producers. The only difference that exists between us is that we are in favour of a free trade agreement which now gives us access to a dispute settlement mechanism, whereas my hon. friend is a member of a political party that will-


An hon. member:: Tear it up.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Tear it up, tear up the free trade agreement?


An hon. member:: Well, they might renegotiate it.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Renegotiate it? Change it?
Tell us about that, Brian, when you stand up the next time.


CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAYS
Mr. Iain Angus (Thunder Bay-Atikokan):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Transport.
I would like the Minister of Transport to explain to this House, and more important to Canadians, how it is that the only way jobs can be created in Canada is by having CN award a contract to a company in Erie, Pennsylvania.


Jean Corbeil: Mr. Speaker, I will try it another time. I mentioned a few minutes ago that the contract CN has just awarded to GE is going to produce 518 person-years of work in Canada for Canadian workers, whereas the contract that could have been awarded to GM at a higher cost would have produced 257 person-year jobs in Canada.


Iain Francis Angus: I have a supplementary question, Mr. Speaker.
If Ontario Hydro can negotiate with two coal companies, two railroads, two terminal operators and at least one, if not more, shipping companies to ensure that Canadian western coal is purchased for use by Ontario Hydro, surely this government through its Crown corporation could have found a way to ensure that both GE and GM received benefits from this contract.
Explain that to the people of Canada.


Jean Corbeil: Mr. Speaker, again, as I mentioned before, CN went into an open bidding process and there were two bidders. GM was higher; GE was lower. They awarded the contract to GE, but they even improved the contract with GE by updating this arrangement which is going to produce work for suppliers in Winnipeg, Calgary, Hamilton, Welland, Stoney Creek, London, Kingston, Prescott, Belleville, Fort Erie, Sherbrooke, Tracy, Montreal, Saint-Laurent, and Pointe-Claire.
March 23, 1992


UKRAINE
William D. (Bill) Casey: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the right hon. Prime Minister.
The whole world breathed a sigh of relief with the demise of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now it has been replaced with instability, confusion, new armies, and the possibility of new nuclear threats.
Has Canada taken direct action? Are we playing a role to help stabilize this evolving situation?


Martin Brian Mulroney: Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. friend for probably the first substantial question of today.
In point of fact, President Kravchuk of Ukraine called me earlier today to-


Mr. Speaker:: It is sort of a case of I thought you would never ask. Perhaps the right hon. Prime Minister could complete his answer.


Martin Brian Mulroney: Well, I was not here when he called the first time. I said: "You can talk to Lloyd", but he said: "No, I will wait".
He raised, on behalf of the Government of Ukraine, some very serious matters which have concerned the House, ranging from the question of destruction of nuclear missiles on Ukrainian territory to the question of Canadian assistance, for which he has expressed gratitude to all members of the House of Commons, but also the ongoing future of the Commonwealth itself.


Brian Vincent Tobin: He will not let us use the Black Sea fleet to protect the 200-mile limit.


Martin Brian Mulroney: He has expressed concerns about the manner in which the negotiations have been ongoing. He has indicated the Government of Ukraine is ready to make compromises in the interest of keeping the Commonwealth together, but he feels very strongly that the national interests of Ukraine must be respected as well.
He is looking forward to their next meeting in May, but I suppose in a fundamental way he wanted to convey to all members of the House and to the Canadian people the gratitude of his government for the very significant
Oral Questions
assistance that Canada has provided thus far to all initiatives in the former Soviet Union.


FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS
Mr. Svend J. Robinson (Burnaby-Kingsway):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister for International Trade, in the absence of the Secretary of State for External Affairs.
Shortly after the budget was tabled the president of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers that represents career foreign service officers sent a strong letter to their minister condemning the decision to transfer over 300 officers from the social affairs stream to the immigration department.
In view of the sense of anger and betrayal that this action has met within the department and particularly in view of the fact that over a third of these employees are women, by far the largest proportion, I want to ask the minister: Will he now agree to reconsider this decision to ensure that External is fully able to meet all the challenges of foreign affairs in the 1990s and ensure that these people remain within the External Affairs department?


Michael Holcombe Wilson: Mr. Speaker, my colleague, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, is out of the House on government business as my friend well knows.
We have reviewed the requirements of the department looking out into the balance of this decade along the lines that my hon. friend has referred to. We believe that the obligations of the department can be met, but I will raise the particular point that my friend has raised with my colleague when she returns.


Svend Johannes Robinson: Mr. Speaker, I have a supplementary question. The other major concern aside from the substance was the way in which this decision was announced.
According to the president, and I quote, "unveiling the announcement in the dead of night by posting press releases in elevators is to display an unheard of level of disrespect to the department's employees".

March 23, 1992
Oral Questions
In view of the fact that this decision is supposed to take effect next week on April 1, will the minister at the very least agree to delay the implementation of this decision until there has been an opportunity for full consultation with all of the employees affected by this and the other transfers within the Department of External Affairs as well?


Michael Holcombe Wilson: Mr. Speaker, I think my answer to that question would be the same as the first one.


IMMIGRATION
Hon. Warren Allmand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister for immigration.
In recent weeks there have been increasing revelations of negligence and misbehaviour in the minister's department: board members asleep at hearings, others ridiculing applicants, inhumane deportations, and now we hear that the minister will make extensive changes to the law.
Will the minister in fact soon produce amendments to the act? Will these amendments correct the abuses that I have referred to, or will they simply incorporate the more restrictive recommendations made recently by the Law Reform Commission?


Hon. Bernard Valcourt (Minister of Employment and Immigration):: Mr. Speaker, if any amendments are made to the Immigration Act they will be made for the only purpose of trying to improve it.


William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, the minister should be making changes that will clean up his department and give it a fair and human face, instead of making as he did last week announcements to change the immigration regulations which will reduce the number of dependent children who can be sponsored under the family class.
What is the justification for these restrictions on the family class? How many dependants will be cut off as a result of these changes?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member should have read the regulations. They were pre-published months ago. He had the occasion.


William Warren Allmand: I did.


Bernard Valcourt: He said he did. I did not receive any view from the Liberal Party as to the definition of the family. A lot of Canadians did. When he says in this House that we will reduce the number of dependent children, that is false.


Mr. Jesse Flis (Parkdale-High Park):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the same minister.
Increasing numbers of refugee claimants from eastern Europe, from the Hispanic countries and from many other countries are being deported.
They probably would have been considered refugees if their cases had been heard promptly. Now they are being deported because the situation in their homelands has changed while they are stuck in the backlog.
These are people who have established themselves in Canada with jobs, children being bom here and in some cases by owning homes.
What definition of humanitarian and compassionate grounds does the minister use to justify telling these people to sever their new roots in Canada and go back to a life of uncertainty in their homelands?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member raises a question as to what is the definition of human and compassionate considerations.
I think that Canada stands out in the world as a country affording or giving protection to those who need it. The hon. member suggests, however, an interesting point and one which I am ready to consider.
Maybe we should define in the act or by regulations what we mean by compassionate and human considerations. If the hon. member or members of this House have suggestions so that we can improve the transparency of the Immigration Act, I am all for it.


Jesse Philip Flis: My supplementary is for the same minister. The system is so bad that I have here over 5,000 signatures collected in one afternoon on petitions asking the minister to review and change the policies.
People are committing suicide. They are leaving Canada because this minister does not have any compassion for them. They are being sent back to Lebanon, an
March 23, 1992

unstable war-tom corner of the world. A 10-year old Canadian born girl was sent back to Bangladesh with her parents, a country which she has never seen.
I ask the minister what qualifications must the judges have in order to hear refugee cases, and what guidelines are used to define humanitarian and compassionate grounds which he did not answer in my original question?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, in all fairness to Canada and to the Canadian people, whenever someone raises the question of our immigration system in the House and depicts it as being about sending kids, for instance a 10-year-old, out of Canada, the reality is that Canadians are not told that there are hundreds of thousands of immigrants received in Canada according to the rule of law and the regulations.
Whenever there is someone here illegally, that is he has not passed through the legal process and he has been denied Canada's protection, that person is not in the same bag as the person who does qualify according to our law.
If members of the Liberal Party are for the opening up of immigration to absolutely everyone in the world without consideration let them say so.


FISHERIES
John Williston (Bud) Bird: Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
All users of the Atlantic salmon resource have applauded the conservation measures which the minister has introduced recently in closing the commercial fishery in Atlantic Canada. In order that that investment not be wasted it is very important that a new conservation ethic, a new conservation vision, be established within the province of New Brunswick and other river systems in the Atlantic region.
For several months now recommendations have been made to the minister's department for him to convene such a conference to define that new vision and I would like to ask when that conference will be held.
Hon. John C. Crosbie (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportu-
Point of Order
nities Agency): Mr. Speaker, senior officials from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have been consulting extensively with all the user groups in New Brunswick and throughout the maritime provinces on these issues.
We are exploring all possible solutions to the existing concerns about conservation and user conflicts in connection with the salmon resource and the magnificent salmon rivers in New Brunswick.
The hon. member who has asked the question is a tireless advocate of the proper system of conservation in the fishery of New Brunswick and Atlantic Canada and a tower of strength to us in connection with achieving these objectives.
We will set a date for such a conference when we are satisfied that real progress can come as a result of a meeting of all of these user groups.


John Williston (Bud) Bird: Mr. Speaker, regarding the agenda for that conference will the minister recommend or instruct that gill-netting be terminated?


Hon. John C. Crosbie (Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency):: Mr. Speaker, those who are interested in conservation certainly do not wish to see the continued use of gill-nets in fishing the salmon rivers of New Brunswick.
At the same time, as the hon. member knows we had to consider the situation with reference to the Sparrow decision on aboriginal rights to fish for food, social and ceremonial purposes. We are certainly hoping that all groups involved in the fishery, including the aboriginal groups will agree to use some better method of fishing from the point of view of conservation in the rivers of New Brunswick.


POINT OF ORDER
Lorne Edmund Nystrom: My point of order, Mr. Speaker, arises from the question I attempted to ask the Prime Minister earlier today.
I simply want to state on reviewing my question that it was in order and I think out of fairness to both sides of the House you might find time to review the question.

March 23, 1992
Routine Proceedings
Maybe people on the other side would want time to review the question as well.
With your permission I will pursue it at a later date.


Mr. Speaker:: I certainly thought at the time that the question was probably out of order. I certainly will look at it and I will hear argument on it. Not argument to change the decision; we cannot do that. But if the hon. member wishes to pursue it, I of course would hear him.
I thank him for the suggestion to defer it to a convenient moment.


BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Mr. Andre:: Mr. Speaker, I would like to designate tomorrow, March 24, an allotted day.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Mr. Albert Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing 36(8), I have the honour to table, in both official languages, the government's response to 18 petitions.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]


Hon. William C. Winegard (Minister for Science):: Mr. Speaker, as promised in February, I am pleased today to table, in both official languages, the funding statistics to which I referred in debate.
In this regard, I would like to make a correction to my February statement where I indicated that the figures were provided by the Association of Colleges and Universities or by the Canadian Association of University Teachers. In fact, they were provided by the National Consortium of Scientific and Educational Societies and Statistics Canada.


PETITIONS
Iain Francis Angus: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour and privilege to present a petition signed by a number of residents in the Thunder Bay area.
The petitioners raise a concern about a previous promise by the government to freeze unemployment insurance premium rates for three years and that recent cumulative increases in the UI premiums are unfair and insensitive to small business during hard economic times and that further job losses due to business closures would further impair the chances for a full economic recovery in Canada.
Therefore, your petitioners call upon Parliament to freeze unemployment insurance premium rates at the 1991 level for one year.


Svend Johannes Robinson: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to table a petition signed by hundreds of residents of Hamilton, Ontario, Montreal and a number of cities in British Columbia. It notes that in February of 1985 the House of Commons asked the justice committee to prepare a report on equality rights in Canada and that the committee in October submitted a report unanimously recommending that the Canadian Human Rights Act be amended to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in all areas of federal jurisdiction.
It also notes that many years after that promise was made it has yet to be kept and that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has consistently called for this amendment to the Human Rights Act. Therefore the petition urges Parliament to ask that the government immediately bring forward an amendment to add sexual orientation to the Canadian Human Rights Act as a prohibited ground of discrimination.


Mr. Sergio Marchi (York West):: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to table a petition for the government and the House of Commons signed by hundreds of petitioners from my riding of York West.
They ask and request that the Government of Canada amend the Narcotics Control Act so that the assets seized from drug busts, particularly in metropolitan Toronto, rather than all those assets being put into the general Consolidated Revenue Fund back in Ottawa, be
March 23, 1992

shared equally and fairly with police forces and local organizations so that they, who are on the leading edge in combating the drug abuse cancer that is spreading across Canada, will be able to fight this and fight it successfully.


Margaret Anne Mitchell: I have the honour to present two petitions today.
The first petition is from a number of people who are very concerned about exports through Canadian ports and particularly through the port of Vancouver.
They ask that whereas Canadian grain has traditionally been exported through Canadian ports and the shipping of grain exports through Canadian ports provides the most direct and least costly route for grain producers, and the shipping of grain through Canadian ports also provides employment to Canadian workers, and whereas the Canadian Wheat Board has arranged for Canadian grain to be exported through the port of Seattle, therefore the petitioners ask that Parliament instruct the Canadian Wheat Board that all Canadian grain exports must proceed through Canadian ports. I certainly fully support that.


Margaret Anne Mitchell: The second petition has to do with the goods and services tax which is applied to feminine sanitary products such as tampons and pads.
Since these are necessities for women and the government has decided that the goods and services tax should not apply to certain foods because they are necessities, therefore the many people who have signed this from my riding of Vancouver East ask that Parliament consider removing the GST from women's sanitary products.


Mr. Jack Whittaker (Okanagan -Similkameen -Merritt):: Mr. Speaker, it is my duty and in fact it is my pleasure to stand here today under Standing Order 36 representing the people of Penticton, British Columbia. These people in Penticton have been working hard since
Routine Proceedings
January 6 when they found out that Canada Post was replacing their post office with private postal outlets.
They are petitioning Parliament against the closure of the post office, trying to save 12 sorting jobs within that community and to get an answer from Canada Post.
They are asking Parliament to stop the closure and the privatization of postal services in general and to ensure that the citizens and taxpayers of Penticton, British Columbia, have a full service post office which is directly run by Canada Post corporation.


Mr. Jim Jordan (Leeds-Grenville):: Mr. Speaker, I have a petition from my constituency in which the petitioners are asking that an obvious weakness in our legal system be addressed by this government. This will be added to thousands of others that have come in.
Their concern is one that resulted in the murder of Nina de Villiers on August 9, 1991. There are many vulnerable people out there who have little protection under the current system. These petitioners are asking that that problem in our legal system be addressed.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
Mr. Albert Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House
of Commons): Mr. Speaker, I ask that all questions be allowed to stand.
Don Boudria: Mr. Speaker, I am forced again to rise on a point of order, as a result of the government's inaction to respond to Question No. 110 which has been on the Order Paper since last September.
The government has only 45 days to answer. It is not a complicated question at all. There is no legitimate excuse.
The question merely asks for the expense account of each deputy minister in the government. There are only about three dozen such people. Surely that is not hard to determine.
I would ask that the Chair address this issue. After six months I can no longer put questions on the Order Paper because my previous questions are not being answered. And this goes on and on and on.

March 23, 1992
The government does not have an excuse because the answer might be embarrassing. That is not provided for in the rules. My constituents want to know the answers to questions, and I am availing myself of the privileges of this House to do so.


