1992-06-05

Mr. Derek Lee (Scarborough-Rouge River) moved:: That this House condemns the government for its negligence toward the worst social and economic difficulties faced by residents of Ontario in modern times.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have an opportunity in this House to debate an issue that is of great concern to all residents of the great province of Ontario.
The issues touch on national interests, of course, but the residents of Ontario have particular reasons now to fear for their futures and to question the attempt of the government to manage their economy and their social planning, the infrastructure of the economy. They have very real fears.
In an effort to ensure as full a debate from the Liberal opposition side today in this relatively short day, we will be asking that we split our times.
I want to make reference to the motion itself. It says: That this House condemns the government for its negligence toward the worst social and economic difficulties faced by residents of Ontario in modern times.
Anyone who doubts the seriousness of the economic crisis has only to visit the streets of Toronto, of Sudbury, of Thunder Bay and look at those who are unemployed, who are losing all they have built around them over the last many years of prosperity and to see the fear in their eyes.
As we speak today, we are reviewing the new monthly unemployment statistics. These days, this is a bad news item every month. But Statistics Canada tells us that the unemployment rate in Ontario is 10.9 per cent. It is a double digit figure for the first time in a long, long time.
We are not the only province with double digit unemployment. Ontario has been the engine of the national economy, assisted by all the other regions. The engine of the national economy has now struck double digit unemployment with apparently no end in sight. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because this government is not doing anything. This government is taking the hands-off approach of letting the private sector solve our problems and it is not working.
The unemployment rate in Toronto is 11.2 per cent. Promises over the last few years of jobs, jobs, jobs and sacred trusts are simply not believable any more. There has been a reneging by the Prime Minister on those promises. Ontario, Toronto, and our national economy are paying a very high price.
There are two specific issues I want to address relative to metropolitan Toronto. They relate to the economic and social planning envelopes. One of them is urban crime and the other has to do with federal non-funding of immigration and refugee settlement.
On the urban crime issue, in our metropolitan area in Toronto we are seeing a decaying of neighbourhoods. For the first time, we are seeing what I would call a criminal block-busting of neighbourhoods. The criminal blockbusting relates to the crack house phenomenon. That is the situation where there is no landlord and the criminals and drug pushers move in and take over a house. That brings prostitution, more drug pushers, drug purchasers and petty thieves who want to finance their drug habit to the neighbourhood.
That is decaying and destroying neighbourhoods in which people just like all the members in this House of Commons live in. Ordinary neighbourhoods are falling victims to this criminal block-busting.

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Prostitution in Scarborough is up 95 per cent over the last year. That is a doubling of prostitution crimes. Drug offences are up 22 per cent.
These are figures that residents and many neighbourhoods in metropolitan Toronto are struggling to cope with. They look to their elected representatives. They look to government and they see nothing happening. The cancer of the crack house continues to grow. They ask for the government to react, to do something about it.
In the meantime, the government watches while the powers of police to investigate and prosecute are restrained. They look at a Criminal Code that is 100 years old and does not address the phenomenon of the modem crack house. The government is simply not addressing the phenomenon of the urban crack house with either legislation or policies. It has not provided any alternatives.
To put the icing on the cake, there is legislation that permits the seizure of proceeds of crime. Usually those proceeds are seized as a result of drug criminal activity. Even when the municipality bears the cost of the drug investigation, which in many cases in a metropolitan area like Toronto amounts to many millions of dollars, the federal government is not giving back to the metropolitan police the money that was spent to investigate the crime in the first place. That is negligence. That is an abandonment of the federal government's very important role in this area. The government is deaf to the issue of urban crime.
The second area I want to bring to the attention of the House has to do with federal non-funding of refugee and immigrant settlement.
In the one area of refugee settlement, the region of metropolitan Toronto and Peel will spend approximately $430 million in the settlement of refugees. That includes welfare costs. That money comes from the pockets of municipal taxpayers. The federal government has capped its funding of all of this and has not responded to this funding imperative.
If the federal government and federal legislation is going to accommodate the refugees, then it damn well better start funding the settlement initiative. Municipal taxpayers are becoming fed up with having to carry more
than their share of the burden when they do not manage the laws and the borders.


An hon. member:: That does not happen in New Brunswick.


Derek Vincent Lee: Well it happens in southern Ontario.
The other area has to do with the field of education. We have a lot of great new immigrants in this country. They are populating principally our larger cities and we are glad and proud to have them.
A difficulty arises when they come in large numbers to particular municipalities. The school boards are forced to absorb the second language training for these new Canadians. When they come in large numbers it creates significant distortions for school boards.
I have a list of schools here that have anywhere from 43 per cent to 27 per cent of students who must be educated in a second language. English is the second language.
The cost of integrating and adjusting goes on for several years, the school-boards estimate about four years, and the federal government is not assisting. The federal government is happy to have the new immigrants, happy to have the family-class immigrants and the business-investor immigrants and Canadians are too. But the federal government has abandoned to the municipal taxpayers the cost of funding the education integration.
There is a cost because if the costs are not paid, the school itself and the quality of education in the school suffers. The full student body is not able to absorb all of their education training in the English language or in the French language in Quebec or other parts of the country.
This is an abandonment in these areas: urban crime, they are asleep at the switch; and in federal funding of immigrant and refugee settlement, they have abandoned it to municipal taxpayers.
These taxpayers and their elected representatives on a municipal and regional level are very angry. They are waiting, I am waiting, and my constituents are waiting to see what this government is going to put forward as a solution to that ridiculous abandonment in that field.
I will close now and invite this government to address its negligence before it is too late.
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Hon. John McDermid (Minister of State (Finance and Privatization)):: Mr. Speaker, we have listened to the lead-off speaker today from the Liberal Party, a member from the Scarborough area of metropolitan Toronto. He stood here and talked about a litany of problems we are facing in the province of Ontario, but once again the Liberals have no solutions.
They stand and its more money: maybe we should throw more money at this problem and more money at that problem. They do not say where the money comes from. They do not say we will raise the deficit. They do not say we will borrow more money, we will raise taxes or whatever it may be. They do not say any of those things.
The hon. member talks about the job creation. I can tell him that we have come through a very difficult recession. Of course our unemployment rate is unacceptably high right now. I can tell him that we saw the fastest job creation in the industrialized world between 1984 and 1990 when 1.6 million new jobs were created, of which 1.4 million still exist. We must understand that. It must be understood by the Canadian people that 1.4 million of those jobs still exist. Entrance into the labour market and the unemployment rate because of the recession we have gone through have increased.
He talks about the decaying of neighbourhoods and the drug problem. I remember very well-and I am going to remind him of this because I think it is very important-a speech that the Prime Minister of this country gave. I believe it was in 1987.1 could be wrong. I sat here in the House and listened to the hon. member for Hamilton East. She stood and ridiculed the Prime Minister on his speech. The Prime Minister said that we had a drug problem in this country. He put more money and more effort with the RCMP to fight drugs. The RCMP has been somewhat successful but not successful enough because we have not seen the elimination of the drug problem.
The Liberal Party, led by the hon. member for Hamilton East, tore the Prime Minister apart saying that he was exaggerating, that he was saying things were way out of control, that he should not be talking that way, and that that was not accurate.
Today we see Liberal members stand and all of a sudden express concern about crack houses and about
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drug problems in this country. The Prime Minister warned about this problem and the government did something. The hon. member says it did not. It has done something about it and it is continuing to work on it, in co-operation, I might say, with local police forces and police forces around the world. It is very important.
He talks about immigration and immigration levels. The hon. member should know the system. The system was in place long before we became the government. The government through the Minister of Employment and Immigration would contact the provinces in a consultative mode and ask: "What can you absorb in immigrants each year?" Those recommendations come in and that is how the levels are determined.
The hon. member is saying that it is all the federal government's fault for bringing too many immigrants to this country and not funding them. For heaven's sake, education has always been a responsibility of the provinces. If he is saying that we should start funding elementary and secondary education from the federal government then he should stand and say it.
Is that Liberal policy? Is it Liberal policy to fund elementary and secondary education? If it is then let us have it as a policy and let us see them fight that one out in a constitutional way. I mean the provinces will take the money.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I believe that was a comment but the member has a minute to answer.


Derek Vincent Lee: Mr. Speaker, that was a long comment with a question wedged in at the end.
I did not say it was the federal government's fault there is immigration to this country. I said it was the federal government's responsibility to ensure that immigrant settlement took place properly.
I am not saying the government should throw money at this. I am saying the government should use its brains, its leadership and its jurisdiction.
The member opposite complains because a member on this side critically challenged an initiative of the government at one point in time. It is our job to challenge critically from time to time, but it is the government's job to exercise leadership. It is the federal government's responsibility to address these things.