Albert Glen Cooper: Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member referred to Question No. 110, which is one that was answered I think last week.
Perhaps the question he is referring to is No. 111. My understanding is that the information has been largely collected now. He should be able to expect an answer fairly soon.
I would like to raise this point. The hon. member and others regularly ask questions that have to be circulated to all departments and often all departments and agencies. It is physically impossible for the government to answer those questions in 45 days.
I want to express very clearly and very strongly with the Chair that that cannot be done if they continue to insist on 45-day answers. Then we will be in no position but to give an answer that is incomplete.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Shall all questions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


James Ross Fulton: Mr. Speaker, I rise under the provisions of Standing Order 52 to seek the adjournment of the House to debate an urgent issue of national importance. I would just like to take a moment to give my reasons.
The revelations of the last few days regarding Liberal cabinet authorization to violate the laws of Canada constitutes an urgent issue of national importance. Documents released under federal access law confirm that the Trudeau cabinet ordered the RCM Police to obtain Parti Quebecois documents, including membership lists, clearly contrary to the laws of Canada as passed by this Parliament.
The protection of democratic institutions is the ultimate responsibility of every member elected to this
place. If we were to allow these revelations of cabinet endorsed burglary and theft to go unchallenged, there would be good reasons for Canadians to lose faith in the rule of law and to question our collective commitment to open, lawful government.
Yesterday the former Prime Minister, Mr. Pierre Trudeau stated only: "The record is there". Both the present and past Liberal leaders, the member for Vancouver Quadra and the present leader were in the cabinet when the decision was made. Surely during a Standing Order 52 debate, Canadians can learn from them why the cabinet chose to order the RCM Police to break the law and if there were other similar activities.
Unless there is a full debate on these matters, the ability of Parliament to craft laws and of this or any future government to administer them will be injured.
The released documents also implicate persons such as Gordon Robertson, Secretary to the Privy Council and cut to the quick of the reliability of the conclusions reached by the McDonald royal commission into the RCM Police dirty tricks operations of the early 1970s.
Democratic institutions are fragile. It is surely urgent that this matter be fully aired today because, as we learned, Question Period and some other options ordinarily available for the airing of an issue such as this may not be the most appropriate. The options under Standing Order 52 seem to me to be the most appropriate to allow Canadians to know what truly took place.


Mr. Speaker:: I thank the hon. member and I thank him for giving me notice of this in advance, which gave me a chance to consider it.
First of all, and I say this to all hon. members and especially to the public that may be listening or watching, this is a matter which was of very grave concern to this country for a long period of time. There are members in the House, myself included, who were here when the matter was a subject of debate and then later the matter of the McDonald commission to which the hon. member has referred. However, I still have to apply the rules and while the matter may be important, and I accept the hon. member's concern which I am sure will be shared by others, I do not find that it would be appropriate, at least at the moment, to order an emergency debate.
March 23, 1992



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Mazankowski that Bill C-61, that an act to provide borrowing authority for the fiscal year commencing on April 1, 1992, be read the third time and passed.
Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, as I was saying before Question Period, when the Minister of Finance tells us that he reduces the tax burden of the Canadian people, it is a delusion. The fact of the matter is that, in 1986, 19.9 per cent of each dollar earned went to taxes, while today 22.3 per cent of it goes to taxes, and that is excluding the GST. Just imagine how much higher this figure would be if we were to include the GST!
It is no wonder that the Canadian people are suspicious when the Minister of Finance comes and tells us that he intends to go in the same direction as his predecessor, because we know what the policies of the former Minister of Finance were that have plunged us in this economic slump. Repeated tax hikes, the GST, the US free trade deal, a ridiculous monetary policy and cuts in transfer payments to the provinces are responsible for the slump this country is in today.
As I said at the beginning of my speech, Mr. Speaker, a survey shows-and I will repeat it-that only 23 per cent of Canadians believe that this budget will help the Canadian economy.
How many times have you heard people say that this government's monetary policy is ridiculous? We, in the opposition, are not alone in saying so. Practically all national organizations in Canada and in Quebec, including the Conseil du Patronat, the Manufacturers' Association and the Chamber of Commerce, every one agrees that a high dollar does not help. And, of course, high interest rates definitely did not help the Canadian pulp and paper industry.
Government Orders
We have repeatedly asked this government for many months now to change this monetary policy which is at the root of this recession.In excess of 65 per cent of our exports are shipped across the border to the United States. When our dollar is high, we are not as competitive with the United States, we export less and, as a result, we have fewer jobs and our workers work less.
The government's negligence in terms of its monetary policy is destroying the pulp and paper industry, at a time when the industry is already weakened by the recession and the FTA with the United States.
Canadians want no part of these disastrous economic policies. The government proposes to keep increases in CMHC spending on social housing down to an annual average of 3 per cent. The government hopes to save $622 million during the next five years, and here again, the middle class will be the one to suffer.
As far as housing is concerned-I raised this matter during Oral Question Period a few weeks ago-we are faced with a dramatic situation in Montreal. People need low cost housing, and now this area is going to be cut back. What are we going to tell those people? There are endless waiting lists. Every day, every time we are in our riding offices, we meet people who are looking for low-cost housing, and the Minister of Finance turns around and provides nothing of the kind. We are not the only ones to say this. According to the head of the Federation des cooperatives d'habitation de Vile de Montreal, Mrs. Monique Blanchet, the federal government's withdrawal from this sector-and I am referring to co-operative housing-will mean that 500 new co-op units will not be built, despite 10,000 applications. Because the government withdrew from co-operative housing, 500 units can't be built this year, despite the fact that 10,000 people are on the waiting list. The situation is serious, and the ministers and the Conservative government have not done a thing. In fact they cut the few resources left in this area.
Low income groups are not the only ones to be hit by the government. Students have also suffered as a result of the Conservative budget. The government says students are an abiding concern, but you would hardly notice that from this budget. Ironically I received a letter

March 23, 1992
Government Orders
from a young student in my riding who deplored the fact that we invest very little in our educational institutions, colleges and universities. If we want to be competitive, that is where we should invest.
Earlier during Question Period, I heard the Minister of Transport bragging that CN had awarded a contract in the United States, when it could have avoided the political fallout by awarding a contract that would have provided jobs in Canada. Meanwhile the government is slashing funding for students, in other words slashing our future. Young people are the future of this country.
If we look at all the countries in the world that invest significantly in their institutions and educational system like Germany, Japan and so many other countries, we see that they are competitive and can compete in this increasingly global environment. But we are doing the opposite.
The government must change direction. If we continue, I have the impression that in the time the government has left, because I know it does not have much time. According to custom, there should be an election this fall, but according to the Constitution, they could continue to govern until the fall of 1993. But if we continue with these policies until the fall of 1993,1 think that it will be too late and it will take many years to restore the confidence of our consumers, young people and investors and to continue to give hope and keep this country great.
As Opposition Whip, I do not want to give the impression that I am criticizing only the government. When I see newspaper articles like the one of Wednesday, January 15 in La Presse, which said that Montreal is getting steadily poorer, I find that incredible. It says that manufacturing employment in Montreal declined 28 per cent in two years, between the summer of 1989 and the summer of 1991. The Conservative government was in power then. Of the 66,000 jobs lost, three-quarters disappeared in the first year, even before the recession really hit.
Another article in La Presse said that one out of two adults in Montreal does not work. That is serious: one in two adults. How can we go on? In this great beautiful city of Montreal, which was the pride of all Canadians and all
Quebecers, how come one adult in two does not work? That is totally unacceptable.
Another article in La Presse of March 7, 1992 said that thousands of full-time jobs are disappearing. If full-time jobs are disappearing by the thousand, how will we be able to revive our economy? How will we be able to put people back to work? It is not the Official Opposition but rather journalists and economists writing in national newspapers who are saying that.
On the editorial page of La Presse for March 7, 1992, Alain Dubuc, who is a well-known journalist and economist, headlined his article "Economy Assassinated". What a title: "Economy Assassinated". That is where we are at after just seven and a half years with this government. As I said earlier, this government should either change the economic policy that has resulted in this disastrous situation or it should call an election to let the people of Canada pick a government that would give them new hope.
I see that I have hardly a minute left. In closing, then, I would like to say that this government economic policy is truly appalling. As we go down a commercial street in our ridings, every weekend, we can see the for sale or for rent signs in store windows. The showcases are empty. The office towers are empty. It is really depressing. If it is depressing for us who are there only on the weekend, imagine how depressing it must be for the people who live there.
I hope that the Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister and the rest of cabinet, as well as all other Conservative members, will insist at their next caucus meeting that these disastrous economic policies be changed.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: We will now have a 10-minute maximum question and comment period. The hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood.


Mr. Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood):: Mr. Speaker, I want to say to my colleague from Montreal that the condition he describes in his community is exactly the same in my community in downtown Toronto.
People are in deep economic pain in this country. There is a very high level of insecurity, and people in all
March 23, 1992

regions of this country are looking to this Chamber for some direction, for some hope.
The government has said on more than one occasion today, and on previous occasions, that when we stand up to criticize the direction its policy is taking us in this country, it always says that we on this side do not have ideas.
We have put ideas forward to the government repeatedly. I want to repeat to the government that it did an all-party report. It was done in 1982 and it was called Employment Opportunities for the Eighties. It listed some 180 different ways in which we could put Canadians back to work.
Repeatedly in this report the government talks about the fact that it is important that we retrain our work force. It also talks about the fact that entrepreneurship in this country is the greatest hope for creating new jobs. We have 1.7 million entrepreneurs in this country.
I believe that entrepreneurship is our greatest hope for revitalizing and getting people off the unemployment rolls, off the welfare rolls and back into the work force, and dignity can be restored and our economy can come back.
Does my colleague from Montreal not share the view that entrepreneurship and retraining are things to which this government has really not given the proper respect or the proper support in terms of using them as catalysts to get people back to work?


Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for giving me the opportunity to continue to say what I was saying.
I agree with him 100 per cent that this government, in seven and a half years, has been paying lip service to entrepreneurship, to small business.
Two, three or four months before the last election, this government came with all the fanfare and announced a big program: the institute of entrepreneurship. Three and a half years after the election, where is the institute? Nobody knows where it is and nobody knows what it is doing.
My hon. colleague said that there are 1.7 million enterprises in this country. If we would encourage them to create a job each, we would have no unemployment in this country. That is the policy we need.
Government Orders
In the budget we saw the government trying to increase the ceiling of small business loans from $100,000 to $150,000 or $200,000. When I was small business critic I said the economy was good and businesses could use the high ceiling. The government said no.
Now there is no economic growth. Increasing the ceiling to $200,000 will not work because the bank will not give them a penny. What is the use? The government wants to look good.
The government looks good when it increases the ceiling from $100,000 to $200,000 so that the businesses can create business. There is no business.
I said in my closing remarks that when you walk on a commercial street, it is very discouraging. In every store, the windows are empty. There are only two types of signs: "For Rent" or "For Sale". There is no activity. What is the use of increasing the ceiling of the small business loans when there is no small business? There is no need to borrow.
Even if somebody had some ideas, the banks need so much collateral that they will not give a penny. I agree with my colleague that this government only gives lip service to small and medium sized business. When it comes to its friends, big business, then it is open. Today we saw an example during Question Period.


Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Mr. Speaker, I am happy to be able to participate in the debate this afternoon on the borrowing authority.
The borrowing authority is the central, paramount tool that the Government of Canada utilizes in terms of its government expenditures. The borrowing authority is central to the budgetary statements of the Government of Canada, and it is a central issue in terms of the confidence that the government places with regard to running the affairs of our country.
We have seen, over the last number of months, a number of initiatives which have been funded by the Government of Canada which have drawn some serious concerns from Canadians. Some have been in relation to the funding of the prosperity initiative which, by itself, one could argue intellectually is a wonderful concept and we should pursue it. As we have seen on the floor of the House of Commons, with interchanges with government representatives as well as members of the opposition, the government really does not know where it is going on that particular issue, but it is prepared to spend a fair

March 23, 1992
Government Orders
chunk of money in order to consult with different sectors of the Canadian economy.
That is not to suggest that different sectors of the economy ought not to be consulted with, but this government has been in power for eight years, not six months, not nine months, not twelve months. It has been in power for close to eight years. To embark upon this particular initiative at a fairly substantial cost to the taxpayers of this country is something one has to question in terms of the seriousness and the genuineness of this government in view of the fact that we are probably going to be facing a federal election within the next twelve months.
Some have said that perhaps these consultations are a prelude to the federal election which is to come in order for the government to consult with its friends in the private sector in order to ascertain its ideas in trying to put together a platform for the purposes of the next election.
I certainly would not want to argue that. I would hope that the government and ministers opposite would be much more responsible than only looking at a very short-term political high jinks, if you will, of the Canadian people. Sortie members opposite would certainly agree with my intervention on that.
The facts were drawn out in Question Period today. The Government of Canada is providing a university in the United States with over $18 million to do a study of the social services in the city of Toronto. All it would have to do is contact and have some discussions with the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood, who would be able to give example after example of some of the difficulties plaguing that particular community.
The cost is $18 million. I am sure that if the government contacted my colleague from Broadview-Greenwood, he would be much more conservative in terms of what he would request from the Government of Canada to pay him in order to provide for the necessary answers so that the government could move forward.
Advertising costs of the government are way out of whack. We have seen that the Minister of Finance has tried to take some steps to curb the escalation of advertising costs of the government.
One of the interesting things is that when this issue is raised, ministers of the Crown will stand in their place and say they thought the opposition wanted the government to provide to the Canadian people information about the various programs it has in place. That is very true, and there are various ways in which the government of Canada can do that without necessarily having to retain the services of friends in high places in order to put together these packages of information to try to sell to the Canadian people.
The argument can be made that if the program in itself is so good, Canadians will recognize the merits of that program and will respond accordingly to the focus of that program.
The government has also announced in its budget something which is dear to my constituents and something that I find somewhat alarming in view of the stage we are at in Canadian economy. It is intending, as it has announced in the budget, to privatize the Cape Breton Development Corporation.
For those in the Chamber and those who may be viewing our proceedings here this afternoon, the Cape Breton Development Corporation was bom in 1967-68. The premier of the day, the former leader of the Conservative Party, the Hon. Robert Stanfield, is a great Nova Scotian. He has served this country with great distinction on the floor of the House of Commons. He was the premier of our province and he and a young minister of the Crown at that time, Allan MacEachen, came together and discussed what could be done because numerous coal mines in Cape Breton were being done away with by the private sector; they walked away. They took the key out and just said: "To hell with the community".
Federally we conceived and implemented what is known as the Cape Breton Development Corporation to try to assist the diversification of the local economy and also, in later years, to try to provide alternatives for the uses of coal in Cape Breton. If one were to look at the bottom line of this Crown corporation, one could not be as positive as one would want to be.
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One would have to say that without the federal Crown corporation, as so moved and sponsored by the hon. gentleman in the Upper House, Allan J. MacEachen, we in the island of Cape Breton would be more in tune and more inclined to be referred to as a Third World country.
One of the rationales for the conception and subsequent implementation of Devco, as we refer to it in Cape Breton, was that the Nova Scotia Power Corporation would use the coal which is produced from Devco to generate power in the province of Nova Scotia.
The minister responsible for Devco is in the House. The policy of Robert Stanfield, as premier of the province of Nova Scotia, was affirmed by his successor, the late G. I. Smith from Truro, Nova Scotia. It was adopted, promoted and enhanced substantially by a Liberal premier who succeeded him, Gerald Regan. It was once again reaffirmed by his success, Premier John Buchanan, who also sits in the Upper House.
From time to time, I have said things about that particular premier which may not draw a consensus in this House, but I would have to say that he affirmed the consistent policy of the provincial government as it relates to the utilization of coal. The successor to the past premier of the province of Nova Scotia, the hon. Donald Cameron, has not affirmed that policy. He has walked away from that policy. He has cut his hands adrift from the Cape Breton coal industry. He has denied us the opportunity to sell a product which was clearly the understanding or the genesis behind the concept and the implementation of the Cape Breton Development Corporation.
You cannot blame the federal minister. You cannot blame the Prime Minister for that. I blame one individual, and that is Donald Cameron, the premier of the province of Nova Scotia.
I say to the federal minister and to the Prime Minister, do not get sucked into the Cameron agenda, which does not put in place its concerns for the real lives and real aspirations of people. To Canadians who happen to live in that region of our country, do not get sucked into buying his request to privatize the Cape Breton Development Corporation.
This was done at the federal level to try to help out a weak sister or weak brother in the province of Nova
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Scotia in the person of the premier of the province of Nova Scotia.
To the viewing audience, you may ask where the hon. member is going. Let me be very clear.
The premier of this province wants the Cape Breton Development Corporation to be privatized, and the reason is that he is involved to his ears in the sponsoring of the Westray Coal Mine in Pictou County, which is in grave, grave economic difficulties at the present time. The only way that he can justify throwing provincial moneys and getting the assistance of the federal government is to now ask the federal government to privatize Devco so that it will be on the same level playing field. The federal government, unfortunately, has announced its intentions to pursue that.
It is wrong for the government to co-operate, to be co-opted, to be coerced into taking this kind of action with regard to the coal industry in industrial Cape Breton.
Another aspect of the federal budget has been the winding over, if you will, of the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation into the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. That is wrong. It is bad public policy. It will not service the needs of those individuals who live in eastern Nova Scotia. In point of fact, it will add further uncertainty with regard the privatization of the Cape Breton Development Corporation to an already weakened economy in that part of our country.
It is wrong for several reasons. Regarding Devco, the Prime Minister, in his own words in Cape Breton, made reference that he would not privatize the Cape Breton Development Corporation. Ministers of the Crown indicated that as well. The government has not clearly defined what it means when it says privatization. We do not know if it has some friendly individual who wishes to come in and pick up all the pieces, bleed it for a few years, and then leave the coal mines, as we have seen in the past.
Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation was to assume the role of the industrial development division of the Cape Breton Development Corporation, which was a part of the ACOA legislation placed on the floor of the House of Commons.

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It has once again broken its commitment to the people of my district, as well as to the three federal constituencies in Cape Breton.
The minister is going to intervene and say some things and we will have an opportunity to debate. I want us to be clear. I did not support the passage of ACOA because I did not believe the government in 1986-87. It said that the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation would have longevity. I have now been proven correct. It has not had longevity. The government has dubbed us. It has fooled us. They manipulated. They distorted the facts to the people of Cape Breton when they said Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation will take over the role of the industrial development division of Devco.
We in this party opposed that because the special relationship that we had with the federal government and the people of Cape Breton would be done away with. It has now happened as a result of the budget of the Minister of Finance.
There were individuals in this House who supported the government in that particular initiative. They thought it was going to be wonderful. It would be the panacea in terms of rectifying the economic ills in Atlantic Canada.
My colleagues to the left, the New Democratic Party, were front line and centre in supporting ACOA but knowing full well and with the full knowledge that Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation would not be in existence for a long period of time. In point of fact, it would be done away with sooner as opposed to later.
They knew, so I put both of them in the same bed together. The Tories and the NDP are on the same side when it comes to economic initiatives in industrial Cape Breton. On this one the NDP preach one thing in Halifax, one thing in Cape Breton, and another thing here in Ottawa. They are going to be caught on their own words as we evidenced in this debate on a previous occasion as related to ACOA and Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation.
I would hope the minister could stand in his place today and say: "We are not going to privatize the Cape Breton Development Corporation at this time. We will
pull back because it is nonsense to proceed with it at this point in time when we have a weakened economy".
The minister laughs. When you have a weakened economy in Cape Breton, can he laugh about that? Can he laugh about that?


An hon. member:: Sure he can.


David Charles Dingwall: We have a weakened economy. The corporation has been under substantial downsizing. Both management, as I am sure the minister will attest, and labour are attempting to the best of their abilities to tiy to make the corporation more viable each and every day.
I do not think that privatization at this time or giving the mandate to pursue that is going to assist the workers, the management and the community in arriving at a solution which is acceptable to all those who are stakeholders with regard to that corporation. I would hope that the minister would avail himself of that opportunity and say that on the floor of the House of Commons.
I suspect that this minister probably had nothing to do with putting the privatization agenda in the statement of the Minister of Finance some weeks ago. Perhaps we will get an opportunity to hear the minister's views.


Hon. Tom Hockin (Minister of State (Small Businesses and Tourism)):: Mr. Speaker, I just rise to ask a few questions of my hon. friend.
I was on duty this afternoon and was delighted to hear that Cape Breton is the topic for debate on this day when we are discussing the budget. I want to raise a few questions for my hon. friend based upon his interventions.
I think it was Voltaire who said that all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own different ways. When I look at the Liberals in Nova Scotia, I am reminded of how very unhappy they have been and in so many bizarre ways the last few months, and how they have so much difficulty in agreeing with each other. Pictou County Liberals, Cape Breton Liberals, they can barely talk to each other.
I am from Ontario so I am not a great authority on Liberalism in Nova Scotia, but they are a very unhappy party in that province. I can tell from the hon. member's intervention some of the reasons why. There is a sense of rivalry and distrust there which I really think we should now grow beyond.
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More important is his point about privatization of Devco. I have been very privileged over the last two and a half years to have this corporation as a responsibility. I have grown very fond of Cape Breton in these years of looking after that file and visiting that beautiful part of Canada.
I am pleased that shortly we will be having some major announcements under the Canadian Aboriginal Economic Development Program that will help Cape Breton in important ways. We are going to have some further important capital expansions under Devco which will interest my hon. friend. We have a Devco, by the way, which is now exporting in impressive quantities. I just signed a corporate plan the other day, sending it to Treasury Board. I note that exports for Devco are way up. In fact they are surpassing their financial pro forma projections for 1991-92.
I have to commend as, indeed, my hon. friend did, labour and management in that corporation for their very fine performance this year.
I remind my hon. friend who complains about the premier of Nova Scotia's opinions about Devco that he is not the owner of Devco. The owner of Devco is the Government of Canada, the Parliament of Canada. We make the decisions on whether it is to be privatized or have its nature changed, not the premier of Nova Scotia.
Let me tell you exactly what the budget said. It listed 45 agencies that could be privatized or could be examined as to modalities for privatization and the Devco Corporation, of course, falls into the latter.
The reason I could not resist a chuckle while the hon. member was speaking was that he adamantly refused to consider, ever, ever, privatization for this Crown corporation. It makes me laugh because the Soviet Union is privatizing everything. East Germany is privatizing everything. Eastern Europe is privatizing everything, but a Cape Breton Liberal would never privatize; never, ever privatize the Devco Corporation.
What makes me laugh is that these people are farther to the left than the eastern European socialists or communist parties, let alone the old Soviet Union itself. For the hon. member to not even allow consideration of privatization is an intellectual ostrich-like pose which I think he must be embarrassed to assume.
Let me ask this question. Could the hon. member ever foresee a time when he would privatize a federal Crown
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corporation and tell me under what conditions? Could he ever foresee a time when he might privatize Devco?


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, I am sorry to have to say this, but the hon. minister started his remarks after I concluded mine and made some references to provincial colleagues in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. I was quite sincere in my remarks as I attributed them to the former leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, the Hon. Bob Stanfield. I must say that I take strong exception to the political cheap shots of the minister opposite with regard to the scene in the province of Nova Scotia.


An hon. member:: He is no Bob Stanfield.


David Charles Dingwall: The minister has not only taken cheap shots, but it shows the total lack of understanding and knowledge the minister and the Government of Canada have with regard to the coal industry, its history and its future.
I will answer the hon. minister very clearly. The minister is so on to himself that he does not even know the dossier. I have said, as early as 1983,1982, 1985,1987 and 1988 with regard to the privatization of the Cape Breton Development Corporation-the minister does not understand the dossier-that to privatize Devco, to give it to his friends, the Joe Shannons of the world or whoever it may be, his Sinclair Stevens friends, that kind of individual to come in and be the sole operator of a coal mine, to strip it down to sell off its best parts and make a million dollars or more and then walk away from it in five years, is privatization which I would never support.
I have said both privately and publicly: Check with the unions. I have said to them privately and publicly that we need to have union representatives on the board of directors of this corporation, that employees have to be involved with running this corporation, managing this corporation and in having shares in this corporation.
Do not give me any of this hogwash, as a minister of the Crown, that somehow those of us on this side of the House will never be able to see the day. The minister went on to say: "Devco is owned by the Government of Canada". We know that, but the sole supplier to the Nova Scotia Power Corporation of Devco's product is the provincial government which happens to be run by Don Cameron.

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If the minister does not wake up and stand up to this provincial premier to get a better deal for the Cape Breton Development Corporation, the federal government, the employees and the community, we are all going to be worse off as a result of this.
I am happy to hear the minister say on the floor of the House of Commons that he, as the federal minister responsible, dissociates, discounts, wants nothing to do with the former Minister for International Trade, the Hon. Pat Carney, who said not long ago as the minister responsible for international trade: "Devco is not to sell its coal on the international market".
I am glad that the minister has now said that statement on the floor of the House of Commons. It is a few years too late, but nevertheless, the minister has said that.
My final comment is that this minister better understand.


Thomas Hockin: Answer the question.


David Charles Dingwall: I said yes to your question. I said yes to the hon. member's question and that is not an issue on the island or anywhere in the province of Nova Scotia.
The issue is the terms and reference with regard to the privatization. I say to the hon. minister: You are making a major faux pas, a major mistake in terms of public policy in this country by asking that Crown corporation at this time in its mandate with a Canadian recession, with a substantial downsizing and the fact that management and labour are working on a daily basis to try to make further reforms to that corporation, to remove itself from all of that hard work, to jump into a dossier with regard to privatization.
The minister cannot understand that the refocusing that will have to take place now for privatization will certainly have a negative impact in the short term, medium term and long term. I am surprised that the minister responsible would be so incompetent on a dossier which is so important to a region of this country.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Mr. Speaker, I want to say a few words on the borrowing bill before the House today. It is a bill of importance in terms of how the government sets its priorities.
I want to make remarks in a couple of areas. I want to express my concern about what is happening to the country in general. I think Canadians are feeling a general sense that our country is drifting away from us, that we do not have a sense of priorities as a people, as a Parliament since the government across the way is missing in a certain amount of leadership in terms of where it wants to bring this country.
The second part in this is a concern about what is happening to the farm economy in prairie Canada where farmer after farmer is being forced to leave the land through circumstances that are not her fault or his fault in any way whatsoever.
I will start off with the farm economy. In a recent tour of my riding, I had a chance to go to 10 different communities to have public meetings in those communities. I heard from person after person the difficulties they are facing on the farm today in terms of a decent and fair price.
The important thing is that they are not getting a fair price for their products. The important thing to know is that the farmers, relatively speaking, are getting less today than they got in the 1930s for a bushel of grain or for many of the other products that they ship and sell to the marketplace. When that happens, of course, the farmers are going to leave the land. There will be more and more bankruptcies, more and more hardship, leading to social problems for the farmer and the farmer's family. The small towns and villages will gradually lose population, lose businesses, have schools close down, have post offices close down. When that happens, people leave and the thing tends to snowball and more and more. Farm implement dealers leave. Automobile dealerships leave. More and more businesses leave and as a result, we find more and more rural depopulation over the entire prairies.
Veiy simply put, that is the situation on the prairies today. We are seeing a rapid depopulation of rural Canada, people moving to the towns and the cities, moving in particular outside of rural Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta to the larger cities or off to British Columbia or, indeed, to the province of Ontario.
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What is going to happen to the rural society and the rural fabric? What I find is that we have to do two or three things. First of all, the most important thing is that the farmer needs a fair price for the product that the farmer sells in the marketplace. The farmer needs to see some reflection of that price in the cost of producing that bushel of wheat, that pound of beef or that pound of pork he puts on the market. The farmer also needs a return that reflects a decent wage for himself or for herself in producing that farm product. The farmer needs a price that reflects parity between the input costs and a decent wage and what he or she receives from the marketplace. That is not happening today. That is not happening today despite the GRIP and NISA programs, despite the other programs that are in place at both the federal and provincial level.
What we need is a new farm program. We might call it a fair prices program or fair prices bill that will guarantee the farmer a return based on the cost of production.
The second thing that one notices immediately is that our farmers are caught now in a price war, in a trade war, between the Europeans and the Americans. There is a subsidy on grain for export from Europe and the United States to other countries in the world. It is the Canadian farmer who is caught in the middle of this price war and it is the Canadian farmer who is suffering the consequences of that particular war.
Our government has to be more aggressive in putting forward the arguments of our country around the world because it is our farmers and the Australians and the Argentinians and the New Zealanders who are caught in the crossfire of a vicious trade war between the Americans and the Europeans. If it does not stop soon, we are going to see even more farmers leave the land.
The third problem is the problems of the GATT negotiations as it effects the four national supply management marketing boards, the dairy commission, the turkey marketing agency, the chicken marketing board and the Canadian Egg Marketing Agency. Under article XI of the GATT, there is protection for our four national supply management boards.
What is happening now in the GATT negotiations is that the tendency or the momentum is to take away that protection from Canada, from our farmers. If we lose those marketing boards we in effect are going to lose those industries, because without the protection of the
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supply marketing system the dairy farmer will not survive.
I remember about a month ago when the dairy farmers came to Ottawa. They had a huge demonstration here on Parliament Hill with 25,000 to 35,000 farmers from across the country. I remember the Stillborn family from my riding saying to me in my office: "If the dairy commission goes, it is not long before the dairy farmers go because these huge farm factories in the United States that produce milk will soon be shipping milk into Canada in huge tanker trucks at a lower price that can be produced in this country and undercutting the farmers who produce milk today". We have all kinds of additional costs in this country that you do not have in the United States.
We have the cost of a much more severe climate in this country than they have in parts of the United States. We have social programs which are, of course, expensive to keep in this country so our taxation regime is different than the United States. Without supply management, without the marketing boards, we are going to lose the dairy, chicken, turkey and egg farmers we have now .
I would like to see our Prime Minister take a much stronger stand on behalf of our farmers. I would like to see him fly to Washington, along with a delegation of Canadian farm leaders, and lobby the President of the United States on the position and the point of view of the Canadian farm.
Our problem is that President Bush and the American administration are the main ones pushing to get rid of the Canadian marketing boards so that there would be a greater market for the American farmers in this country.
If you have a market in this country of 26 million or 27 million people and the United States is south of the border, they are looking at that market and they are sort of savouring the market like a fox savours the chicken coop. They want to get inside the chicken coop and they want to feast on it.
Yet we do not see our Prime Minister going to Washington and saying to Mr. Bush: "Look. We have a democratic right to keep our marketing boards. We want to produce for our own market. We are competent and efficient. Our marketing boards are good for the farmers and good for the consumers. Our marketing boards in addition to that mean there are more jobs for the people of this country".