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Mr. Maurizio Bevilacqua (York North):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to congratulate the member for Scarborough-Rouge River on his excellent presentation this morning. He outlined some of the key concerns we as Canadians face in metro Toronto and in the province of Ontario. I would also like to take this opportunity to speak to the issue in a more global sense.
In the past two decades major economic changes have forced Canada to confront rapidly shifting international, political and economic relationships. The pressures of the GATT, the free trade agreement, and the structural deterioration of our economy demand that Canadians find innovative solutions to international competition.
Unfortunately Canada stands extraordinarily exposed to the challenges of an increasingly global economy. This federal government has adopted a hands-off approach to economic management, leaving Canada open to the free play of international forces.
The situation is now so serious that commentators are beginning to speak of a window of opportunity within which Canada might still be able to recover control over its economy.
The legacy of this government's mismanagement of the economy is staggering. One and a half million Canadians unemployed, of which 400,000 are young people.
Since 1989 more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs have vanished, many never to return. We have seen record personal and corporate bankruptcies. Taxation levels are higher than ever even as the federal government plans are drawn up to abdicate its responsibilities further. We are paying more for less.
I have spoken in this Chamber before on the need for a new contract, a new set of arrangements among Canadians. The federal government should play a key role in defining the economic and social relationships within our society.
Historically relationships among Canadians have been marked by confrontation instead of co-operation. The consequences of this history is lack of focus on goals and a total absence of a national vision on the part of this government.
The reasons for this are not difficult to uncover. Although this government speaks of creating an innovative economy, its own policies are more appropriate to bygone days. Its thinking is obsolete.
As many studies have shown the federal government does not understand the dimensions of global change. The evidence for this is everywhere. The federal government, committed to cost cutting, is unwavering even as the entire economy crashes to the ground.
To this government numbers matter more than people. They matter more than jobs. They matter more than the future of our youth. They matter more than the sacred trust of health care of our seniors and of those who have fallen out of the work force. In the messages Canadians have sent to this government there is a palpable sense of betrayal and breach of trust.
The implications of this public distress of the federal government are extensive. As elected representatives we need to communicate with the people as opposed to talking at them.
But prospects for success in this regard are grounded in the perceptions Canadians have of governments. This government has confused the reluctance of Canadians to subscribe to Tory policies with an unwillingness of Canadians to act.
Canadians are ready to act. Canadians continue to believe that they are the makers of their own future. This is a powerful asset. This asset provides a solid foundation for presenting Canadians with choices about how to upgrade their schools and how to ensure Canadians have world-class skills and motivation.
Canadians can understand and want to understand what needs to be done. However Canadians have become lost in the maze of conflicting messages sent by this government. What people hear are statements of concern from this government, but these statements are coming precisely at the same time that this government is ignoring those concerns. It is yet another example of this government pulling back from its responsibility.
There is a widely shared consensus among business leaders that action to upgrade the skills of the work force is needed now. It is vital that the knowledge and skills of those already in the work force be kept current and competitive. The rapid pace of scientific and technologi-
June 5, 1992

cal advance is shortening the useful life of knowledge gained through formal education or training.
The requirement for continued learning throughout an individual's working life must be recognized as a binding priority. In this important area this government has reduced its commitment and has clearly been left behind by its competitors.
Priority attention is being paid to developing human resources in Japan, Germany, Mexico, United States, and virtually all our major competitors. In this highly competitive age the economic performance of firms depends more than ever on a well trained work force.
The Liberal Party believes that training is not a cost but an investment. Education is an economic development. If we are to compete successfully with Japan, Germany, Mexico and the United States, federal government policies must encourage appropriate levels and types of vocational development within industry. Government support for training must be more actively focused. However, national industrial training programs are not making a significant contribution toward encouraging the employer sponsored training new technologies demand.
Employees in the most competitive firms increasingly require high flexibility skills which are essentially strong learning abilities, a willingness to change and an ability to work in teams.
But these flexibility skills are meaningless if young people do not stay in school. Over 30 per cent of students drop out before completing high school. Since unemployment affects the youth population in particular, this indicates an urgent need to deal with school drop-out.
I am not advocating that the federal government assume jurisdiction over the provincial responsibility of education, but what I am advocating is that the federal government must assume its own responsibility of its role to foster a Canadian controlled economic base. The role must be strong enough to secure Canada's place on the global stage. This requires the government's full participation.
There is little evidence of government commitment to Canadians today. The gulf between the rich and the poor is steadily widening. Record numbers are on welfare and
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unemployment insurance. Over 700,000 children need food banks. The future for young people in this country is bleak. As tuition fees increase and debt loads mount, many despair at finding work at all.
In my riding of York North the effects of less than full participation by government are pervasive and insidious. Government should be a vehicle of opportunity. Instead the citizens of the greater Toronto area feel victimized by this government's policies. Whole communities are at risk.
According to a study by the York Region Service Needs Committee, youth services have been placed on hold as provincial and municipal governments in turn feel the effects of the government's insensitive fiscal stringency.
Funding for counselling young people has evaporated. Unemployment among youth is increasing steadily as retraining courses and job placement programs are unable to achieve results. And this government believes it is doing enough.
The legacy of this belief is the failure of government incentives to improve sustainably the competitiveness of firms anywhere and everywhere in Canada. The focus should not be whether enough is being spent on training. The focus should be on whether Canadians are getting an efficient and innovative training system that spells results.
Clearly the more high wage good jobs Canada has, the better. Accordingly the most important set of policies this government could bring forward would be those that increase the capacity of innovative firms to expand. This expansion would be assisted most effectively through partnerships among all participants.
People are the key to making our economy work. To compete we must have a pool of Canadians skilled in the emerging technologies. We must have communities that attract and can retain these people. We need people committed to pulling together.
Canadians need to believe that they can make a difference. It remains to this government to show Canadians that it is willing to make a difference.


Mrs. Barbara Sparrow (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of National Health and Welfare):: Mr. Speaker, I certainly appreciate the opportunity to participate in this debate today.

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I listened very carefully to my hon. friend's comments. His number one concern seemed to be competition, as well as a well-trained work force and education. I do not believe anybody in this Chamber would argue with that, but I do have a couple of questions.
Over the past few months I have received over 6,000 responses to a survey from the people who live in my riding. Their number one concern is deficit reduction and they want the government to start working on the debt.
With regard to competition, this involves all of us. The hon. member said that people are the key to the issue. It involves not only all levels of government but the agencies, the work force, educational institutions, research and development, and science and technology.
We should be talking to each other with the keen interest of coming out with some resolutions and ideas so that we can move forward together. As we go through the peaks and valleys there is no doubt that Ontario is suffering, but there are other places in Canada that are suffering too.
Competition is the number one priority. We do need a well-educated and well-trained population, but how are we going to go about that?
I chaired the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology and we came forward with a report, I believe in 1988. The government in 1988 was spending just over $5 billion on research and development and science and technology in all federal departments. We also introduced scholarships for science and technology in centres of excellence. That is addressing the problem in one area.
We also made amendments to the UI bill to put money into training for people who were unemployed. I believe the figure is $3 billion or $3.8 billion this year. I think the member is saying that is not enough.
There is only one taxpayer, whether he is paying federal, provincial or municipal taxes. We must deal with raising the funds so that we are able to follow up the resolutions that the hon. member is putting out today. No one is going to disagree that we need a well-educated population. We spend more per capita than other countries with the exception of Sweden. We have to spend more efficiently and effectively.
I would like the member to tell the House exactly who is going to pay, or indeed how we can redirect funding to obtain the goals that he has outlined.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the hon. member for her question. However, it is quite evident that this government speaks a different language than the rest of Canadians.
Canadians need jobs. This government has been abdicating its responsibility towards that duty. If we examine the master plan that the government has presented it does not speak at all to the future. As a matter of fact, a close analysis of the budget would probably show that a very small percentage of the budget is dedicated to areas that speak to the future: namely research and development, education and training for young Canadians.
I personally do not understand how this government plans to lead Canada into the future when Canadians are telling it that we need more commitment to education. They are telling it that if we want to build a high-wage, highly skilled society we need commitments. It cannot simply be words.
The time has come for Canadians to realize, and particularly this government, that we need a new contract, a new set of arrangements between the individual, the community and the government. To that end, I can tell the member opposite that the government's plan is simply not working. Its message is not getting through.
We on this side of the House clearly understand that research and development and education and training are part of our economic development plan. We certainly do not think that we can compete when 30 per cent of our high school students drop out. We know that.
What one must do, as I am sure the member does as a responsible member of Parliament, is do some inner analysis and look within for answers.
This government's policy has failed. The member must admit that. We still have over 400,000 young people who are unemployed. This summer there will be young people who will not be able to continue their education. At the end of the day we must make sure that we give the necessary prerequisites to Canadians.
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Mr. Rene Soetens (Ontario):: Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and participate in this debate, particularly as the member for the riding of Ontario. The debate is about the province of Ontario and the economic policies of the federal government as they impact on Ontario.
I have listened to two previous speakers from Ontario, one from a riding immediately adjacent to mine and one not too far removed from mine. We are operating in very similar economic environments, and there are some problems.
The member for Scarborough-Rouge River talked about some problems as though they were the problems of the federal government, such as municipal taxes. He said that the tax rates are going up because of the policies of the federal government. I would suggest that municipal taxes go up because provincial or municipal governments increase their spending. That is the reason they go up. When large salary increases are extended to teachers in the school board system, which has nothing to do with the federal government, the money must be found somewhere.
When we have an inflation rate of 1.7 per cent and they hand out salary increases of 6 or 7 per cent they must raise municipal taxes to find the money to do so. We at the federal level have recognized the problem of dealing with salaries. Although it was a very unpopular and very difficult thing to do we were able to accomplish some goals so that in the last budget it was possible not only to avoid tax increases but to have some tax decreases.
When the members opposite from Toronto area ridings complain about municipal taxes I would encourage them to talk to their municipal colleagues, and to put the blame where it belongs.
It is the same for provincial responsibility. Two members from the Liberal Party got up and spoke about the problems of southern Ontario as if those problems had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ontario has the highest spending government in Canada. Year over year it increases spending far more than anywhere else in Canada, including places like Alberta.
All I can say is that when we are talking about problems in Ontario in many instances they are directly related to the provincial government.
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The members talk about welfare costs. Yes, there are more people on welfare and I am sorry to hear that. We did not force the provincial government to increase the payout to those receiving welfare over the last two years by 28 per cent. It chose to increase that amount and simply assumed we would write a blank cheque for whatever money it wanted. We did not force it to add all these day care centres on to the schools being built in my riding. It did that and presumed we would write a blank cheque to pay for them.
Those costs are strictly provincial, municipal, and school board responsibilities. To blame them on the federal government, as the two members opposite have done, does a total disservice.
On the other hand, as we in Toronto are impacted by high real estate costs, I did not hear these members say that because of the policies of the federal government we can now get mortgage rates substantially below anything they could ever get in their entire house-buying days, not just in their house-buying days but in mine as well. Mortgage rates are lower.
I come from a constituency that has a lot of new housing under construction. People are either getting their first mortgage or a renewed mortgage and they are all able to get one at a much lower rate than they have ever been able to in the past, unless they happen to be over 50 or 55 years of age and can remember those days when mortgage rates were low and very attractive. We are back down to those levels and there are projections that they may drop even further.
The members talk about the problems young people are facing.
It is funny that the member did not talk at all about the fact that the federal government introduced this 5 per cent down payment policy for Canada Mortgage and Housing. Young people are able to buy housing and take advantage of the very attractive house prices in the Toronto area right now. They can take advantage of very attractive mortgage rates and get into their homes, which is something that I thought the members opposite would say was a good policy.
However, I do not recall hearing them mention that at all. The impact of that housing policy allows for house construction and it creates construction jobs. When people build houses they put things inside those houses