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I go back to the Stillborn family from my riding. They explained that not only will we lose the farms if we lose the marketing boards, but we will lose all the jobs, the part-time help of people working on those dairy farms and working on those poultry farms and working on the egg producing farms. Many young people work part time on those jobs. We also lose the full-time jobs that go along with it.
In the city of Yorkton that I represent for example we have the Co-op Dairies which employs a lot of men and women in the dairy producing the milk products that go around our province of Saskatchewan. If we lose the marketing boards, how long will it be before we lose the dairies because if we start using American raw milk we are soon going to be using American cheese, American yogurt, American ice cream and other American products. The same thing is true of course in the chicken, turkey and egg industry as well.
We are looking here at losing the farmer, at losing tens of thousands of jobs for people in the small towns and the cities right across this country. Of course we are losing a stable and reliable market for the consumers of Canada.
Those are some of the problems facing the Canadian farmer today. The important thing is a fair price based on the cost of production. The other important thing is to have a Prime Minister that supports us in the GATT negotiations by going to Washington with the farm leaders and bringing opposition members of Parliament with him to make the case to the President of the United States, to Congress, to the American people why we as Canadians need to keep our marketing boards.
We need a government that is more effective and more outspoken about ending the trade war, the grain wars between the United States and Europe. Those are the three big issues that are facing farmers today.
There is a fourth very important issue and that is the issue of farm debt. Farm debt is there largely because of the problems of farm income. If we look at debt today we find that our farmers are in greater debt than they have been for decades in this country. Many farmers are being forced to leave the land. There is farm bankruptcy after farm bankruptcy.
I know of a couple of cases in my riding where the farm stress situation because of debt have led to some very serious problems. People have contemplated suicide
because of the stress on the family, because of what it has done to the children of those particular families that all of a sudden come from a household that does not have the money to buy the basic necessities of life, let alone some of the things that most children want and need for their own development, their own entertainment.
These are the social consequences that are facing rural Canada today. One of the problems we have of course is that in the rural communities people live a long way apart. They live on farms scattered throughout many miles. They live in small villages and on small farms so that we do not see in a vivid and explicit way many of the problems that we tend to see in urban Canada, such as food banks, soup kitchens, people living on the streets, the homeless and people living in small homes, small apartments on minimum wage or people begging on the streets. We see that in urban Canada. In rural Canada much of that poverty, suffering and misery are hidden from public view. But I assure you, Mr. Speaker, it is there.
I conclude this part of my remarks by saying that the most important industry, the fundamental number one industry in this country is the agricultural industry. If we have a strong farming base, and of course fishing and forestry in other parts of the country, in other words the renewable primary industries, we will build a strong country and create jobs for Canadians from one coast to the other.
I do not see that vision today. I do not see that plan today. I do not see that objective today in terms of the government's spending priorities either in the budget or in the borrowing bill in terms of what it wants to borrow money for.
The other point I want to make is that as I travel around this country I feel that Canadians are fearing for Canada. They are wondering what is going to happen to this country of ours. It is not only the farm crisis. There is the unemployment crisis. People are being thrown out of work. There is a recession that is worse than the recession back in the early 1980s, 1981-83. We have a recession that has caused hardship, because we had high interest rates, because we have an overinflated dollar, because we have a trade deal that was signed between this government and the United States which I maintain has given away too much of our sovereignty. The trade
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deal should be scrapped and should never have been signed in the first place.
That trade deal is hurting this country. In particular, it is hurting manufacturing. We are seeing that in the province of Ontario and it is hurting every single province of this country. Yet we have a government that is now negotiating not just a trade deal between us and the United States but trying to expand that trade deal to include the Mexicans as well. That concerns me when I see the wage rates in Mexico compared to Canada where people are paid one to three dollars an hour compared to $14, $15, $16 an hour here. In Mexico they have no social benefits compared to social benefits in this country, they have little or no environmental regulations or standards compared to what we have today.
When I see those comparisons, when I see those differences I fear for the Canada that we are going to have if this government signs the trade deal with Mexico.
I think Canadians are fearing for their country. They are fearing that their national institutions are slipping away, that CBC is slipping away, the post office, the railway system and the airlines. Canadians say to me now from coast to coast that we want our country back. We want this country back. We want Canada back once again.

We need a country that is stronger and sounder than it is now. We have many economic problems. I mentioned the high rate of unemployment, farmers, the problems we find throughout the country, and the problems we have as a result of the FTA between our country and the United States. We also have to deal with national unity and the Constitution, to achieve unity between Quebec and Canadians across this country.

It is important that we have a national vision, that we have a national dream, that we start building once again, that we start spending our money in this country on research and development, on education so that we can create jobs. In the long run, I do not think it is any secret on how to create jobs in this country. If you look at Japan, western Europe, parts in the United States and
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other parts of the world, many of them having fewer resources than us, what they basically do are three things for making their economies more competitive and more efficient. They invest in training. They invest in education and they invest in research and development.
What do we do? We do not invest anywhere nearly as much in those areas as most countries around the world. In research and development, our investment per capita is at roughly the same level as the Republic of Ireland or the country of Egypt. Is it any wonder we in this country are falling further and further behind our neighbours in Europe, the United States and Japan? We do not have the national priority and the national vision to do what other countries have done so well.
Mr. Speaker, 50 years ago, Japan was crushed by nuclear bombs during the Second World War. France was also crushed, like so many European countries. And today, the standard of living in many European countries is as high as it is in Canada or even higher, in some cases, and we see the same phenomenon in Japan.
If people in Japan, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and many other European countries have a national vision, we could also have a national vision in this country.

We can do many things in this country. We can educate our people. We can train our people. We can put our people to work on building a strong and independent Canada that can be competitive and efficient and compete with anybody anywhere in the world, but we can only do that if we have a national dream and a national objective and a national motivation to do that. I sense that the government across the way does not have that any more, if indeed it ever did.
The last point is that the people of this country are afraid of losing our social programs. We are seeing examples now, that started a number of years ago, where the federal government is cutting back on the rate of escalation of transfers to the provinces for post-secondary education and for medical care.

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Some of the statistics that I have here, compiled by the provinces, tell us that over the last five or six years, going on to the end of the 1990s, the provinces will have lost tens of billions of dollars of potential revenue that they would have received if the federal government had not cut back on the Established Programs Financing program or not put a cap on CAP, which is the Canada Assistance Program, for Ontario, British Columbia and the province of Alberta.
These cutbacks by the federal government have put a large burden on the backs of the provinces, have driven up provincial deficits, have caused the provinces to scale down on their commitment to medical care in terms of dollars and have put a greater commitment on the hospitals, universities, school boards and municipalities of this country. As a result of that, the Canadian people are worried about their social programs, about the future of medical care, hospitalization, family allowances and the old age pensions. People in this country want to keep those programs accessible to all and keep them universal to all Canadians.
As we speak in the House of Commons, there is a greater movement in this country to end universality and medical care. In fact, the Reform Party of Canada as its official policy says: "We want to end universal medical care in this country". The Reform Party leader came two weeks ago to Regina, which is the cradle of medical care in Canada, and he challenged the NDP government to cut back on medical care and end universality in medical care. I say to Mr. Manning and the Reform Party, the answer to that is no, no, no. We need in this country universal medical care. We need a recommitment in this country to our social programs.
In ending, that was one reason why I was proud, as a member of the committee on the Constitution, that we included, in an all-party agreement, all three parties, a commitment to a social covenant which talked about medical care, post-secondary education, primary education, the environment, social programs, food and housing and collective bargaining for workers. We need a social covenant. We need to renew that commitment.
I end by saying people want this country back. They want Canada strong and free once again. I guess the way we will have to accomplish that is by changing the
government across the way for one that really cares about ordinary people in Canada.


Hon. Doug Lewis (Solicitor General of Canada):: Mr. Speaker, I compliment my friend on parts of his remarks. Obviously I cannot agree with him on all of them, but I would ask my hon. friend if he could enlighten the House, and I am particularly referring to his comments on agricultural policy.
My friend knows, as does everyone in this House, that the government has firmly supported the farm groups on supply management and done everything it can and continues to do everything it can to put forward its case. The farmers and farm leaders came to Ottawa and demonstrated in support of the government, as a matter of fact, on our policies and our efforts. What I want to ask my hon. friend about, because he is from the west, is this Reform Party policy. Of the three major parties- the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Conservatives-I do not really see any difference in our support of the supply management policies that have been put forward and that have brought stability to those sectors where they are in place. That puts us all in the same boat.
The Reform Party policy manual, and we have looked at it, is very very thin on agricultural policy of any kind. But Preston Manning is time and time again quoted as saying they would eliminate supply management and marketing boards and destroy what we have built up, whether it has been done federally or provincially, to bring some stability to those areas of agriculture which need it and which endorse it. I do not really believe that it is to the detriment of the consumers. I happen to think it is a good process.
I wonder if my hon. friend could enlighten the House as to why the Reform Party from the west wants to destroy what has brought such stability to agriculture in the rest of Canada.


Lorne Edmund Nystrom: It is hard to answer for Preston Manning and the Reform Party, but I will give it a shot.
First of all, the minister is correct when he says the three national parties are committed to supply management. That is true of our party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. My suggestion here was that the Prime Minister could make a real point by flying to Washington with farm leaders and with members of the opposition to lead a lobby in putting pressure on not only
March 23, 1992

Mr. Bush but on members of Congress and the national press in the United States. I think that would be useful for the Prime Minister to do. It is a suggestion I made a few weeks ago to the Deputy Prime Minister and I hope that might be considered very seriously in the next few days.
In terms of the Reform Party, let us make it very clear that it is the only national party in this country, if you read its program, that says: "We do not support marketing boards in this country. We do not support marketing boards that are supply management boards", or indeed I suspect other marketing boards as well.
I believe the reason they do not support them is that they are a very, very conservative fringe group in this country which believes that farmers should be left totally to their own in terms of the international competitive forces. That is totally unrealistic in the world of today. Our farmers need the support of marketing boards. We have a colder climate, we are a small country in terms of market, we are right next door to the most powerful largest country in the world, the United States of America. It is a bit like the mouse and the elephant dancing together; unless we have some protection, which we get through marketing boards, the Americans are just going to come in here and trample all over us.
People should be aware that the Reform Party is saying no to marketing boards in this country. It is also saying no to farm subsidies, saying the farmers should be able to fend for themselves. Once again, it is the only party in this country that is saying no to farm subsidies: "Get rid of those farm subsidies". I ask you this: How many farmers in my riding would survive without support now from the federal government or the provinces? The answer to that question is very few indeed, yet the Reform Party is saying to get rid of them.
Finally, in terms of the Reform Party, not just agriculture but in terms of the Reform Party in general, what they are saying to the Canadian people is that there should be a cutback of 10 to 15 per cent right across the board. That is a relevant point to make here because we are dealing here with a government borrowing bill. The Canadian people should be aware of this. They are saying to cut back on everything from 10 to 15 per cent.
What does that mean to the old age pensioner who is barely making a living in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, or in
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Montreal? A15 per cent cutback on the old age pension? What does it mean to education? A 15 per cent cutback when already we haven't enough funds to keep our universities and schools funded the way they should be? What does it mean to a sick person? A 15 per cent cutback on medical care in this country?
It is about time the Canadian people saw the Reform Party for what it is and said "no, no, no" to that party that wants to bring this country back into the dark ages.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I listened to the remarks of the hon. member for Yorkton-Melville. Quite frankly, in that part of his speech where he talked about the breakdown of rural Canada I am in full support of his recommendations, his ideas. I want to ask him a question. We touched upon it earlier before he began his speech. I raised an issue in this House about two and a half weeks ago when I relayed the story of my experience in the Middle East where I received in conjunction with constituents orders for 140,000 tonnes of food from Canada. That is not 40 boxcars or 400 boxcars of food. That is a combination of
4,000	grain cars and boxcar loads of food that is needed in the Middle East which will be paid for.
Because this food is going to the people of Iraq, and I stress the people of Iraq monitored by the United Nations, monitored not only in terms of shipment but distribution, I believe it is something that as a nation we should be doing, not only in terms of helping the people of Iraq, but also in terms of our own exports, our farming community. It not only has a short-term positive effect, but long-term potential.
I find that it is very difficult to move this kind of an order through the system because of the red tape here and the red tape at the United Nations, the difficulties between reparations and sanctions and humanitarian aid.
I would like to ask the member for Yorkton-Melville a very specific question. He has been a member of this House for almost 20 years. What direction or what thrust does he think that we should be taking to make something like this happen? Not only are the people in his community affected, but farmers all across Canada are affected by this kind of transaction. Could he give the House some advice.

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Lorne Edmund Nystrom: Mr. Speaker, first of all I want to compliment the member for Broadview-Greenwood for the work he has been doing on this issue in terms of trying to accomplish two things, to help people in the developing world in terms of basic food products which are extremely important and at the same time providing a new market for the products of our Canadian farmers.
Many years ago, back in 1968 when I was first elected, there was a civil war in Nigeria. I was one of the members who flew to Biafra into the war zone and spent some time there with the churches and the Red Cross. I then got involved for several months afterward in trying to get humanitarian aid into Biafra through the church organizations. I am talking of food products, medicines, powdered milk, and things of that sort.
I understand what the member says when one of the big problems we had is the red tape on this end and the red tape on the other end and all the bureaucracy one has to go through.
Surely to goodness in our modern age there must be ways of expediting that, of eliminating that red tape, eliminating some of the bureaucracy, some of the details we have to' go through when people are dying of starvation and needing something that we in this country can produce and produce in great abundance. There must be some way we can do that in the modem advanced age of technology. Surely to goodness we have the minds that can come up with a method of making the delivery an awful lot easier.
The second thing is there should be an agency of government which helps the public sector and the private sector to expedite work of this sort, that would go into places like Iraq and Iran and all throughout the Middle East and act sort of like a middle person that would make things a lot easier to accomplish in terms of what Canadian people want to do.
There is so much that we can do. I go back to the trade war with the United States and Europeans. I do not have the statistics with me now, but if you go back a few years you will find that there were massive subsidies of exports of American grain and European grain to the Middle East to places like Iraq and Iran and many other countries. That of course really hurt the Canadian farmer and producer because we do not have the
treasury in this country to subsidize in a massive sense or in any sense the export of our grain to other countries around the world.
I think my answer to the member across the way is that there are many things we can do. One is to get rid of some of the red tape.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: Before resuming debate, it is my duty, pursuant to Standing Order 38, to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for London East, Housing; the hon. member for Vancouver East, Violence Against Women; the hon. member for South West Nova, Search and Rescue; the hon. member for Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Gun Control; and the hon. member for Sudbury, Employment.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, today we are considering Bill C-61, which deals with our country's economic issues, with the broad economic issues of the day. First of all, I would like to say that as Canadians we all know that we have quite a few economic problems. Instead of getting better, the situation is getting worse every day.
We know that the unemployment rate recently went up to 10.6 per cent, which means we are not coming out of the recession but are still right in the middle of one. Canadians are afraid of what will happen to the economy in the future, and that is why retail sales have not picked up. Canadians are afraid of losing their jobs.
However, this is a direct result of the government's policies. Two years ago the government started with its high dollar and high interest rate policy. According to them it was the only way to make Canada more competitive. As a result, we now have a made-in-Canada recession, created by the policies of this government.

Our recession in Canada started long before the American recession because it was a made-in-Canada recession. What have we seen today?
In my city of Toronto, the unemployment rate is about
10.5	per cent. There are 211,000 Torontonians looking for work and cannot find it. Every person in this House, from whatever party, knows what it is like when a
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constituent who is 40 or 50 years of age comes into your office and says: "You are my last hope. I have lost my job. My unemployment insurance has run out. I have sold my car. I have sold my house. Now I am losing my family".
Do we not have a responsibility to those individuals? Do we not realize that more than any other group in this country we are responsible for the tragic plight of these people who face unemployment? We cannot give them hope in terms of saying their jobs are going to come back. So many jobs are not going to come back.
Canada, in the three years since free trade, has lost
345,000	manufacturing jobs. That is 16 per cent of all our manufacturing jobs. Those are the highest paying jobs. They are not lay-offs, they are permanent job losses. The companies have closed up, and in many cases the jobs have gone south of the border.
Look at the auto industry. The auto industry is probably the key to whatever we are going to do in NAFTA. Canada has lost, since free trade came in, three short years, 21,213 auto jobs. That is 21 per cent of our auto jobs. When I asked the government the other day what it intends to do about it, it said that things are rosy and that the United States is losing jobs as well.
The United States, in those same three years, has lost just 9 per cent of its auto jobs. We are losing our automotive jobs at two and a third times the U.S. rate. This is due in large measure to an ill-conceived free trade deal that wiped out the safeguards for auto jobs in Canada. That is why we are losing the jobs much more quickly and they are going south of the border. Things are not well because we are going to continue losing more of those jobs unless this government shows some leadership and is prepared to step in and say: "Enough is enough. We are going to stand up for Canadian workers".
The member for London East raised the issue today of General Motors. It lost a deal at its London plant for 25 locomotives. Who is going to pick up those 25 locomotives and create the jobs? General Electric in the United States is going to.
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CN is buying these locomotives. CN has public funding. It is a Crown corporation. Can you imagine anything more stupid than our Crown corporations helping American workers?
We heard the member for York South-Weston who showed how we had increased funding from $.6 million to $17 million for Canadian studies abroad. At the same time here in Canada we are cutting out the Science Council, the Economic Council. At the same time this government is spending $21.2 billion on an ill-conceived prosperity agenda. This prosperity agenda asks stupid questions to which we already know the answers, questions it raised in its 1984 mini budget. What has it been doing? Eight lost years and it did not even answer them.
In effect, Canadians have answered. We have a high pile of studies telling the government what should be done in the area of education, training, research and development, science, technology, innovation, financing entrepreneurs. These studies have done at public expense already. Why did it not read these to get the answers? It had to spend $21.2 billion so it can consult with Canadians. Canadians do not need this consultation. The answers are there.
The government is being political. It is spending over $3 million to simply advertise these meetings. Thirty or forty people are invited by paid consultants to come to these meetings and listen to some of the things the government has to say. The answers are already there. We know this is a government that is not prepared to consult and listen. It is prepared to advertise and tell Canadians what it wants, but it is not a government that is prepared to listen.
Did it listen to big business or exporters about the crushing impact of the high dollar and high interest rates on exports and on jobs in Canada and on the cost of the deficit? Did it listen to small business in terms of its two unemployment insurance premium increases? Why are labour and small business not part of this on-going prosperity agenda consultation process?
This government played fast and free with its own public servants when it limited them to 0 and 3 per cent increases at the same time that it was giving senior officials huge increases, at the same time that was giving

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the Bank of Canada 6 per cent increases. How stupid. Labour had to back out of this prosperity agenda.
In Canada we all know that if we are going to get our economy turned around, one of the keys has to be that labour and management and governments at all levels must learn to work together. They do in other countries. Canada has the worst record of labour strife and days lost of any country in the OECD. How are we going to get competitive unless we work together for a common purpose? Instead of enhancing that co-operative spirit, the government has been destroying it repeatedly.
What did it do in this budget, which came down about a month ago, to try to remedy the situation? What did it do about this rising unemployment? I will give the government credit on two counts. It accepted the advice that we have been giving it for several years now, consistently, saying that the housing sector is one of the most important sectors in Canada for creating new jobs. We had recommended lowering the down payments and using other possibilities such as pension funds and RRSPs for funding the down payment on homes.
We know that if we can get the 50 per cent of our construction workers who are not working today back on the jobs, we are going to have not only housing, but immediate creation of jobs, if the government accepted these two proposals.
Those proposals did not cost any money. The government was not prepared to go further, as we suggested, in dealing with the municipal infrastructure programs in which we have to build new sewers to look after our environment and stop pollution. All we wanted to do was prepay a couple of those schemes that were on municipal books, to bring them forward a little bit. Was this government prepared to enter into a co-operative program with the provinces and municipalities in itself? Was it prepared to spend, in advance, a little bit of money to create these necessary infrastructures and also get people back to work, giving people the dignity of a job? The best social program is a job, it is not welfare that is augmented and is being paid for by the municipalities at the same time as this government is cutting back its payments for education.
At the same time, from the 1986-87 year until the 1992-93 fiscal year, this government has cut back its
transfers to the provinces by $4.9 billion. There has been a $4.9 billion decrease over what it had committed to spend before.
With this type of approach, there is no doubt this is a government that is not prepared to create jobs to arrest this rising unemployment. This government was not prepared in its budget to accept our proposal for more basic training. This government was not prepared to even put $25 million to help with the food banks.
Today, there are two million Canadians using food banks regularly. Seven hundred thousand of those are children and the food banks are stretched-what a travesty in a country that has so much. We have come to rely on them. We have to get these Canadians back to work to give them the training and the education. We have to get the science and technology going.
We know that innovation, entrepreneurship, science and technology and research and development are the keys to the future. What has this government done? The Prime Minister promised everyone of us in this House and all Canadians in 1984 that he was going to double R and D by 1988. It has gone down. It has gone down below the level it was at in 1984. We are now down to the level which is less than half of that of our major OECD competitors.
Where are our young scientists who are going to universities going to get the jobs? The government will say it is the fault of the private sector. Blame it on the private sector, blame everything on somebody else, but the fact is that this is a government that admitted to Canadians that with the high degree of foreign ownership and multinational corporations in Canada, the R and D is just not going to get done here in the private sector. The minister of industry said a couple of years ago that branch plants just do not do R and D. What did this government do in its last budget? It decreased the withholding taxes on payments to foreign multinationals as if this is going to get them to come in here and do an R and D. Was it linked to more funding by these branch plants for R and D? Was it linked to the creation of more jobs in Canada? What a boon to have your withholding tax rate cut in half cut in half when you are sitting with profits and you want to repatriate them to your own home country.
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If you are going to get at the problem, that is not the way to do it. We face a real crisis in terms of retaining our jobs and creating them here in Canada. The government is now engaged in the North American free trade agreement negotiations, NAFTA. It has a great deal of hope for these agreements. It said: "We are going into NAFTA and we are going to become part of NAFTA". There are no conditions, no qualifiers. It is an article of faith that free trade with anyone is good. There are not even ant terms.
We have suggested to this government to take our auto sector, which will and must be a deal breaker for NAFTA.
As I have said before, we have lost 21 per cent of our auto jobs under the free trade agreement at a rate two and one-third times the U.S. job loss rate for auto workers.
Are we prepared to stand up for Canada's needs or are we simply ideologues, free trade, marketplace, all those things are to the benefit of us all the time. We have a chance to say that we want a fair deal for Canadian workers. We want Canada to have its fair share of auto jobs.
Every expert recognizes the auto pact lead to the establishment of a high-level automobile industry, a world-competitive automobile industry in Canada going back to 1965. That auto pact basically said: "You will have free trade in North American automobiles, but only if you produce an equivalent number of vehicles in Canada. You can bring one vehicle into Canada duty free if you produce one vehicle in Canada". That is fine. We used our market to guarantee certain jobs. You get our market free, but you have got to produce jobs here.
That safeguard for jobs was wiped out by the free trade agreement. It was wiped out to the point that by 1998, when all the tariffs are gone, the Big Three could pull all their production out of Canada, there could be no auto parts jobs here, they could ship cars into Canada from the United States duty free and not have one job here in Canada.
The Conservatives believe that free trade is a necessary part of globalization. That is naivety of the worst order. What percentage of Japan's auto market is served by foreign auto manufacturers? Three per cent. In the European Community they are debating whether by the
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year 2000 they will allow foreign penetration to go to either 15 per cent or 17 per cent.
Today in Canada the European, Japanese and Korean auto-makers, the foreign auto-makers, have 37 per cent of our market and produce only 3 per cent of the auto jobs in Canada. Now to me, that is being the Boy Scouts, naive to the nth degree, and we are the ones who suffer for not standing up for our rights, the rights of our workers to use our market to create a fair share of Canadian jobs. Why give it away for nothing? The other countries do not do it. The other countries are not practising free trade. Why should we be the only ones to do it?
In these NAFTA agreements, we have asked the government some very specific questions and we have asked it for some terms and conditions. We want, first of all, a North American tariff level or quota level which is going to get foreign penetration of the North American market back down to international norms. Why should we be higher than our major competitor, the European Community or Japan? Is that asking too much? Is it really?
Second, we want to go back to something like the auto pact. Not only will we give free trade within North America, but we want to make sure that free trade applies in a way that Canadian jobs are not sacrificed. So that means that we have to undo the provisions of the free trade agreement that allow these manufacturers to pull completely out of Canada. As a price for coming into Canada free of duty they should be prepared to create some jobs here. This is what we are asking, that is all.
We are going to have to have not only North American content rules, but country or Canadian content rules if we are going to get back to where we should be in terms of international norms and in terms of Canada's fair share of North American auto jobs. Let us not be the only naive people.
There is a lot of misunderstanding going on with this government. There is a canard out there promoted by this government, that the dispute settlement mechanism under the free trade agreement has just been a wonderful boon for Canadians.
We now have the Honda decision. They can impose tariffs on us and the only right we have is to consult with the Americans about these tariffs they have imposed on us and then after consultations go to a panel. But that panel's decision will not be binding on the United States

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unless the United States agrees. There is no binding arbitration of the Honda dispute. This is the most potentially damaging decision that has ever been taken to Canada's industrial future. It means that no other country or no other corporation within Canada or outside is going to establish in Canada to service the North American market.
We have got so much to do. I wish I could speak longer.


Jim Jordan: Mr. Speaker, I would like to direct a question to my colleague from Willowdale. He has given a very succinct speech. He has an appreciation of all the problems that this country is confronted with. In my particular area I do not think there is one area in which it is illustrated so clearly the mistaken policies of this government as in the crossborder shopping issue.
I live in a border town. I can look across the water and see the United States. I see the devastating effect that cross-border shopping has had on the merchants in these small towns along the St. Lawrence, which is my beat.
I was suggesting to the government, because this has been tried, this is not a stab in the dark. It was tried in one community where they lowered the price of gasoline by giving out coupons. The merchants gave out coupons and lowered the price of gasoline. They found the biggest single attraction to the United States is the price of fuel. Fuel is not a luxury. Most householders, working men and women, have a car and they need that. At one time perhaps fuel was a luxury. It is not now.
I am convinced that if this government would make some kind of a study to determine the amount of revenue generated from the 8.5 cents federal excise tax on fuel, and if it would drop that, drop it totally or reduce it drastically, that it would turn around the economy of these small centres.
When people go to the United States to fill their gas tanks with fuel, while they are there they shop. That seems to me like a rather simple sort of solution to the problem. Take away the attraction. I do not blame the people. I never blamed the Canadian people for going to the United States to shop. With the policies of this government, it is driving them to the United States to shop.
I just wondered if my friend from Willowdale would like to comment on that kind of perception. It is not imagined; it is real. All you have to do is drive through these towns and see the number of shops that were thriving a few years ago. They are closed now. It is hard almost to find a gas station on the main street because there is no sale in Canada for the product.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, my colleague and friend from Leeds-Grenville has brought this issue forward time and time again. What he says is absolutely right.
His contention that the chief cause for cross-border shopping is our high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel has been confirmed by the Liberal task force on deindustrialization and economic renewal and by the border municipalities. The mayors of these cities have told the government to get the cost of fuel down to the U.S. level and we will get rid of part of this whole phenomenon of cross-border shopping which is costing Canadians anywhere from $3 billion to $5 billion in lost sales a year.
The government knows that cross-border shopping is a problem. What did it do? A couple of months ago it brought out its answer. Did it deal with the cost of fuels and bring them down to the U.S. level? It did not even mention the cost of fuels. Its head was in the sand.
What it did do though is it figured out that Canadian cigarettes go into the United States duty free and then they are smuggled back into Canada. The government figured that it could be the tax cop and it would impose the GST on these cigarettes going out of Canada up front so that even if they are smuggled back in here, we have not been cheated at the Canadian revenue base. Did it do any research of people who buy cigarettes? What has happened? People just buy American cigarettes because they are cheaper. That is the stupidity of this government.
The government's tax policies are not based on common sense. What is the result? We are losing our tobacco industry.
Now maybe the tobacco industry is in disfavour, but I will tell you this: Don't kick a tobacco farmer out of Canada until you have another job for him that just pays the same amount of money. That is the obligation.
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As the hon. member for Leeds-Grenville has pointed out on a number of occasions, this government thought as to what it was going to do. It said: "We will help you collect the taxes when people come back into Canada, because there is total tax evasion when people come back in. We don't have the officers there to collect the taxes". But it said to the provinces: "We will help you collect your provincial sales taxes if you will implement our GST and start taxing more goods". My God, the provinces are not going to fall for that blackmail, and they have not.


Mr. Ken James (Sarnia-Lambton):: Mr. Speaker, I listened with great interest to the member for Willow-dale who seems to know a lot about cross-border shopping, even though his riding is a long way from the border.
I hear what he is saying about gasoline tax and cigarette and tobacco taxes. He is saying what a terrible mistake it is. Well, I guess he was not here at the time, but he should reflect upon his colleagues on the Liberal side. For years they did the exact same thing. It is a carry-on from this philosophy in Canada to add those taxes.
I am in agreement that gasoline tax is certainly causing us some problems at the border. But I also submit to my friend across the way that I spent a lot of time last summer devising a plan. I thought would be helpful for us to have a system at the border communities that would help us to have a reduced tax by giving an allowance on the income tax like the northern benefit.
I was interested in the pontificating by the hon. member for Leeds-Grenville. I sent him that proposal. I did not even hear one word of support or interest whatsoever. I think that is a little bit disheartening to do that. I included the opposition members as I did my own members on this side of the House.
There was very little interest, even from the opposition members who have border communities. But I understand within his party there would probably be a problem because the rest of the people say: "Me too". I am sure that he did give it a whirl and they all said: "Yes, we want the same thing too".
But I agree with my friends across the way. We who represent border communities have a problem with cross-border shopping and certainly with the price difference in gasoline. It does not affect the member for Willowdale at all, I do not think. People do not drive from Toronto to buy gasoline, but they do from the
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border communities and then they buy other things when they are there.
It is a difference in philosophy that has been carried on for years and years. I do not think that he is fair in blaming the government of the day because the Liberal government was in power a lot longer than the Conservative government. It started this whole thing rolling and it has continued on.
I agree with him that it must stop, and we must not have increased gasoline taxes.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, in response to the partially intelligent intervention by the member for Sarnia- Lambton, he is right. It is a real problem. Our task force on deindustrialization travelled throughout that whole area. We saw how communities were being devastated, their downtowns were being wiped out because of cross-border shopping. He knows what is happening in Sarnia-Lambton.
I recall that part of our task force was conducted by the member for Lambton-Middlesex and partly by the member from the Tilbury area. We met truckers who said: "Peterson, we have not filled up our trucks in Canada in the last year. We have to move to the United States". The trucking industry is moving because of this differential of which the member for Sarnia-Lambton talked.
I suspect this was partly facetious, but he said that it was our fault, that we did not respond to his entreaty to have some type of benefits program for border communities. That is the first I have heard of it.
What I wonder is why he could not convince his members. He has the benefit of talking to them in caucus and of working with them. Why could he not convince them? I am sure he tried eloquently to get his members onside for his proposal that might have done something to stop cross-border shopping. Why did they not listen?
I do not condemn the member over there. He was not sitting around a cabinet table when they made these laws. He was just slightly ingenuous when he said that this was a program that we had started.
Cross-border shopping became a major problem when we got free trade, the GST, a high dollar and high interest rates. That is what drove Canadians into shopping across the border and gutting the downtowns of our border communities. Until these policies are reversed, we are not going to get this problem dealt with.

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I am sorry that the member was not successful in convincing his colleagues that perhaps they should have listened to him. I will tell hon. members that they should have listened to him. I hope they will listen to him in the future when he tells them to get their dollar down, to get their interest rates down, to get our taxes down and harmonize them. That is one of the problems that is going on right now.
I hope he will be prepared to stand up and say: Get rid of the GST.