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which are manufactured, such as carpeting, appliances, furniture, lighting, electrical equipment and so on.
They have to buy lawn mowers to cut the grass and other products to maintain the place, and certainly most, if not all, of those products are manufactured in Canada. Guess what? That creates manufacturing jobs. Is it working? I would say that it is.
Not only I say that it is. A recent article in The Financial Post says: "Longer work week may signal an upturn. Manufacturing employees spent more hours on the job in March than they did in the same month last year". That is a good sign.
Are we out of the woods? No, but it is a good sign. It is a sign that things are happening the way that they should happen.
Another member spoke about training funds. One of our members from Calgary got up and made some very legitimate points in response to that request for more training funds. However, what was not mentioned in the debate by the member from the Liberal Party is that since 1990 we have tripled the amount of money going into training funds.
Over $3 billion a year is now spent on training. Much of that is for those who are on the unemployment rolls. Much of that is for those who are unable to find jobs because the skills they have do not match the required skill for the jobs that exist. That is a positive step.
Is it enough? We can always say it is not enough, but can the taxpayers afford it? We must understand that in many instances in order to fund unemployment insurance training programs we must increase the deduction for unemployment insurance. Those who are working will therefore have less to spend because of that problem.
It is a fine balance, but I would say that in the last three budgets we have moved the numbers in the right direction, I think very successfully. Is that all we have done? No, not at all.
In this budget we have recognized the problems that Ontario is facing. We have recognized that there is a need to assist the manufacturing sector to make it more competitive. Therefore we introduced a reduction in the
tax that must be paid by manufacturing because we have increased the capital cost allowance.
That is a very direct benefit to the manufacturing industry of Canada, particularly the manufacturing industry of Ontario. If the provincial government has done nothing else right in Ontario over the last year and a half it has been in office, it did follow the lead that we provided on that capital cost allowance. It has also made a similar move in its budget.
About the only good thing in its budget was that move. The net result was that Ontario based manufacturing is better able to invest in new technology and new ideas. Therefore Ontario based industry can be more competitive. That is positive.
Not only did we do that, but we have made it possible for consumers across Canada to have a little bit more money to spend. I do not want anyone to believe that they are going to be able to buy a Rolls Royce with the tax cut that we put in place, but we did put in place a tax cut for all personal taxpayers in Canada. It helps them pay less tax and therefore they have more to spend.
It comes into effect on July 1 and there will be more to follow early next year. Those were very positive steps. We have recognized the need that exists in Ontario and we have very clearly tried to do something about it.
More than that, we have made some very major steps for small business. We have increased small business loans, which means that small businesses can borrow up to $200,000 guaranteed by the federal government to invest in new technology and new capital equipment. We have also put in place additional small business loan programs. All of those programs have been to provide help in a very difficult time in southern Ontario.
This difficult time we are talking about is not all doom and gloom, as the members opposite are saying. We have done a number of other things to assist not just Ontario business but all of Canada. For example, we spent extensive time in a committee chaired by the member for Mississauga South dealing with financial reforms.
We have now changed the method in which financial institutions operate in this country so that all Canadians, particularly business, can access the trust companies, insurance companies, and credit unions. They have a

whole new pool of revenue and funds that they can access. That is a vety positive move for Canada and Ontario, particularly southern Ontario.
We have seen improvements in house sales this year. We have seen a tremendous improvement in the bank rate. I have talked about the bank rate as it applies to mortgages for individual consumers in this country, but it is not just those people who benefit by this improvement. A low bank rate helps businesses in this country borrow money, and borrow it on a much better basis.
I should add that there are some very good things going on in Canada. One of the problems we have in this country is that we do not have the courage of our convictions, and that is certainly evidenced by all those on the other side of the House. I would like to give a few examples.
Free trade was supposed to be a terrible thing, at least according to some of the comments made by those in opposition. Yet we are into the third year of the agreement and in March a headline in one of the local papers stated: "Trade figures surge in March as exports hit a record high". A record high is positive.
If we examine those numbers we find that the percentage of manufacturing exports as a part of that total was larger than ever before. In fact, we had a record trade surplus with the United States and record exports to the United States in March.
I do not know where all the doom and gloom that the members opposite are talking about is. Those numbers are very positive and they are very positive for Ontario. Manufacturing was part of that.
It goes even further. Another headline states: "Economy shows modest growth for third month". Another states: "We are moving in the right direction as hard hit manufacturing perks up". Manufacturing in Ontario is starting to see real benefits from what has been done.
They say there are no good signs, but there are many of them. In the Algoma region an article about a company called Great Lakes said: "Great Lakes enjoys a healthy year". The article says that the company is doing all right.
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There is a company in Cambridge that found that Canadians were not prepared to accept its products. Jane Martin went into the manufacturing business and found she had to export up to two-thirds of her products to the United States in order to make the business grow. She was able to do it. She was able to do it very successfully because she stood by her convictions and said: "There is a way to do it and the way to do it is to get on with the job. If Canadians do not want to get on with the job, I will sell my products somewhere else". She did and it worked and the company is very successful. That is one example.
We heard how the textile industry in Canada would be devastated by the free trade agreement, at least that is what those opposite said. A textile manufacturer in Cambridge, a city in Ontario, said: "I agree with the free trade agreement. I think it will be good for my business". Canadians said: "You're wrong, the textile industry will be decimated". What did he do? The chap's name is George Hancock and he put in place new technology and new manufacturing ideas. Lo and behold 1991 was his best year ever. He has increased his exports. He is now selling in the United States, which he did not do before. Twenty-five per cent of the company's $7 million revenue in 1991 was generated out of exports to the United States.
There are people who are prepared to be very positive, who know how to do it and who are prepared to get off their duff and get it done. That is what we need in this country.
Members may argue that is not constructive. At least that is what the members opposite try to argue. What are the general benefits of this? I happen to have an article from The International Herald Tribune on Monday, May 25. It is a U.S. publication distributed world-wide. Its headline is: "Canada sets an example". It is the editorial. I would like to read one paragraph of the editorial because it says exactly what we in this party and government have been saying.
Both Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Bush are conservatives and both resist raising taxes. Mr. Mulroney has attacked his deficit mostly by curbing spending. Canadians have complained loudly and bitterly but they re-elected him in 1988. He has kept the squeeze on, although he will have to run again next year.
There have been real costs-
-and we have all identified them.