Mr. Sid Parker (Kootenay East):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak on Bill C-61, an act to provide borrowing authority for the fiscal year commencing April 1, 1992.
Before I start, I would like to comment on the remarks of the Minister of State for Finance and Privatization who opened the debate. During his remarks he stated that the government cannot be crippled by debt any longer and were looking to streamline the economy by cutting spending and not by increasing taxes.
It seemed to me that the minister should be enlightened as to what this government is doing. I would like to comment a little bit on some press releases. For instance, in the Toronto Star on October 21, 1991: "Thx Revolt Brews Among Tory MPs". That is his own MPs on his own side of the House.
"A revolt is brewing among backbench Tory MPs over what they see as excessively high taxes on the middle class. The attitude that the Tories are only pro-business and do not care about the little guy is sinking us", says MP for Markham-Whitchurch-Stouffville.
This is coming right from their own side of the House. It identifies very clearly what this government is doing and the policies it is carrying out. Now it is coming back to this House and telling us to approve a borrowing authority so that it can carry on and conduct its business.
I would like to identify some of the things that this government is doing. Taxation comes in many, many forms. Let us take a look at another form of taxation. My riding of Kootenay East identifies pretty broadly with other ridings and the effects on them right across Canada.
I have a large area that is covered by three border crossings, customs crossing to the United States. I have a large resource base in coal mining, silver, lead and zinc mining, and in forestry, natural resource bases. One of the things that the government did was change the Unemployment Insurance Act. Bill C-21 opted out of that program. It introduced a new program to which only the employer and the employees contribute.
It also raised the cost of that program. The business and labour groups are outraged that the federal proposal increased unemployment insurance premiums by 14.3 per cent in January, only six months after a 24 per cent hike.
This is another form of taxation. What is being done in the riding of Kootenay East is taking another large amount of money directly out of those communities and sending it directly to the federal government. Of course, those communities lose. The workers and the employers lose that money, so it is another form of taxation and the money that has left that area.


John R. (Jack) Whittaker: When they closed the mine did they use any of that UI money for retraining?


Sidney James Parker: That is right. My colleague from Okanagan-Similkameen asks if they used any of the money for retraining. That is the problem. They have got out of this program and now they are not initiating any kind of training or are trying to help these people. The changes have cost the people a lot of money.
Another area is the high interest rate policy. The high interest rate policy of this government has created serious problems for the coal mining companies, for the various business groups, and the other areas within Kootenay East because the high interest rate policies cause them to borrow money. The money leaves the area and of course the area does not have those moneys any more.
The implementation of the GST, is that not another form of taxation? "The GST to hit $16.3 billion target says Jelinek" was a headline in The Ottawa Citizen of October 25,1991. Seven per cent of every dollar on every item that people buy within that riding immediately is picked up by the business people and shipped off to
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Ottawa. It is another form of taxation that is taken directly from these people.
Is it any wonder that the people in my riding who have three accesses to the American border are going across that border for shopping? This has affected adversely the small businessman within the Kootenay East area. People are finding out that on a weekend they can get in their cars and drive a short distance, fill up their cars with gasoline, spend a couple of evenings across the border, do their shopping, come back the next day with virtually very little cost and have an entertaining weekend. It certainly affects the economics of the area.
Probably the worst form of taxation that this government has ever brought in was maintaining the high Canadian dollar. The high Canadian dollar in a resource industry area such as mine where we have to depend on the sale of our materials such as coal, silver, lead, zinc and softwood lumber to other markets creates serious havoc. Everyone in Kootenay East knows, and I am sure everyone across Canada knows, that the high Canadian dollar is a direct result of a commitment that this government made.
In fact the former President of the Treasury Board reported that it was a part of the free trade agreement that they maintain the Canadian dollar at a high level during a certain period of time.
It is another form of taxation that is crippling a riding such as mine which depends so totally on the resource base to sell its products. A lot of our coal goes to the Japanese market.
Another very direct form of taxation is the capping of the equalization program for the province of British Columbia. Again the people of Kootenay East are being taxed because when the province does not get its fair share of taxation from the federal government, taxation comes back down to the provincial governments and down to the local governments.
Is it any wonder that the Canadian people are standing up and fighting this government on their taxation policies and what this government is trying to do.
The cuts to our education programs, especially in a riding such as mine where the nearest university is in Vancouver which is a good 400 miles away is another tax. Students have to leave the riding to go to university. We are fortunate enough to have a college there and many students are able to go to the college but those who wish to go to university have tremendous costs. Where are the provisions to assist those people? They are not there.
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I want to speak for a few moments if I may about a report that was put out in The Financial Post of October 21, 1991.
Canada needs a new economic vision and implementing it will require profound and uncomfortable change right across Canadian society, says a landmark report on the economy.
The $ 1-million study released yesterday by Harvard University economist Michael Porter is a sweeping indictment of the attitudes and practices of the major players in the economy- business, labour and government.
Mr. Porter gave this government a seven-step solution to our economic problems. This is not a New Democrat but I want to read this report because I think it makes a lot of sense.
Harvard economist guru Michael Porter, who has advised other countries on prescriptions for success, says Canada must take several steps to become a more competitive economy. Among his recommendations are:
Become an economy driven by "innovative" export industries.
You are not going to do that with a high Canadian dollar.
Increase and upgrade the sophistication and productivity of the existing base of resource companies.
Shift various incentives in government, industrial and regulatory policies to encourage work investment and skills upgrading.
Did you see anywhere in this government's program for competitiveness any of these proposals?
Build on Canada's regional strengths instead of trying to diversify the economic base over our regions.
Move quickly and decisively to create a true economic union and effective free trade within Canada.
Can you imagine signing a free trade agreement with the Americans after a century of building a railway system east and west? We signed a free trade agreement with the Americans going north and south and we have not even devised a system within Canada of trading with each other.
I have worked extensively with our coal industry, trying to sell our western Canada coal to the central Canada markets. We are starting to have some success. The only reason we are having that kind of success is because we have a government in Ontario which is starting to listen. It can see the benefits of buying western Canada coal, shipping it across the transportation systems into the Ontario markets and the possibility of those shipments on those railways being able to buy the steel from their steel mills to upgrade the rails that go west again. That is the kind of trade we should be looking at. That is the kind of encouragement that should be taking place.

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Transform foreign subsidiaries into companies that serve the
Canadian market.
Another sensible suggestion. Why are we not doing it? Probably the most important recommendation, but it is not going to happen from this government, is to "forge more co-operative labour-management relationships". That is essential to any striving country that wishes to get out and be competitive. This government is not putting out that kind of effort, the kind of programs that are going to be required to carry that out.
Is it any wonder as I go through my riding, I hear the people talking about how our country is beginning to fall apart. They want Canada back. They want to get rid of the policies that are splitting and dividing us. They want a government that will bring us back together and a Canadian government that will save our transportation systems, not dismantle them like it did with VIA Rail. They do not want deregulation of our airlines. They do not want the Americans coming up and taking over our transportation systems. Surely to goodness we are innovative enough to be able to bring about the kind of policies in transportation that will serve our people and not let us be dependent on other countries for even travelling across the broad lengths of our own country.
Is it any wonder that no members of the Conservative government are speaking on this bill. I would not if I was a backbencher sitting on that side. God forbid me if I was. I would be ashamed to stand in this House and try to defend the kinds of policies this government is bringing to the Canadian people and to come back to this House and ask for borrowing authority to fulfil those kinds of programs. Is it any wonder that none of you got up in this House to speak on this bill. It does not surprise me a bit.
Many of the other policies that this government has adopted have hurt us in a tremendous way, such as VIA Rail. Ask the people in tourism how it has hurt us in the west with regard to the abolition of VIA Rail through British Columbia.


Thomas Hockin: What about the Rocky Mountaineer?


Sidney James Parker: The member across the way asks about the Rocky Mountaineer. The Rocky Mountaineer comes on in probably another month and it will serve for the summer months. That train is booked solid with people from Japan and across the country. To get a reservation on that train is almost impossible.


Thomas Hockin: That is in addition to what was before.


Sidney James Parker: It is not in addition. We had a crack Canadian train that travelled across Canada, called The Canadian. Remember The Canadian, that silver bullet, that beautiful passenger train with the good services that travelled across Canada that was dismantled by this government?


An hon. member:: Shamefully.


Sidney James Parker: Now he says: "What about the Mountaineer?" Try to get a booking on that train. Try to say to the tourism people in my riding that they can conduct a tour-


An hon. member:: You are against it because it is private enterprise.


Sidney James Parker: I am not against private enterprise. I think the Rocky Mountaineer is a good proposal, but why do away with the transcontinental train and stop other people from travelling.


Ms. Campbell (Vancouver Centre):: Nobody rides it.


Sidney James Parker: The member for Vancouver Centre says: "nobody rides it". I worked for the railways. I can remember the day when there were seven transcontinental passenger trains going east and west across the country. We did not have the courage or the decency to maintain one good transcontinental train.
I want to say that the same thing is going to happen to our airline industry if we are not very careful. We are now seeing the situation where airlines are finding themselves in difficulty. The Americans are looking at coming in and picking up some of the pieces. We will end up having to make a detour to Seattle to get into Vancouver. Is that the kind of transportation policy we want in this country? I say that is not the kind of vision I have for Canada, nor do many of the people in my riding.
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I want to go back to some of the policies this government has carried out with regard to the free trade agreement because I think it is really the cause of what is happening here. That is the cause of the high Canadian dollar and the GST. There is no question about it. They wanted to do away with the manufacturers' tax so they could conform with their free trade agreement


Thomas Hockin: You would keep the manufacturers' sales tax?


Sidney James Parker: I want to state quite clearly that I want to know where the benefits are. The manufacturers' tax was supposed to have been taken off but I do not see a big decrease in the cost of manufactured goods. I do not see a decrease in the price of the car I purchased.


Thomas Hockin: Read the Consumer Information Act.


Sidney James Parker: I want to say something to you in reverse with regard to the free trade agreement. I want to pursue this because the softwood lumber issue is a prime, key example for someone from a resource based area in the lumber industry, such as my area. To slap a duty on our softwood lumber shows very clearly that this government did not protect our own interests with regard to the lumber industry. Many of them may be going broke before the settlement finally comes around if this government is fortunate enough to be able to convince the Americans they are wrong. They should know they are wrong and they should demand that they remove it immediately if they feel the free trade agreement is that important.
My view is that the free trade agreement is what is killing us. We should get rid of it. We should be looking at a trade agreement that deals with sector by sector and try to bring about a more rational agreement than the one today that is killing our farming industries and the various manufacturing industries in Canada.


Jim Jordan: My colleague in the NDP mentioned cross-border shopping and the effect it is having on his riding. I was not aware that he was in that particular riding.
We have mentioned here this afternoon that the biggest single feature in attracting Canadians to the United States and border towns is the price of gasoline.
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That has been identified. The party in power should know our position on it, to drop the 8.5 cents federal tax on gasoline.
We heard from a colleague in the Tory party who agrees with that, I think. He said he agreed with that a little while ago. I suspect he could be speaking for part of his party, although not all of it. I would like to know what the NDP position on this would be. Would you not feel that it would be a good start if we could keep Canadians at home, to shop at home, buy things at home instead of going to the States to shop? I am not condemning Canadians. They have been driven to the States to shop. If we could make it attractive for them to stay and buy fuel oil at home, they might also then stay at home and buy some other things because the main attraction is the price of fuel.
I would like my colleague's reaction to that.


Sidney James Parker: Mr. Speaker, in my findings in my riding, gasoline is one of the major factors. They go there and gas up their cars. In a place such as Creston, they have an agreement with their company. They have cut the gasoline rates in those areas. We have seen a system where some of the oil companies have identified a problem there. If they are going to keep those servicing bays open, they have to cut their gasoline prices in order to try to alleviate that kind of problem.
I think it is much deeper than that. What I find in my riding is a protest against the taxation policies of this government. That is what they are telling me. "I find a way of going across the border and showing this government. Whether I save any money or not, it is going to be a protest against this government about its taxation policies and how it carries them out". Another very important area, and I am sure that the member knows this, is dairy products. Many of them go over for dairy products because they are able to get dairy products there much cheaper and so on.
I believe that the taxation levels of this government have created that kind of situation. It is a hundredfold worse now that we have the GST because it is a protest. That is the only way these people can get back at this government to notify it that they do not agree with the policies it is carrying out.

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John R. (Jack) Whittaker: Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my friend for his comments on this particular debate. In speaking in the debate, I noted a number of things that occurred to me throughout the course of his remarks, from the problem of the unemployment insurance, the high unemployment rate, knowing that in his riding within the last couple of years he has had a major problem with the shutdown of a major smelter and mine in his area, problems caused by high interest rates and a high dollar for exporters for his region, in the farming communities in Creston, from the forest industry in his area in Cranbrook and from the mining industry through Kimberley-Fimie and other areas.
One thing occurred to me as he was speaking, and I know that the Minister of State for Small Business would want to pay particular attention to his response on this because it is a small business matter. It is one of the things that this government appears not to have paid much attention to and can actually, I believe, help the small business community and the resource sector is in the area of value added production. It appears that they have not given much attention to it. Over the course of the last three years, I have asked a number of questions of the government on its purchasing policies. I find that it often goes out to contract to the lowest possible purchasers, certainly in the area of food production.
I know the member, coming from an area like Creston, represents an area of agriculture, as is the Okanagan- Similkameen region. We have been trying to encourage value added products in agricultural products. Yet we have seen canneries and jam factories that we had in our areas over the years that have closed down because they are non-competitive supposedly. If you talk to the producers, for instance in Summerland or Bevan, they tell you that they have got all sorts of purchasers. You have got other value-added products that could be made with the drying of fruit and fruit leathers, et cetera, but can they get the federal government to open the bidding process to them? It appears that the federal government cannot do this.
The government could be injecting millions, in fact billions of dollars into this area, creating employment
and doing something about the 1.5 million unemployed and the millions of others who have given up at this particular time, creating employment by putting money back into the pockets of those producers, whether it be softwood lumber, in the production of goods from the mining industry, or in the agriculture industry of Kootenay East riding or in fact Okanagan-Similkameen-Merritt.
I want to ask the member for some comments on his views of value-added production and what the government should be doing in turning its purchasing policies toward purchasing locally, purchasing from Canadians for Canadians.