Unemployment is much higher than in the United States but inflation is only half as high. With the end of the recession the chances for a strong recovery are better in Canada than in the United States.
Mr. Mulroney makes jokes about his low popularity ratings. According to opinion polls only 20 per cent of Canadians like him. A politician's popularity is capital and he has spent his capital well on economic benefits that will come to Canada for many years, regardless of who is Prime Minister.
A foreign magazine, a foreign publication is talking about the strength of the Canadian economy and about how we in this country are going to reap benefits for many years to come. I have no doubt about that in the least.
In conclusion, I would like to point out to the members opposite that there are some problems in Ontario. However, I am convinced that the problems have been addressed and the initiatives we have taken will lead us to future economic prosperity. We are starting to see some of that already.


Mr. Dennis Mills (Broadview-Greenwood):: Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the member for Ontario. I share the community that he represents.
First, I want to say that he said many things in his speech that I agree with. I do not want Canadians to think that we are all doom and gloomers over here because that is not the case. He spoke of low interest rates and we recognize that fact. He also spoke of low inflation rates and we recognize that fact as well.
We are not elected to this House of Commons just to talk for those who are advantaged or doing well. We are also elected to this Chamber to speak for those in our community who are going through difficult times. In your community, my community-and let us forget the number 11.2 per cent because it is a misleading number-right now we have over a half million people not working in the greater Toronto region and area.
In this House it is our responsibility to try to find work for them. The comment saying: "Let us not give a blank cheque to those who are on welfare" might have been a bit cruel. I do not think anyone was suggesting that we give a blank cheque to anyone.
There are a lot of Canadians who understand and realize that there are abuses in the welfare system and abuses in the unemployment insurance system. None of us would support ignoring those abuses. What people are crying for-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret to interrupt the hon. member. It being eleven o'clock I must go to statements. The hon. member will have an opportunity after Question Period.
It being eleven o'clock, pursuant to Standing Order 30(5) the House will now proceed to Statements by Members pursuant to Standing Order 31.


STATEMENTS PURSUANT TO S. O. 31
Mr. Ronald J. Duhamel (St. Boniface):: Mr. Speaker, in October 1990, roughly 20 months ago, the Prime Minister and then Minister of Finance promised at that particular time a review of the goods and services tax on books and reading materials.
It is now time for that particular review to take place.
Most Canadians would realize and acknowledge that the goods and services tax on books has reduced reading in Canada and has driven Canadians to shop for books and magazines outside Canada. It has also harmed our writers, our publishers, our book stores and our libraries. It has also affected students in a very negative kind of way.
Continuing this tax will reduce our literacy, our competitiveness, our productivity and our prosperity. It has also contributed to a loss of jobs. This has been documented.
The GST is a tax on literacy. It is a tax on knowledge. It is a tax on learning.
The Economic Council of Canada has pointed out that there will be another one million illiterate Canadians, functionally illiterate Canadians, out there in the work force by the year 2000.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret the hon. member's time has expired.


BUY CANADIAN PROGRAM
Mr. Ken Atkinson (St. Catharines):: Mr. Speaker, when the announcement was made earlier this year that the General Motors foundry in St. Catharines would close in 1995, the city council reacted by calling on the federal
June 5, 1992

and provincial governments to establish a program to encourage our citizens to buy products domestically.
I am glad to say that the federal government has responded to this resolution and has listened to similar suggestions made during the Community Thlks meetings across the country.
Last month the government launched the "Canada- Buy Into It" program. It is a campaign designed to ask Canadians to take a fresh look at the quality and range of products we produce in Canada.
This is an important initiative. Our manufacturers are responding to competitive pressures to improve the quality of their products, and this program highlights that fact.
I am confident that this initiative will be very helpful in promoting the idea of supporting wherever possible the businesses of neighbours and friends.


HUMAN RIGHTS
Mrs. Beryl Gaffney (Nepean):: Mr. Speaker, on April 3 a prominent human rights activist, Ajit Singh Bains, was arrested in India.
This retired judge and current chairperson of the Punjab Human Rights Organization has been thrown in prison and denied the right to a full and legitimate trial under the rule of law.
Further, the police confiscated valuable documents relating to his human rights work.
This incident has summoned condemnation from the international community. Prior to his arrest three Canadian members of Parliament from all three parties met with Mr. Bains in January in India. It is an insult to this Canadian Parliament that this man was then arrested.
The World Sikh Organization's genuine concern for the human rights of all peoples cannot be ignored. The carnage continues in the Punjab, in China and in many other areas of the world.
I urge the Secretary of State for External Affairs to voice Canada's disapproval in the strongest possible terms to the Indian government about the continuing
violations of human rights and to call for the immediate release-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. member for Don Valley East.


FEDERAL BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT BANK
Hon. Alan Redway (Don Valley East):: Mr. Speaker, most jobs are created by small business but most small businesses cannot get bank loans.
If we really want the banks, the trust companies or the life insurance companies for that matter, to provide small businesses with lines of credit and loans for inventory rather than just fully secured asset loans then the government must be prepared to lead by example.
Unfortunately the lending policies of the Federal Business Development Bank are exactly the same as those presently employed by the chartered banks.
We cannot expect the banks, the trust companies or the life insurance companies to lend to small business if the government's own lender of last resort, the Federal Business Development Bank, will not.
At present the FBDB's aid to small business seems to be based on the theory that if we hold their head under water long enough they will develop better lung control.


VETERANS AFFAIRS
Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg TVanscona):: Mr. Speaker, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Dieppe raid on August 19,1942. In April I was honoured to be among those who visited the Canadian cemetery at Dieppe while in France for the 75th anniversary of Vimy Ridge.
Today I would encourage the government to consider the following request made by the Dieppe veterans.
First, the commemorative stamp for the 50th anniversary should be issued prior to August 19 rather than in November as now planned.
Second, POW veterans from Dieppe should be made eligible for the veterans independence program.
Third, post-traumatic stress disorder should be recognized as a pensionable disability.

And last but not least, Dieppe veterans should finally receive an appropriate medal for their part in the raid.
Meeting these requests would be a fine way to mark the 50th anniversary of this tragic chapter in Canadian history.


THE ENVIRONMENT
Mrs. Shirley Maheu (Saint-Laurent-Cartierville):: Mr. Speaker, world leaders are meeting in Rio de Janeiro to discuss our global environment. The nations of the world must work together to preserve and protect our global heritage: the environment.

The government should do everything in its power to lead by example on issues such as biodiversity and global warming. We must help companies develop new technologies that will take pollution out of the production process.
Canada must take this opportunity at the world summit to be a global leader. The government must urge all nations to fight stratospheric ozone depletion, pollution of our oceans and global deforestation. It is our common heritage and we must protect it.



Mr. Maurice Tremblay (Lotbiniere):: Mr. Speaker, World Environment Day is an opportunity for us to demonstrate our determination to preserve our environment. We expressed that determination in Canada's green plan, to which all Canadians contributed. Published in December 1990, the green plan is our action plan for meeting the challenges of sustainable development.
More than ever before in our history, we are focusing our attention and efforts on the environment. We know that our economic prosperity depends on a healthy environment. We know too that our success depends on working together, here in Canada and with the other nations of this world.
While our country is celebrating Canadian Environment Week, more than 150 heads of state are meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the earth summit. This conference will be a major step toward achieving our common objective to make sustainable development a reality for this generation and generations to come.


EMPLOYMENT
Hon. Bob Kaplan (York Centre):: Mr. Speaker, I want the House to hear about a young constituent of mine, 17-year old Nick Iozzo, who has just learned a lesson about the Mulroney government.
Last winter Nick saw an ad for a summer job with the Department of National Defence to get musical and military training in the reserves. He is a musician and he wants a career in music so this was right up his alley.
He applied for the job. Lengthy auditions were held, and he and 34 other youngsters were hired for this job. He and his family were very happy and he assumed he would be doing it for the summer.
However, a few days before he was supposed to report for work he was telephoned and told the job was cancelled because of Department of National Defence budget cuts.
Nick wrote to me and asked me to help him now that it is too late to get another job. He wonders how anyone can trust this government, and frankly so do I.


CALGARY SOUTHWEST
Barbara Jane (Bobbie) Sparrow: Mr. Speaker, in April I sent a survey to the constituents of Calgary Southwest asking them for their views and their concerns, and to rate in order of priority the most important issues.
I want to thank the 6,000 plus people who took the time to return the survey. Eliminating the deficit is the number one issue. Close behind the people of Calgary Southwest believe both health and education must be a majority for all levels of government.
June 5, 1992

Property rights should be entrenched in the Constitution. The Senate must be reformed. Elected, yes, many want an equal number of senators from each province but abolition has strong support.
One constituent said:
I fully support free trade, GST, deficit reduction, and economic
restructuring but you had better frame this card because I doubt you
will get many like it.


THE FAMILY
Mr. Jim Karpoff (Surrey North):: Mr. Speaker, this week Canadians learned about the existence of a Tory family caucus which has taken credit for the influencing of the many negative cabinet decisions on policies affecting families.
The reality for families today is that in the 1950s it took an average of 45 hours a week of paid work to support a family. Now it takes an average of 65 to 80 hours. Today two-parent families make up the largest group of families living in poverty. Poverty rates among two-parent families would more than double without the incomes of wives.
New Democrats know that Canadians want a government not rooted in the past but one which will recognize and accept the transition families are going through and seek to provide policies which address the new roles of families; a government which is committed to full employment and which provides training and other necessary support programs; a government committed to improving access to non-profit, universal, quality, affordable child care.


CO-OPERATIVE HOUSING
Hon. Andre Ouellet (Papineau-Saint-Michel):: Mr. Speaker, I would like to draw the attention of the House to the fact that the Index Linked Mortgage Program to assist the development of co-operative housing projects has been abolished, and that as a result, the number of co-operative housing units will be reduced by 80 per cent. The program, which the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation qualified as low cost and high-performance, should not be cut.
Mr. Andre Gariepy, president of the Cooperative Loge-Uni, Mrs. Mariette Dunn, secretary, Mr. Guy Simard and Ms. Youance, Desin, Thiboutot, Bedard, Gagne and Simard, all members of the same housing co-op in my riding, have made it clear that they totally disapprove of these regressive measures by the Conservative government, and that is why I ask the government to reverse its decision.


HARBOURS
René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, for six years the barge named The Prince Edward Island has been tied up at the pier in Whitby harbour. This derelict vessel has been an eyesore, a possible safety hazard and a possible environmental hazard.
It has taken a concerted effort, particularly by the town of Whitby and its municipal council but also by the province and the federal government, to get rid of this thing finally. Just the other day it was towed out of Whitby harbour. The unfortunate part of it all is that it is going some place else.
I call on the federal government to bring forward regulations to prevent this kind of thing from happening at any harbour anywhere in Canada again.


MANITOBA UNEMPLOYMENT
Mr. Rod Murphy (Churchill):: Mr. Speaker, today's unemployment statistics indicate that northern Manitoba has 24.8 per cent official unemployment. This is the highest of any region within any province of Canada. Yet this federal government has refused to renegotiate the northern development agreement, has refused to provide funding for the port of Churchill, has refused to do anything with regard to the hydro development, and has refused to provide adequate training for native Canadians.
My statement in this House is to the effect that the government is ignoring a very important part of this country. It has no concern for the youth. It has no concern for native Canadians. It has no concern for women.
Why does it continue to be the government when it will not do anything to help the people?

June 5, 1992


UNEMPLOYMENT
Mr. Don Boudria (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell):: Mr. Speaker, the unemployment rate in May 1992 was 11.2 per cent, up 2 per cent from last month. This is the highest unemployment rate since November 1984.
In my own region in eastern Ontario the rate has gone up by three-tenths of one per cent over one month and
2,000	more people are unemployed this month than last month.
Here is what the government had to say about unemployment on October 25, 1991 when the Minister of Finance said-and I know it is unfair to quote him, using his own words-as follows:
I ask the hon. member to consider the fact that the merchandise trade balance is up, housing starts are up-on an annualized basis and unemployment rates are coming down. The indicators to which the hon. member refers, such as bankruptcies, have a certain amount of lag time. I would ask him to take that into consideration.
Things are going better.


CATHOLIC TEACHERS' FEDERATION
Mr. A. H. Harry Brightwell (Perth-Wellington-Waterloo):: Mr. Speaker, at this time in our unity debate and at a time when Canadians who are modest and self-effacing run themselves down quite a bit, I thought I would read a message from my riding office about something that is happening in Canada.
My assistant just talked to a teacher from St. Patrick's school in Sebringville, Ontario. He tells me that the Catholic Teachers' Federation is celebrating Canada Day by having all school children in Catholic schools across Canada, hundreds and thousands of schools and thousands of students, sing O Canada at twelve noon. This was on Tuesday, June 2. Then they are going to shake hands, hug, and generally celebrate the joy of living in this great nation.
My staff member ends by saying: "I don't know if anybody in Ottawa knows this, but I think it is great". Until now I don't know if anybody in Ottawa did know of it, but I too think it is great.


WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY
Mr. Lee Clark (Brandon-Souris):: Mr. Speaker, today we celebrate World Environment Day, a day for all Canadians to demonstrate their commitment to a healthy environment.
More than at any previous time in our history we are focusing our attention and efforts on the environment. Most of us know that our future, both our physical well-being and our economic prosperity, depends on a healthy environment. We know too that our success depends on working together to achieve a common goal.
That is what we are hoping for at the earth summit in Rio de Janeiro this week and next. Heads of government and over 30,000 people in total are attending this important conference at which the Canadian delegation will be playing a leading role.
The green plan, Canada's national agenda for protecting and restoring the environment, has been suggested by the United Nations as a model for other countries to follow in designing their own strategies. The partnership principle which is achieving positive results in Canada can be made to work on a global level as well.
If we work together we can make a difference.


CHILD EXPLOITATION
Mr. A1 Horning (Okanagan Centre):: Mr. Speaker, one of the worst crimes that faces our country is that of child exploitation.
Next week Mrs. Monica Rainey, the head of a group called CACE, Citizens Against Child Exploitation, will be in Ottawa to present over 10,000 signatures of support from my constituency of Okanagan Centre.
People in a position of trust who exploit children should never be allowed to return to those positions again. Our laws need to be changed to make that happen.
Mrs. Rainey will be meeting with various ministers and MPs from all sides of the House. I would urge all members of Parliament to offer their support to her in her efforts to put an end to this terrible abuse of children.
June 5, 1992



ORAL QUESTION PERIOD


Mr. John Nunziata (York South-Weston):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Employment and Immigration.
The unemployment statistics released today are staggering: 11.2 per cent, the highest rate since this government took office in November 1984. There are 1,536,000 officially unemployed with hundreds of thousands more who have given up hope and given up looking for a job. Seven provinces now have double digit rates of unemployment.
This government must take responsibility for the devastating situation we are in today. When will the minister finally admit on behalf of his government that the government does not have the slightest idea how to put Canadians back to work? When will he finally admit that the unemployment rate is a direct result of the policies of his government?


Hon. Bernard Valcourt (Minister of Employment and Immigration):: Mr. Speaker, earlier this year members opposite were calling for lower interest rates. They were calling for a lower dollar. They were calling for a 5 per cent down payment for mortgages. Two weeks ago they called for more section 26 training in Canada.
Today we have a lower dollar, lower interest rates and $150 million more for training and work sharing, but we still have problems and we acknowledge that.
What is important is for the hon. member to pay attention to the real facts that happened this month.


John V. Nunziata: People have lost hope.


Bernard Valcourt: The member says: "People have lost hope". How does he explain that over 50,000 people returned to the labour force this month? That is an encouraging and positive sign for our economy.


John V. Nunziata: Mr. Speaker, there are faces behind the massive numbers of unemployed in Canada. The hardest hit are women and youth.
The unemployment rate among women rose to 10.3 per cent; 20,000 women lost their jobs last month. Youth
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unemployment is at 17.8 per cent. There are 114,000 fewer young people employed this year than in May of last year. Among young men the rate is 20.3 per cent. Students looking for work this summer have little or no hope of finding summer jobs.
What positive news does the minister have today for the youth and women of Canada who are desperately searching for employment?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, when the hon. member talks about women-and in his earlier question he referred to 1984-he should also add that since 1984 it is close to one million; 890,000 more women are working today than in September 1984 and 71.5 per cent of the jobs created for women since September 1984 are full-time jobs. That is an improvement over the era when his party governed Canada.
He is asking: "What are we doing for those people today?" He seems to imply that we take solace in the fact that people are unemployed. Not at all.
We are working on the fundamentals of the economy being right, not on having a quick-fix solution, throwing money at the problem, giving them make-work projects and then having them on welfare again. We are working to create solid, sustainable, long-term jobs and this is what the budget of my colleague, the Minister of Finance, will achieve for Canada.