Sidney James Parker: Mr. Speaker, yes, and I welcome the question from the member for Okanagan-Similkameen-Merritt.
Years ago, Bulman tomato juice, the canneries in the Okanagan, the pea growers and various other groups were down there. I think that is the type of thing that the federal government should be getting involved in and encouraging these people to go that extra step. Our Canadian products are equal to anyone's anywhere across Canada.
Had the government stayed within the unemployment insurance, it could have raised the rates to bring about more technology and more training. It could have stayed within that program and used it to deal with the economic problems when mines shut down. It could be used as a training facility to help retrain people, especially older people. Most of the people in these resource-based areas are older people. They are unemployed because of technology or different changes and so on. Had the government stayed within that program maybe I could believe its story about wanting to be competitive, wanting to retrain our people and to get out there and show Canadians how we can do things. But no, the government has opted out of that program. It is standing by and saying that the free enterprise market is going to do it.
I am very much afraid that future Canadians are going to be the ones who are going to suffer for it.
Mr. Francis G. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-
Canso): Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate on Bill C-61, an act to provide borrowing authority for the fiscal year 1992-93.
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With this legislation, the government is seeking authority from Parliament to borrow some $24.7 billion, as well as another $3.9 billion under section 47 of the Financial Administration Act, which is a tremendous amount of money.
In introducing the bill, the Minister of State for Finance reminded the House that this was the fourth time he had the privilege of introducing a borrowing bill.
I found it rather strange that he should be proud of that given the fact that this government had gone so far off on its economic projections so repeatedly and, as a result, was having to come back to Parliament for vastly varying sums, varying according to the plans that it had announced to us previously in its budget papers. Be that as it may, this debate allows us to talk about the context of the request by the government for this additional borrowing authority. That context is provided for in the February 25 budget of the Minister of Finance. I would like to address this debate in that context and speak about the budget of the Minister of Finance.
Like so many other Canadians I listened intently to the presentation of the first budget of the Minister of Finance, and like so many other Canadians I found myself very disheartened by the content or the lack of content or even the relevance of the budget to many of the problems facing Canadians at this time, particularly the Canadians I represent in eastern Nova Scotia.
There were two key priorities for the Minister of Finance to deal with in his budget. The first priority was to deal with the grievous levels of unemployment in this country. Unemployment has been driven up as a result of this government's wrong-headed fiscal and monetary policies which have caused the recession we are currently and seemingly forever in the midst of at this present time.
The first challenge of the minister was to do something to stimulate the economy, to get the economy moving again, and to do something in the short term to bring down this appalling level of unemployment.
The second challenge the Minister of Finance faced was to formulate and to implement measures that would restructure the Canadian economy and would halt the decline in our country's level of competitiveness and productivity which has been eroded seriously during the mandate of this government.
We realized that the Minister of Finance did not have a lot of fiscal room in which to manoeuvre. There was no
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opportunity to make lavish increases in spending and in new programs that would be very costly for Canadian taxpayers. However, the Minister of Finance had an opportunity and a responsibility to deal with these twin problems facing our economy.
His budget regrettably failed on both counts. Rather than deal with the fundamental problems we face in Canada, the Minister of Finance presented Canadians with a series of empty gestures which do nothing to get Canadians through these difficult times or prepare our economy to deal with the fundamental problems that lie ahead.
Basically what the Minister of Finance did in his budget was to present some gestures primarily directed at the Reform Party, obviously the party that he feels most threatened by, and to offer some small measures to convince the Reform Party that the government was actually listening to it and the constituency in the finance minister's area was tempted by the policies of Preston Manning and his Reform Party group.
As far as my riding is concerned the budget was a non-event. There was very little in it that could be said to be relevant to the problems facing the riding of Cape Breton Highlands-Canso which I represent. This budget failed to address the fundamental and systemic problems which will continue to plague the Canadian economy and the economy of eastern Nova Scotia, problems that will only intensify until definitive measures are taken to deal with them.
A prime example of the empty gestures found in the budget is the government's decision to sell off or wind up some 46 different agencies such as the Economic Council of Canada and the Science Council. These independent organizations were charged with identifying not only the many problems facing our country but also the potential solution to these problems. Yet this government would attempt to score cheap political points by eliminating these important bodies and would dare to suggest however subtly that these bodies had become part of the problem.
The Economic Council of Canada had a point, perhaps coincidentally, in a report released only a few weeks before the budget to the severe productivity problems that this country faced. These productivity problems had been aggravated and had become much more serious

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during the last six years when this government was in power and when it failed in its first mandate to put measures in place that would deal with those serious problems.
It has only aggravated the situation. It has forced us into a much more critical financial and fiscal situation and made it much more difficult for us to put measures in place to deal with these problems.
On the contrary, the Economic Council of Canada and others represented our best hope of finding solutions to the challenges which confront us. Yet they must give way to the government's covert political agenda, not based on getting Canada working again but rather on short-term and self-motivated political gain.
That is what I call an empty gesture: empty of vision and empty of hope. Like so much of the Reform Party's simplistic dogma, the hollow measures contained in this budget are more style than substance. They do nothing to confront the deep-seated and profound problems which face Canada.
This government and this minister have done nothing but pay lip service to the fundamental and systemic difficulties which confront our economy and us all.
What will this budget do for the countless Canadians who have endured and who are facing bankruptcy? The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council stated in its most recent newsletter that business bankruptcies over the first 10 months of 1991 increased by 42 per cent in Atlantic Canada over the previous years, on top of the big jump in 1990 over 1989.
Last year alone there were 6,500 consumer and business bankruptcies across Canada. That is almost 600 more bankruptcies than in 1990. What is even more frightening is that 5,350 of last year's bankruptcies were consumer or personal bankruptcies. It is difficult to imagine the scale of personal tragedy represented by these figures which in themselves do not even begin to reflect the huge number of Canadians who are avoiding bankruptcy by the skin of their teeth.
What has the Minister of Finance done for them? Why do we not ask the 1.5 million unemployed Canadians
who look to this government and to this minister for concrete action on job creation, only to be ignored? All this government did for unemployment was to add to it. We have only to ask the hard working employees of 46 federal agencies who found out on February 25 that their services were no longer required by this government.
Even closer to home for me was the proposal to sell Cape Breton Development Corporation and to wind up the Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. It will hardly instil confidence in the people of Cape Breton where the unemployment rate currently hovers over 20 per cent. What does this budget do for them?
In cutting back and folding over agencies designed to stimulate growth in the region of north eastern Nova Scotia, the government is in effect reneging upon a long-standing commitment on the part of successive governments to address regional disparity.
Let us take for example the government's measure to allow Canadians to use up to $20,000 of their registered retirement savings toward the purchase of a home. Very few of my constituents in Cape Breton Highlands-Can-so have RRSPs to draw upon to purchase homes. That is not to say that there have not been inquiries on the part of some of my constituents about this program.
Some have asked whether they could work toward paying off their existing mortgages using this program. Many of these same people, however, were not even able to make a RRSP contribution this year, economic conditions being what they are.
Some members of the banking community in my riding tell me that they feel more like priests these days, having to listen to heart-breaking stories of economic hardship and the economic burden which these hardships place upon the family unit. These people face uncertainty as to whether they will have jobs six months from now.
Most are struggling just to make ends meet and to feed their families. How many of my constituents will be able to take advantage of the programs newly announced in the budget? Precious few.
What will this budget do for the housing industry in my region of northeastern Nova Scotia? Virtually nothing.
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Of far greater effect would have been provisions for upgrading existing housing, such as providing more funding for the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program or the Rural Assistance Program. It would have been less glamorous but more effective. Effectiveness does not appear to be part of this government's agenda.
This government has talked again and again about the importance of preparing the Canadian economy for the challenges of the new global economy as we move toward the 21st century. It has talked about retraining and the vital importance of building an educated and highly skilled work force. It has talked about how our young people are the key to future prosperity.
This government seems intent on making it impossible for young people to get a decent education or to have a fighting chance upon graduating from college or university. Students are graduating with debt loads averaging between $10,000 and $17,000, only to discover that there are no jobs. They are looking at having to wait up to ten years or more before they can pay off their debts. The Minister of Finance announced in his budget that the Canada Student Loan Program will be privatized, and that the six-month interest-free period for loan repayment following graduation will be eliminated.
This government is refusing to deal with the problem. It is simply shunting it off on to the banks.
What will this do for the 20 to 30 per cent of student loan recipients in my region who are delinquent on their payments? It will make matters worse for them. These people are not deadbeats. They are young people who, at this point in their lives, should be filled with hope and optimism for the future. They are not being given a fighting chance. They are graduating only to find that the odds are completely stacked against them and that the government is only adding to their intolerable burden.
What is this government saying through this budget? It is saying: "That is their problem, not ours".
The budget also makes ominous reference to a new rate structure for student loans, which everyone concerned knows means higher interest rates. How can we expect students to pay more for the opportunity of furthering their education and to pay back these loans
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faster when they cannot find a job upon graduation? It does not make sense, except to this government.
Students, over 200,000 every year, who rely on student loans will pay the price as their government dithers, offering hollow platitudes instead of concrete measures. The students in my riding do not want empty gestures from this government. Neither do the unemployed nor those Canadians facing bankruptcies. They want and have every right to expect action, specifically on two important fronts.
First, Canadians were looking to this budget to provide some stimulus to get Canada's economy out of this recession. Canadians were not looking for wild and extravagant spending that would indebt the government further. They had a right to expect the minister to give the inflation song a rest and begin to address the real problem in our economy, the 10.6 per cent of able-bodied Canadians who do not have work.
The Minister of Finance proclaimed in his budget a plan to cut spending and taxes in 1992-93 by $1 billion, as if this would solve all of our problems. Surely we know by now that this is not the case. This is little better than conventional wisdom and a timid version of what the government would have us believe is its fiscal policy.
Let us not forget that last year the government told us that through its program of fiscal restraint the deficit would fall below $25 billion in 1992-93. Nothing could be further from the truth. It has now modified its estimates, saying that the debt will be reduced to $27.5 billion. It begs the question, why should we believe it now?
What about the unemployed? Is the government contending that the measures announced in this budget will solve all of the problems by stimulating economic growth? I am sure that is what it would have us believe. Canadians have every right to be doubtful, especially as far as this government is concerned.
I noted in this year's estimates that an additional $1.6 billion will be required to pay for the administration and expenditures of unemployment insurance over last year. As put so bluntly in the government's estimates of 1992-93, the total projected UI expenditures of $20.3 billion reflect the anticipated impact of a continuing recession on unemployment levels.

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In light of this statement, what has this government done to address the tragedy of unemployment in this country? It has done nothing, and that is the greatest tragedy of all.


Mrs. Coline Campbell (South West Nova):: Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my colleague from Cape Breton Highlands-Canso on his speech on this borrowing bill.
The words he spoke here before the House showed clearly that this government lacks the ability to govern the Canadian people. It lacks in that it has no imagination. The borrowing authority bill is before the House for passage. At the same time, we have passed a budget that has provided absolutely nothing in the way of incentive to Canadians for growth. Nor do we see any vision that this government might have for Canadians to spur them on.
The leader of our party had an idea that this budget should be giving something to stimulate Canadians. He had this idea as a result of many trips across Canada and as a result of many visits by members of Parliament to their constituencies and other places.
I cannot believe we are here borrowing. We saw nothing to give a stimulus to the Canadians to get the economy moving. We saw no restraint except for the ministers' salaries being frozen. At the same time, we know that the civil service is in a wage range that far surpasses members of Parliament who are here to supposedly represent Canadians and bring suggestions to the House. The salaries of the nine top categories in the Public Service are higher, starting with the lowest to the highest, than those of members of Parliament.
In the United States there is a capping on that by saying that the public service in the United States cannot be paid higher than members of the Congress or of the Senate. We do not see that in Canada. We do not even see that initiative on the part of what I call a dead-end government speaking to a Public Service that is not coming up with the ideas, speaking to Crown corporations in this House whose salaries are on the advice of an advisory group to the cabinet.
Today in the House there were two or three questions on the direction of Canadian National Railways to go out and get a contract in the United States.
These Crown corporations and the Public Service are not stimulated with high salaries.
Canadian National Railways goes from about a recommended $317,000 to $396,000. It seems to me that somewhere this government should have talked about that restraint and not restraining the Economic Council of Canada or the Law Reform Commission, which are aids to a sagging government with very few new policy ideas.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: I would remind the hon. member that one normally addresses the Chair.
That being said, I give the floor to the hon. member for Cape Breton Highlands-Canso.


Mr. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-Canso):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from South West Nova for her comments and questions.

My colleague is one of the most assiduous members in this House when it comes to representing the basic economic concerns, not only of her constituents, but of rural Canada. She will know about some of the points I want to raise in response to her questions.
To begin with, as I said earlier, the budget had a challenge.
The budget had a twofold challenge. It was to address the real concerns facing the Canadian economy at this moment, which are jobs and the lack of jobs, and to stimulate the Canadian economy and to put the economy on a footing that would prepare us to be competitive in the next decade and into the next century.
One of the most important sectors is one the government recognized and we on this side of the House also recognized. It is the housing sector. The government adopted suggestions which we made concerning the use of RRSPs and the reduction of down payments for housing. There are many other housing programs through CMHC that could have stimulated the housing sector in my riding and I am sure in the hon. member's riding as well, such as the RRAP. In my riding there are many, many houses that need to be repaired. This would
March 23, 1992

help local contractors and would help seniors, disabled Canadians and others, and would be much more relevant in the rural areas, such as both our ridings.
The minister has been talking about making Canada competitive. We all know that education and investing in people are key. We do not see anything in this budget or in previous budgets to give effect to that commitment. The aspects of the student aid program are certainly not going to make us more competitive or cannot be considered to be an investment in education. They are really only a reversal of previous policies which were against students.
I will conclude on the point about salaries. There is a lot of room to cut the high salaries of chief executives of Crown corporations, a small example of cutting the minister's salary. The point is that cutting the ministers salaries by 5 per cent will not raise a lot of revenue. The fact that it is even an issue demonstrates the bankruptcy to which this government has descended in its management of the economy. The government has to lower salaries because Canadians are beginning to feel that ministers are overpaid because they are unable to address the central problems facing this country and are still dealing with problems that are no longer relevant to Canadians.


John R. (Jack) Whittaker: Mr. Speaker, when I travelled to Nova Scotia last year on an economic tour, I saw some of the problems that were related to various policies of this government in rail transport and some of the policies with respect to unemployment insurance and retraining.
When I was in the Atlantic provinces on the goods and services tax hearings, the prediction from his area and other areas was that as a result of the goods and services tax, the underground economy would become greater and greater. It would be caused not only by the goods and services tax, but by some of the monetary and fiscal policies of this government.
I am wondering if the member would have a comment as to his experiences in his riding of Cape Breton Highlands-Canso with respect to the policy of how the cutbacks in VIA Rail and rail transport affected his area with respect to roads and traditional transport areas. Over the past year and some months since the goods and services tax was put in place, has he seen the problems I have seen in other areas of Canada whereby the goods
Adjournment Debate
and services tax is causing the underground economy to mushroom and become much greater?
Mr. LeBlanc (Cape Breton Highlands-Canso: I want to thank the member for his many questions. It will take me a couple of minutes to answer them.
As far as the underground economy being created by the GST is concerned, it is related to the problem of cross-border shopping for those constituencies that are closer to the border.
My constituency is not that close to the border, although the way in which the GST has impacted on it, in addition to elevating the amount of the underground economy as it might be called, has been that it has discouraged some of the industries upon which we rely, such as tourism. It has added to the real problem that we and many of our small businesses face in attracting tourists to our area.
In addition to that, it has been an additional degree of paper burden on our small businesses. The only businesses that have benefited from the GST are the accounting firms.



PROCEEDINGS ON ADJOURNMENT MOTION

[Stage Direction]
A motion to adjourn the House under Standing Order 38 deemed to have been moved.

Joseph Frank (Joe) Fontana: Mr. Speaker, Canada's first co-operative housing program was introduced in 1973 under a Liberal government.
In 1986 this government promised to produce 5,000 units of co-op housing a year. This goal was never achieved. Instead, under a Conservative government the number of co-op units constructed has declined and funding for the program has been in jeopardy for the last two years.
Funding for the 1992 program was no different. After extensive lobbying the minister of state for housing announced on December 17, 1991 that the funding for co-op housing would be renewed with a budget of $6.1 million.

Adjournment Debate
As recently as February 19, less than a week before the budget was introduced in this House, the same minister confirmed in writing that the co-op housing budget was secure. Based on his assurances co-op housing groups across the country proceeded with the development of co-op proposals.
In an attempt to justify this broken promise the government is claiming that the co-op housing program is not targeted to those in need of affordable housing. On March 11, 1992, the Minister of Finance criticized the co-op housing program and I quote:
How is it that it is well targeted when 50 per cent of those who occupy these units are not in effect qualified under the provisions of social housing?
The minister is revealing his ignorance of the co-op housing program. He is correct when he states that 50 per cent of those who occupy co-op housing units are not qualified for social housing.
What he failed to acknowledge is that this same 50 per cent of occupants pay market rents for their co-ops. These units are not subsidized by the government. It is the other 50 per cent that the funding is targeted to.
This statement by the Minister of Finance also contradicts his own colleague, the Minister of State for Housing, who said in his December press release that the co-op housing program is targeted. I quote:
The revised program will make more effective use of scarce dollars ensuring federal subsidies are fully directed towards a mix of low- and moderate-income families.
These statements prove that while the government was praising that co-op housing program a few months ago, now the Minister of Finance is making excuses for eliminating the successful and cost effective program. It appears this government is willing to alter its conclusion of a program in order to justify its rash decisions.
In his March 11 comments the Minister of Finance also stated that the government had done enough to stimulate housing through its introduction of the RRSP for down payments and the 5 per cent down payment. While I applaud the government for introducing these two programs which I have personally been promoting for a year, I must note that these programs help those Canadians who have savings to purchase a home.
Co-ops meet the needs of a different segment of the Canadian population. By eliminating the co-op housing program this government is eliminating a valuable housing program for the lower and middle income families. It provides mixed income communities, not ghetto housing. The elimination of the co-op housing program will also cost 4,400 construction and manufacturing jobs this year alone, adding to the unemployment insurance expenditures.
This government has also progressively eliminated the federal role in housing through the budgetary process, not through the constitutional dialogue. The cancellation of the co-op housing program, a program that is very popular in many Canadian provinces is just another example of this. The termination of the co-op housing program is an abdication of this government's responsibility to provide adequate and affordable shelter to Canadians in a healthy community environment.
There are over 164,000 Canadians who are on a waiting list for co-op housing. Why is this government abandoning these Canadians? The program is cost effective and offers affordable housing and mixed income communities for seniors, single parents, natives, the disabled, and low-income earners.
Will this government keep its commitment to housing groups and provide the $6.1 million for new co-op housing commitments?