John V. Nunziata: Mr. Speaker, this minister is not hoodwinking Canadians into believing that this government is providing the necessary leadership in order to put people back to work.
It is clear that this government does not know what it is doing on the unemployment front. It is paralysed. It is ad libbing its way through the worst economic crisis since the Depression.
He referred to the budget. Let us look at the budget the Minister of Finance handed down just a few short months ago, in February.
In that budget, the Minister of Finance said that the unemployment rate this year would average 10.3 per cent. In January, it was 10.4 per cent; in February, 10.6 per cent; in March, 11.1 per cent; in April, 11 per cent;

June 5, 1992
Oral Questions
and in May, 11.2 per cent. It is obvious that the minister is out of touch with reality.
Given the fact that the minister based his budget to a large extent on assumptions that the unemployment rate would average 10.3 per cent this year, does he still stick to his target? Does he realize in order to meet his target, the unemployment rate will have to average 9.7 per cent for the balance of the year?
Is the minister prepared now to stand up and to admit that he was wrong in his budget of February 25? Will he tell Canadians what his government expects the unemployment rate to be for the balance of this year?


Hon. Don Mazankowski (Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance):: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member will recognize that we have acknowledged the unemployment figures are higher than we would like, obviously because of the weakness in the economy and because of the fundamental restructuring that is taking place.
The hon. member should be encouraged by the fact that the labour force grew this past month by some 56,000. There were 31,000 new jobs created.
What is more encouraging and is really a reflection of the policies of the budget, some 41,000 new jobs have been created in the manufacturing sector. That is precisely what we attempted to do in the budget. We tried to address that particular sectoral weakness, namely the manufacturing and processing sector.
Obviously, with the economy being weaker than we had projected in the budget, the hon. member is aware of the fact that Statistics Canada adjusted the figures for 1991 downward by almost one half of one per cent. This has a reflection upon the growth prospects for 1992.
I ask the hon. member to give the budgetary policies a chance to work. The clear example that 41,000 new jobs have been created in the manufacturing sector is proof positive that the policies of the budget are in fact taking hold.


Hon. Herb Gray (Windsor West):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
He says he wants Canadians to give more time for his policies to work. The minister has been saying for months now that his policies are going to turn the economy around. If he is right, why has the unemployment rate gone up and not down? Why has the number
of people working fallen by 25,000 in one month alone? Why has the number of full-time jobs dropped by
221,000	since last May?
I ask the minister: In the face of these terrible numbers, where are the jobs? Where are the jobs? Why does he not do more right now to get people back to work?

Where are the jobs? Why doesn't he do everything that has to be done to put Canadians back to work immediately?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, there are 12.207 million Canadians who are currently working. The hon. member compares the statistics with 1984. In 1984, there were 10.849 million Canadians working out of a work force of 12.331 million. Today we have a work force of 13.7 million. The hon. member is wrong in one of his submissions. The fact of the matter is the labour force has grown this past month by some 56,000. There have been 31,000 new jobs created. There have been 41,000 new jobs created over the last two months in the manufacturing and processing sector. That is a specific area we addressed in the budget.
Today's Ottawa Citizen quotes one-year mortgage rates have now reached a 25-year low. Canada is not alone in having difficulty with the unemployment situation. The United States of America has just recorded its highest unemployment levels since October 1983. It is a worldwide problem we are trying to address in the most effective way possible.


Herbert Eser (Herb) Gray: Mr. Speaker, in talking only about the number of people working, the minister and his government are in effect writing off the
1.5	million people who are out of work. Surely, they deserve more from this minister.
There is no doubt that the unemployment rate is up, not down. The number of full-time jobs has fallen, not increased. I cannot believe that after these tragic numbers announced today the minister is essentially giving us the same answer he has been giving us for months. Why can he not say something new to at least give some hope
June 5, 1992

to these 1.5 million people in this country who want to work?
Why can the minister not figure out that his policies are not working? Why can he not commit today to making job creation his first priority and not his last?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, it is one of our major priorities. The fact that 41,000 more people are working in the manufacturing sector today than there were in the last two months is proof positive that it is working. The fact that there were 31,000 new jobs created in the month of May is proof positive that our policies are working.
The fact that the Minister of Employment and Immigration just announced an additional $150 million for job training and skills upgrading is again proof positive that this is a priority for us. Why does the hon. member not listen to the answers, rather than reading his rhetoric from questions he prepared in advance.


Mr. Nelson A. Riis (Kamloops):: Mr. Speaker, my question is directed to the Minister of Finance. He will remember well that back in 1984 when his party took office, it decried the tragic situation in terms of the unacceptably high levels of unemployment, the crisis in unemployment created by the Liberal administration before that was up in the 11 per cent range. Well, we are now back to 1984 levels of unemployment.
May I suggest rather than this exchange which may be seen as some sort of statistical mud wrestling in terms of figures, that we admit there is a crisis facing our country in terms of the high levels of unemployment.
Will the Minister of Finance say he takes this seriously and that he plans to call an economic summit of finance ministers across the country to deal exclusively with finding ways and means of reducing the high levels of unemployment in Canada?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, ministers of finance meet on a regular basis. We have had first ministers' meetings to deal with the economic issues.
Perhaps the most appropriate way to help resolve the problem is for the hon. member to talk to his socialist
Oral Questions
friends in the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. They moved in to take up the slack that we provided in terms of reductions both for the corporate and private sector and for individual Canadians. We lowered taxes, we did not raise them.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, back in the 1930s, R.B. Bennett admitted that his Conservative policies of the day were wrong and he changed course half-way through the 1930s. Unfortunately, it was too late.
Before it is too late now in the 1990s, my question for the Minister of Finance is this. He knows that there is a willingness across the country to introduce a municipal infrastructure program that will create thousands and thousands of jobs. That can be done. He has the support of governments across the country.
Will he now invest in the future of those people who are unemployed and give them a chance to work and get them off unemployment insurance and welfare?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I repeat for the hon. member's benefit, we addressed in the budget a specific area that needed to be addressed. That was essentially the manufacturing and processing sector and improving the business climate, the small business climate and adding some stimulus to the economy by bringing down the burden of taxation. These are all positive things.
A positive indicator is clearly the fact that there have been 41,000 new jobs created in the manufacturing sector. There have been 31,000 new jobs created in the month of May. The labour force has grown by 56,000.
The hon. member wants to go on a spending binge. He wants a huge infrastructure program. I know the position of the hon. member's party is that we should print money to do that job. That is not an option as far as I am concerned.


Nelson Andrew Riis: Mr. Speaker, R.B. Bennett had the courage to admit his government had made an error in judgment, that it had brought in policies that were not working. Unfortunately, it turned course too late in the day.

June 5, 1992
Oral Questions
The Minister of Finance knows by the figures this morning that we have literally hundreds of thousands of highly educated Canadians with post-secondary degrees who are unemployed. There are people with Ph.D.s driving cabs.
The Minister of Finance knows that one of the engines of job creation in this country is small business and tourism. Would he call together the ministers from across the country and territories responsible for small business and tourism to find ways and means of creating jobs in those two critical sectors so people can get to work?


Hon. Tom Hockin (Minister of State (Small Businesses and Tourism)):: Mr. Speaker, I am delighted that my hon. friend and his party have discovered tourism and small business. I have to say that this is a very important part of the Canadian economy.
As a result of this, we have through the WD, which would interest him, increased the amount of money that the federal government is going to put into stimulating both small business and tourism.
I have to say though that the NDP government in British Columbia has refused to co-operate with us on the WD money for tourism. We have put forward a tranche of funds and we have asked British Columbia to join us. To date, it is the last province to join us in having a tourism program which would also help small business.
I urge him to take his message to the provincial government in Victoria.


Ms. Catherine Callbeck (Malpeque):: Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to the Minister of Employment and Immigration. The unacceptable national unemployment rate of 11.2 per cent pales in comparison to the rate in Atlantic Canada.
In eastern Canada alone there are now 10,000 more people looking for work than there were in April. In my province of Prince Edward Island the unemployment rate is over 19 per cent; in Newfoundland it is over 20 per cent.
Why does the minister refuse to understand that his government's lack of leadership in generating jobs is causing many easterners to lose hope?


Bernard Valcourt: It seems to me that the hon. member is
interested only in scoring political points. Why does she not look at the programs in place in Atlantic Canada?
I was in New Brunswick and announced with Premier McKenna a $282 million program to help welfare recipients and unemployed Canadians in New Brunswick get off welfare and into productive jobs. We are working with Newfoundland and Labrador, with P.E.I. and Nova Scotia under ACOA and under unemployment insurance programs to try to help those people acquire skills to occupy the new jobs.
We can be concerned about the fact that yes, in a recession the last thing to turn around is unemployment. Looking at the figures for this month, this is happening. It is not a negative sign that over 50,000 people have entered the labour market this month. It is a positive sign. With the proper policies and the fundamentals in place, we can look to much better days.