Mr. Dave Worthy (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Public Works):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to take the opportunity to respond to the concerns about social housing expenditure and the cancellation of the co-op index linked mortgage program.
Social housing expenditures have been growing and were expected to increase by 5 per cent over the fiscal framework. With the recently announced budget, social housing expenditures have been limited to an average growth of 3 per cent for the next five years. It is the same percentage increase as all government programs are targeted for.
In 1992-93 the actual budget available for new commitments will be $70 million. This will mean that even in these tough economic times CMHC will be able not only to maintain its obligations toward the 650,000 households it now assists, but also to provide assistance for addition-
March 23, 1992

al households, we expect in the neighbourhood of 28,000 this year.
The federal government assists households in need, especially those in real targeted need across the country, through the social housing program. The government will continue to spend approximately $2 billion annually, which totals over $10 billion in the next five years.
With respect to the termination of the co-op index-linked mortgage program, the moderate income households, which are some of the clients that the program supports, now have more opportunities to access affordable, decent housing in the private market.
The scarce dollars that are available cannot be diverted, I repeat cannot be diverted, from those with greater need. Low income Canadians who cannot access decent, affordable and suitable housing in the private market will continue to be assisted through the ongoing social housing programs.
The federal government will continue to support the 14,800 units which have already been built under the co-op ILM program.


VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Margaret Anne Mitchell: Mr. Speaker, on December 6, I asked the acting Minister of Employment and Immigration what was being done to meet the needs of immigrant women in violent situations.
She replied that there are already programs to integrate immigrant women into society. She did not seem to realize how inadequate these programs are in meeting the special needs of immigrant women to encourage them to assert their rights, to become independent and to escape violence.
The government showed its lack of concern for minority women when the recent budget rolled back pay equity in the Public Service, cancelled the Court Challenges Program, indefinitely deferred the Race Relations Foundation, changed the Foreign Domestic Program to exclude many women from developing countries and cut $100 million from the Canadian Jobs Strategy program.
There are few shelters specifically suited to assist immigrant women who need to escape violence. Shelters for mainstream women are inadequately funded with no resources for effective cross-cultural staff training.
Adjournment Debate
Violence against women, particularly against immigrant women, is a multi-faceted problem which requires specific government action. Immigrant women are doubly disadvantaged because of racism and sexism. They suffer abuse in silence because the discrimination in our society keeps them in unsafe and vulnerable situations.
Many immigrant women are sponsored by their husbands under the family class. In order to remain in Canada, their sponsorship must be intact. Therefore, many women who suffer violence in their homes are afraid to speak out or to seek help for fear of jeopardizing their immigration status. They cannot leave and are locked into violent situations and so are their children.
The co-chair of the Canadian Panel on Violence against Women, Pat Marshall, said: "Immigrant and visible minority women often have to leave their communities to escape violence and are cut off from their culture". This is not a realistic alternative for many women since their community is often the only support network they have in Canada.
Their lack of language skills also perpetuates the silence in violent situations. When they cannot speak English or French they are insecure and isolated and afraid to leave an abusive partner. The Minister of Employment and Immigration allocated $200 million to increase access to language training for immigrant women. However, this program excludes most immigrant women since it does not offer training allowances or child care. Immigrant women, like many other women in Canada who are primary caregivers in their households, often lack job opportunities and may not have any income of their own. Without training allowances, this government is offering only false hope for many women who continue to be isolated in violent situations.
The lack of professional accreditation for many immigrant women means that they cannot find employment commensurate with their training and experience.
In addition, this government has not implemented employment equity effectively with targets, timetables and penalties. The Canadian Jobs Strategy program was one of the few training resources available to immigrant women, women who want to enter or re-enter the job market.

March 23, 1992
Adjournment Debate
With this year's cuts, the government has decreased CJS training by 35 per cent for immigrant women. How can immigrant women escape violence in their homes when they cannot be independent economically and socially?
To end violence against women, we need to eliminate inequalities in every facet of our society. Government action is needed now because it is a matter of survival for many immigrant women and their families. Women who are victims of violence must have full protection and refuge from violent situations.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: I am soriy, but your time has expired.


Dave Worthy: Mr. Speaker, this government has made a long-term commitment to ending violence against women. Zero tolerance is the goal. An estimated one-quarter of the total Canada Assistance Plan contributions to the provinces and territories are used to provide support to the victims of family violence.
In 1990-91 that amounted to a substantial sum, about $1.5 billion as total expenditures under the Canada Assistance Plan exceeded $6 billion.
I know that the hon. member for Vancouver East would agree that economic restraint is a necessity for all governments.
Federal contributions to the Canada Assistance Plan are being limited, capped if you will, under the Federal Expenditure Control Plan in only the three most fiscally strong provinces, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario and to a maximum annual growth rate of 5 per cent per year. This 5 per cent growth is well above the estimated rate of inflation.
I share the hon. member's concern that adequate services be provided to women and their children who have been victims of violence. The $136 million family violence initiative announced last year proposes to expand emergency housing in provinces which have indicated a continuing need to provide emergency temporary shelter. This would provide temporary shelter for approximately 4,000 women and their children in addition to the transition homes already in existence.
Canada is a country which has justly gained a reputation for being one of the most progressive nations in the world in recognizing the extent and seriousness of the problems of violence against women. Even more important, the Government of Canada is taking action on violence against women including the provision of shelters and other services.


SEARCH AND RESCUE
Coline M. Campbell: Mr. Speaker, I will face you this time.
On March 131 rose in the House and posed a question on the search and rescue facilities based in Yarmouth. The contract runs out on March 31 this year for the search and rescue service. My colleague from South Shore stood up in the House today and presented a petition signed by 14,793 people from the three counties in the southern end of Nova Scotia. Anyone who sails the waters offshore from our villages knows how important it is to have a search and rescue facility. It was important in the past year because 22 lives were saved because this search and rescue facility was in place in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
Yesterday there was-you would not say a demonstration- a meeting of 250 to 300 people who came out in bitter cold weather. On the platform along with myself and the member for South Shore, there were politicians from every level of government, municipal, provincial, including a minister from the provincial level.
The provincial minister and his colleague, Mr. Huskil-son from Shelburne were there along with the wardens from Yarmouth, Clare and Argyle. No one is saying that this is not an essential service. No one wants to see it go.
It may cost somebody a little bit of time to find the money that is needed to provide such an important service. It is not just for tourists who are perhaps boating or for other people who are using it, it is for our own fishermen who are out there daily in weather conditions that makes it sometimes incredible that they go out there.
I want to just reassure the House that this need is not a frivolous demand by the people in this area. The time is coming, April 1, when the contract will have expired. The minister that day said that an announcement would be given shortly. Speaking to the Minister of Fisheries
March 23, 1992

and Oceans during a committee last week, he said that the decision was imminent.
The premier of the province has spoken to the Prime Minister. There is another time this week for him to impress upon the Prime Minister how important it is that we retain this. The service is three years old. You cannot give such an important service to people and not keep it going.
The people are becoming dependent on this service. Saving those 22 lives was very important in the last year. That shows how important it is to have that "search light".
We cannot play with the lives. Governments cannot give three years ago, and take it back this year. It is an essential service to have the search and rescue helicopter in Yarmouth.


Mr. Ross Belsher (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Fisheries and Oceans and Minister for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency):: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for South West Nova for again bringing this to our attention, which she did first on March 13.
As well as informing other members from Nova Scotia,
I want to inform the House that at the moment no decision has been taken with regard to the disposition of the Yarmouth helicopter contract. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Department of National Defence are currently reviewing the options to deal with the delivery of search and rescue, and fisheries patrol capabilities in the Yarmouth area.
As you are aware, we have received numerous representations for the continuation of this contract, and in particular, the search and rescue component. The subject of SAR, as you are aware, is a very sensitive and an emotional issue. It is for this reason that we are reviewing all of the options thoroughly.
I trust that in the not too distant future, but that in a matter of days, we will have a decision as to how this will be handled. There has to be that capability for this part of our country on an ongoing basis.


GUN CONTROL
William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, on December 5, 1991 this House passed with a
Adjournment Debate
large majority Bill C-17, a bill to revise our gun laws and make them more effective.
Royal assent was given to the bill on that date, December 5, 1991. However, the bill has not in fact become law because regulations have not been tabled in the House and the bill has not been proclaimed law by Order in Council.
On December 6, I asked the minister when those regulations would be tabled and when the bill would be proclaimed. Unfortunately she did not give me an answer on that date.
Here it is now three and a half months later and we still do not have this important bill proclaimed and we still do not have the regulations tabled in this House.
The demand and the need for this law were to plug the weaknesses in the existing gun control legislation. That goes back to December 1989 when 14 young women were assassinated by a a single gunman at the Polytechnique Institute in Montreal.
Here I am again today, as I say three and a half months later, asking the government when this important law will be proclaimed and when the regulations will be tabled.
That law, Bill C-17, was not a perfect law but it introduced some very real and good improvements. For example, under that law it will now take 28 days for an applicant to get a firearms acquisition certificate. The delay will give time for the authorities, the police, to investigate the applicant and see if he is a trustworthy person. It also provides for two guarantors or co-signers on the application form.
It goes into other things such as safe storage of weapons and the requirement for a national training program for those who want to use weapons. Of course one of the major gaps in the law is that it did not cover the control of ammunition, and I regret that. But, as I say, what is there represents a very real improvement.
I understand that the delay rests in part with the Canadian Advisory Council on Firearms that is preparing recommendations for the minister with respect to the regulations. I simply want to say this: I hope the regulations that are being prepared by this advisory council are not going to circumvent the wishes of Parliament, because Parliament wanted an effective law.

March 23, 1992
Adjournment Debate
At the last Gallup poll on this matter in 1991,80 per cent of Canadians said they wanted tough gun laws. Parliament passed such a law last December. So let's get on with it.
I see the parliamentary secretary here. He served on the committee that heard representations on this matter. I hope he is here to give me some good news today, that he will give me a specific date when we will have this law proclaimed, when we will have the regulations in effect.


Dave Worthy: Mr. Speaker, the minister shared the member's pleasure that the firearms control provisions in Bill C-17 received such strong support in the Senate when the bill was given royal assent last December. I am confident that the vast majority of Canadians share her view that this new legislation represents a major step toward enhancing public safety in Canada.
I want to assure all members that the Minister of Justice is most anxious the important regulatory and legislative provisions of this act are proclaimed into force at the earliest possible date.
There are, however, important considerations which must be taken into account before various measures can be implemented. Many millions of Canadians are affected. In order that their considerations are reflected, the advice of the Canadian Advisory Council on Firearms and other groups that have proposed views on this subject will be taken into account. And consultations have taken place with provincial and territorial attorneys general.
Another very important consideration is that we ensure adequate information, materials and strategies have been developed and put in place so that both criminal justice administrators and gun owners are properly informed and aware of the new requirements before they come into effect.
The hon. member has said that the regulations and the legislation must be effective. They also could be summed up in two other words: what is needed is that they be practical and workable.
The government is planning a phased in approach to proclamation dates respecting the firearms provisions. The Minister of Justice will be announcing the actual proclamation date at the earliest possible time.


EMPLOYMENT
Diane Marleau: Mr. Speaker, northern Ontario and many other regions in our country are suffering from very high rates of unemployment. Many of these regions have suffered these high rates of unemployment for some time now. As a result they have exhausted UI claims and must rely on social assistance.
In reply to a question I raised in this House on February 11, 1992, the Minister of Employment and Immigration stated: "We have in place programs worth $1.8 billion that allow for the training of the unemployed this year".
While I am aware that there are training programs for the unemployed, these programs do not serve the large numbers of recipients of social assistance. They serve only those who are presently collecting UI benefits. If a recipient of UI benefits applies and is accepted on one of these training programs, even though he has applied at the veiy end of his time to be receiving UI benefits, it matters not. Once he is accepted into this program, he will go on and receive UI benefits for the duration of the training program.
I have had occasion in my riding recently to be aware of people who missed that deadline by about one week. They had collected UI benefits, they applied for a program and they were accepted one week too late. So there is nothing for them. They cannot access the moneys and so they are totally out of it.
I am veiy interested in making sure that some of these people do have the training that is needed also for them because the person who did not qualify because he was accepted one week too late into the program is certainly just as much in need of retraining as the one previous. I want to say that all unemployed should enjoy the same access to retraining whether they receive social assistance or UI.
This government may state that allowing all access to retraining under the Unemployment Insurance Act would be too costly, and I would agree that we should be as cost effective as possible, but many agencies are trying and have tried to fill these gaps and help these social assistance recipients to access training. Unfortunately and unwisely in the face of the realities of this situation this government is cutting back dollars for this category of unemployed. I refer now to the cutbacks under the Canadian Jobs Strategy.
March 23, 1992

This makes me question the government's real commitment to training and retraining. I know of one group in particular which will have difficulty moving forward with a national employability project, a group which has a long history of helping the severely disadvantaged poor, namely the Salvation Army.
There are many reasons for the scarcity of dollars being directed to these severely employment disadvantaged. Not least is the cap on transfer payments to the provinces. This does not allow provinces adequate dollars to deal with the increased numbers of welfare recipients. The municipalities are in the same position. They in turn are faced with increased numbers of welfare recipients. They only have the poor, cash strapped property taxpayer and they are obligated to pay more to just offer the basic necessities of living, let alone retraining.
More training programs are urgently needed for this group across the country.
I ask the government, again, will it consider the issue of funding of employability training programs for those who do not qualify for unemployment insurance? Let us ensure that the growing number of social assistance recipients, casualties of this recession, are fully included in labour force development strategies.


Dave Worthy: Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member. I know her concern is real and, like so many in the House, would like to see more dollars available for many of these programs.
On behalf of the Minister of Employment and Immigration Canada, I am pleased to outline some of the programs available to the unemployed.
Adjournment Debate
As the Minister of Employment and Immigration has already mentioned, in 1991-92 approximately $3 billion was made available to provide training and adjustment programs to Canadian workers and employers. In 1992-93, $3.4 billion, an increase of $300 million, has been, allocated for training and adjustment.
In 1991-92, Ontario will receive approximately $821 million in training and adjustment funds. It is expected that a good portion of these moneys will be spent in northern Ontario, in the area that she represents.
Under the Labour Force Development Strategy, which is Canada's blueprint for creating a highly and internationally competitive labour force, new programs have been designed to build on the strengths and successes of the Canadian Jobs Strategy.
Programs like the Employability Improvement Program, with options such as project based training or job opportunities, provide employers with assistance to hire selected candidates.
Last year, more than 600,000 Canadians in all walks of life and all regions, participated in our training and adjustment programs. In the coming year, we expect to help tens of thousands more.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. DeBlois):: The motion that the House do now adjourn is deemed to be adopted. The House therefore stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow, pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 6.30 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Tuesday, March 24,1992