Catherine S. Callbeck: Mr. Speaker, my supplementary is for the same minister. This government is not only willing to leave easterners out to dry, it is also willing to accept the fact that the unemployment rate among women has risen sharply.
In fact, since January, 82,000 women lost their fulltime jobs. Canadian women deserve better, Canadian youth deserve better and Canadians in general deserve better from this government.
Why will this government not come forward today with an infrastructure program that could provide hope for Canadians across this country?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, as was indicated in the budget, we are undertaking a number of initiatives via the private sector that will help stimulate the economy in certain key areas, for example, in the transportation sector and airport development. The hon. member is aware that we are actively pursuing the Prince Edward Island fixed-link which would be a very important transportation connection and would also create jobs.
We also indicated we would be exploring with the provinces the possibility of upgrading our national highways system which is part and parcel of a four-year study undertaken by the federal and provincial ministers of transport. These are all issues that are undergoing active consideration.
June 5, 1992

I repeat to the hon. member that it is important to get to the fundamentals. A long-term low interest rate is the basis for long-term sustainable growth in bringing inflation down and keeping it down. That has had a very positive effect in terms of increasing our productivity and of increasing our profit margins. That is the key to reinvestment and the creation of jobs in the future.
Those are the fundamentals that have to be in place. We are going through that painful restructuring and adjustment process. Clearly, there are positive signs that are occurring, for example, the merchandise trade and the improvement in the job picture. As the budget policies take hold, further evidence of that will be seen.


Mr. Alfonso Gagliano (Saint-Leonard):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of employment.
Statistics Canada just confirmed 91 per cent of Canadians in a recent poll think the recession is not over. Unemployment in the Montreal area rose to 13 per cent in May. The rate also went up in Chicoutimi, Jonquiere, Quebec City, Trois-Rivieres and Sherbrooke.
Why does the government continue to pursue economic policies that have quite simply failed to create jobs for the residents of major cities in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, I think that the hon. member should say clearly and precisely what he means.
The government has implemented economic policies to create a climate that would lead to the creation of permanent jobs. If the hon. member argues that we should use the approach his party cherished for decades of throwing money at problems by creating fictitious jobs with taxpayers' money, that is not the solution we are considering.
If the hon. member would look at the real situation resulting from the economic policy, the lowest interest rates in 20 years, the lowest inflation of all industrialized countries, all these factors will lead to private sector investment that will result in permanent employment in the long term. That is what Quebecers want.
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Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, this government was elected in 1984 with promises of immediate job creation. After all this time we are in an unacceptable situation.
In May, a thousand jobs were lost in Sherbrooke and another thousand in Trois-Rivieres. In the Montreal area alone, 12,000 jobs were lost in May, Mr. Speaker.
Will the government finally accept the program put forward by the Liberal leader of working with the municipalities to give employment to all these 14,000 families that lost their jobs in May alone?


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, I would like the hon. member to pay attention. When he tells us about the Liberal Party's famous plan, I remember that in January, he submitted this Liberal proposal to us. Under it, $125 million more would have been spent to train Canadians and give them the skills they need to hold new jobs.
We rejected it because we invested $450 million more in this key sector of the economy, namely our workers' skills. We rejected the Liberal proposal out of hand in favour of something much better, to the benefit of Quebecers and all Canadians.


PRIVATE FAMILY TRUSTS
William Alexander (Bill) Blaikie: Mr. Speaker, in 1972, the Liberals eliminated the federal inheritance tax and brought in a 21-year tax exemption for private family trusts. That 21 years is almost up, with these trusts to be finally taxed on January 2, 1993. Estimates of how much money exists in these trusts run as high as $70 billion.
I want to ask the Minister of Finance if he would show he is serious about reducing the deficit and the equitable sharing of reducing that deficit and commit now not to extend this exemption so that the tax is collectable on January 2, 1993, from these trusts and goes either toward eliminating the deficit or toward the kind of job creation programs that have been suggested in the House today.

June 5, 1992
Oral Questions


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I know that the position of the New Democratic Party has always been to tax Canadians into submission. What is important-


Some hon. members:: Fair taxes.


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Well, that has been their policy and we have seen evidence of that in the last three budgets that have been brought down by the socialist governments. They believe in tax, tax, tax and to heck with the economic impact.
The hon. member has to be aware that any tax regime has to be competitive with the global situation. We have been trying to bring about through tax reform a tax regime that would allow us to compete more effectively and to provide incentives for the private sector to invest and to spend, and to create new jobs and new job activity.
It is within that context that we have approached the whole issue of tax reform.


William Alexander (Bill) Blaikie: Mr. Speaker, I ask the Minister of Finance why it is okay to tax the middle class to death, as this government has done through its changes in tax reform, the icing on the cake being the GST. Yet the minister gets up and weeps these big crocodile tears. He does not want to tax the Bronfmans to death. He does not want to tax all these other large wealthy families in Canada that benefit from these trust laws.
I say to the minister he cannot have it both ways. He cannot ask Canadians to take him seriously about the deficit and refuse to do something about this kind of wealth.
Will the minister commit today to not extend this Liberal tax exemption for the wealthy and make that money available either for deficit reduction or for the renewal of Canada's municipal infrastructure rather than just giving this billion dollar gift to some of Canada's wealthiest families?


Donald Frank Mazankowski: Mr. Speaker, I know that the position of the New Democratic Party would be to do away with the capital gains exemption. That would be a further burden on small business, a further burden on farmers, kill all incentives to generate wealth, kill all incentives to generate new jobs.
I can give the hon. member this assurance. As long as I am finance minister, I will attempt to put in place a tax regime that will be competitive and reflective of the reality of the global marketplace.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of employment.
Over a year ago the government received a report on the shortcomings of the Canada student loans programs which it had commissioned. The report stated that cost allowances for students have not been updated since 1984 and that the allowances fall significantly short in most categories.
Given the fact that so few students will find work this summer, what is the government prepared to do in advance of the next school year to address the double crisis of student unemployment and inadequate student funding.


Hon. Robert de Cotret (Secretary of State of Canada):: Mr. Speaker, there is no question that a number of deficiencies in that particular program have been raised. I believe the hon. member opposite has raised some of them.
We have been moving very aggressively to come to grips with the issue. The program is a shared program between the provinces and the federal government. It is also under the administration of the banks.
We have reached agreement with the provinces with a view to first of all increase the weekly loan limit to reflect the increases in costs since 1984. We have also talked about the possibility of removing the 3 per cent administration fee to give the students a greater opportunity.
We started negotiations with the banks about two weeks ago to see how we could put in place a new regime that would make the system more efficient.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, the minister's response is unacceptable. I think it is an insult to the over 300,000 students who would like to return to school but cannot find work this summer.
My question is for the minister of employment. The minister of employment must understand by now, given the figures released today, that we are dealing with a national crisis in relation to young people in this country. What is this government going to do before this House
June 5, 1992

rises to help young people find work so they can return to school in the fall?


Hon. Pierre H. Cadieux (Minister of State (Fitness and Amateur Sport) and Minister of State (Youth) and Deputy Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, I think everybody here will agree with the fact that the situation is difficult, particularly for the young people.
That is why this government is striving through its prosperity initiative, its budget, et cetera, to make sure the fundamentals are there so the youth of our country have the hope to find the necessary instruments to guarantee their future.
That being said, my colleague the minister of employment has put into place the appropriate programs to deal with those youth who are out of school. Through the Challenges program we have put in place the necessary programs and moneys to deal with those students at risk to make sure they do return to school. We believe the most fundamental of the instruments they need for the future is an education.
I am also encouraged by a recent report from Statistics Canada that says this summer more students will be able to find employment than last year. We have put more money into the program in order to facilitate that.


JOB TRAINING
Mr. Jim Peterson (Willowdale):: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister of employment.
On Thesday he said Canada's small and medium-sized businesses are "doing nothing to help train workers".
The minister knows that the Canadian Federation of Independent Business study shows that last year these businesses spent $9.6 billion for on-the-job training. When is this minister, who has cut government funding for training, going to stop blaming business for his own failures?


Bernard Valcourt: I do not know what they take Canadians for, standing up in the House and telling people we have cut money for training when in fact the funds earmarked
Oral Questions
for training have gone up by $450 million. This is chest le comhle.
As for his small business reference, I have not said that small business is doing nothing. I am comparing what Canadian corporations are doing in terms of training in Canada. If we have to compete in this world, we have to compare ourselves to our competing partners. American corporations spend twice as much as Canadian corporations to train people. The Japanese spend five times as much as Canadian corporations to train people and the Germans spend eight times as much. That is what I am referring to.
If he cares to go and talk to the small business people in Canada, he will find they agree they have to invest more in the people.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, let me clear this up. This minister has not increased government funding for training.


Bernard Valcourt: That is a lie.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: He said it is a lie.


Mr. Speaker:: It is one thing to have disagreements but if somebody shouted out "It is a lie", I wish the member would just get up and withdraw it and let us get on with Question Period.


Bernard Valcourt: Mr. Speaker, I withdraw.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: This minister has simply diverted unemployment insurance funds which are contributed entirely by workers and employers to training. It is not government funding. It is out of their pockets.


Mr. Speaker:: The hon. member is putting a question. I am sure the House will give him the courtesy to be heard.


James Scott (Jim) Peterson: The Canadian Federation of Independent Business wrote in a letter to the minister and I quote:
The ignorance displayed by the minister is unbelievable, and his
attempts to blame someone else for training difficulties is
unconscionable.
I ask the minister, who said business does nothing to help train workers; if he will apologize for this gross misrepresentation.

June 5, 1992
Oral Questions


Bernard Valcourt: No, Mr. Speaker, I will not apologize for Canadian workers who are seeing private sector companies not investing enough in their skills in Canada because skills are the success of a competitive economy.
No, I will not apologize because German corporations spend eight times more than Canadian corporations, the Americans spend twice as much and the Japanese spend five times as much. What they agree on is that they have to spend more to help people acquire the skills needed in a competitive world.
I hear the rhetoric of the member. I think we should find another club. It will be the same-


Mr. Speaker:: I think we have to proceed.


WHITBY HARBOUR
René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, for six years a boat was anchored in Whitby harbour, a boat that was derelict, unsightly, unsafe, a possible environmental hazard, among other things. As of this week it has finally been towed out of Whitby harbour to some other unknown destination.
Will the Minister of Transport come forward with regulations that will prevent a vessel of this type being tied up along any pier regulated by the Department of Transport in Canada ever again?


Mr. Lee Richardson (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Transport):: Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question.
The department is very aware of this issue. I think his constituents have been well represented on this issue. The member has expressed the concern a number of times.
The concern here is that in cases like this the government is constrained to ensuring the vessel in question is safe or does not present on environmental danger. There are very real constraints to our ability to order a private owner to move a vessel.
I can only say that the government has looked into the matter. The vessel has now been removed through the
impetus and efforts of the hon. member. We are reviewing the regulations with a view to resolving these matters more quickly in the future.


WESTRAY MINE
Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, yesterday in Question Period my leader read from the CANMET study with regard to Westray and pointed out that with regard to the ventilation section and methane that the test does not give one confidence.
The minister in response said that the studies were outdated. Yet in 1990 in the professional magazine Northern Miner it referred to the inspection of Westray and said: "The potential for spontaneous combustion underground has not been clearly assessed".
The minister in the House has said that the government was not necessarily concerned with safety. It perceived that to be a provincial responsibility. I would ask the minister this: If you are making an economic investment, why would you not look at this information about the danger signals and realize that there is a real potential that your investment is in danger?


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker, the truth is that with every investment and every underground coal mine that has ever been done, there has always been the danger of methane. That exists for all coal-mining investments.
What is different here is that there were a host of studies to try to assess whether the whole project would be economically and technically feasible.
The CANMET review is a review of all of those studies: the Dames and Moore study, the AMCL report in March, 1988, the Placer reports, the Hacquebard review, the Kilbom review and all other technical studies that led up to the decision by the company to go ahead with the mine. All of those reviews looked at the questions to which my hon. friend refers. The reviews all made it clear that the methane problem was either a small problem or a moderate problem or it might be more than that. All of them were looked at. They had to be included as part of the technical review. The fact is that they were and the decision was made by the mine to go ahead because the technical studies summarized by
June 5, 1992

the CANMET review made it clear that the mine was technically feasible.


Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, I come from a mining area. The minister was in that area very recently. Yes, all coal mines are dangerous. However, a mining area that has cost over 240 deaths in the previous period is obviously much more dangerous.
Therefore, the government knew it was not just an ordinary coal mining area.
My supplementary question is this. In December 1990, I tried to get the correspondence between ministers and between officials on this very aspect by tabling a question on the Order Paper.
That correspondence was not tabled in the House yesterday. The government has the ability to table that information. If it will not table it in this House, will it guarantee that all of that correspondence-absolutely all of that correspondence-will be made available to the various inquiries?


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker, there are three separate points to the hon. member's question.
The first point essentially is why, given the tragedy that occurred, did the government guarantee a loan to have the mine start in the first place. Those reasons are clear to the House just from the questions today about unemployment. That part of Nova Scotia had very high unemployment, and there was a provincial economic development priority. I know his party believes in economic development in the regions where there is high unemployment. That is one reason why this particular mine was looked at.
We studied very carefully the possibilities of doing it as long as it was viewed as being technically feasible. In fact, that is what all the documents made clear yesterday. The CANMET review of all the technical studies says this mine is technically feasible, and then it made some other recommendations as well.
In terms of communications beyond what I have tabled in the House yesterday, our role as a financial guarantor of the loan puts us into a position of being concerned with it from a technical point of view and from a financial
Oral Questions
point of view. There will be some more documents tabled along that line as well.


BANKING
Alan Redway: Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.
The minister is aware of the fact that in an effort to provide the necessary financing for Canadian exporters to help create jobs in Canada, the Royal Bank has applied for a banking charter in China. He also knows that approval of that banking charter is contingent upon the minister signing the application for the Bank of China to have a Canadian banking charter.
Does the minister intend to sign the application of the Bank of China? If so, when?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his question.
The Minister of Finance has forwarded a letter to the Bank of China, giving it approval in principle for establishing a bank here in Canada. Our banking regulations require that the Bank of China now must advertise over a 30-day period establishing a Schedule II bank here in Canada.
There is a 30-day waiting period following that for comments on its application. Following that, it would apply for certification to the Minister of Finance.
The letter was forwarded, as I said, April 30 by the Minister of Finance. The procedure is well under way.


WESTRAY MINE
Mr. David Dingwall (Cape Breton-East Richmond):: Mr. Speaker, the failure of the Government of Canada to exercise prudent and due diligence in the Westray coal mining project has unfortunately resulted in a national disaster.
The government's own documents as tabled yesterday recommended: "The Department of Industry, Science and Technology consider more in-depth geological mining process, economic evaluation of the type undertaken by commercial lending institutions on projects of this magnitude".

June 5, 1992
Points of Order
Did the minister follow the advice of his own agencies? If not, could the minister explain to the House what possible reasons he could give for not following that advice?


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is quite right. There were three recommendations from the CANMET review.
First, that the Department of Industry, Science and Technology confirm that the contractual arrangements with the Nova Scotia Power Corporation were in place and assess the significance of failure there. That of course we did because without that contract, there would not have been any cash flow to speak of.
The second recommendation was that Westray had to demonstrate and disclose its efforts to secure commercial lending.
The third one is the one he is quoting, that the Department of Industry, Science and Technology consider a more in-depth geological mining processing economic evaluation of the type undertaken by commercial lending institutions on projects of this magnitude.
Remember that our role in this was purely financial. We were guaranteeing a loan. We did further studies of a technical and financial type in order to make sure that our guarantee would be reasonable.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the minister for indicating to the House that further studies and the advice of the department were followed. We look forward to getting that information in the weeks ahead.
My specific question to the minister is this: On page 5 of the agreement consummated by the Government of Canada, Curragh Resources Inc. and the Bank of Nova Scotia, it says the lender-
-made specific disclosure to the minister of the risks associated
with the project in a letter dated September 14, 1990.
I ask the minister responsible if he would explain to the House the nature of those risks, both commercial and otherwise, and if he would be so kind as to table the contents of that letter in the House of Commons so that all members will have an opportunity to review its contents.


Thomas Hockin: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that the hon.
member, with 2,000 pages of evidence and documentation, will not have found all of it. But, in fact, the analysis of those questions is in the documents that I tabled yesterday.


PRESENCE IN GALLERY
Mr. Speaker:: I wish to draw to members' attention the presence in the gallery of the Hon. David Warner, Speaker of the Ontario Legislative Assembly.


Some hon. members:: Hear, hear.


POINTS OF ORDER
Rodney Edward Murphy: Mr. Speaker, the Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism in response to my question said that he was going to be tabling more documents with regard to the Westray situation. Yesterday in Hansard the government House leader indicated that there really is no relevant information missing.
Mr. Speaker, we were given 2,000 pages yesterday and we were told by the government House leader that there was no relevant information missing. We got an answer today from another minister during Question Period that there were more documents to come.
I would simply ask this: Does the government have another package of information that is coming on Westray? If so, when are we going to get it?


Hon. Harvie Andre (Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, we are getting into debate here. The hon. member should have completed my comments from yesterday where I said that "the total documentation would be several feet high and require a forklift". In fact, there is no attempt to keep anything inaccessible to him or anybody else. They will be made available in the library room at Industry, Science and Technology.
The minister of state for small businesses said today that if there is a line up for certain pieces of documentation in the library, we will certainly table those so that they will be accessible rather than forcing everybody to go over there. But the object is to have-


Rodney Edward Murphy: You didn't mention the library.
June 5, 1992


Harvie Andre: I wish the hon. member would do me the courtesy of accepting what I am saying and not interrupting me and not questioning my motives, which is so much his habit. The reality is that all of the relevant information will be made available.


David Charles Dingwall: Mr. Speaker, I do not wish to impugn the motives of the government House leader, but I do want to inform him of the procedure which was set up by the minister of state for small businesses for obtaining the documents, particularly the ones he refers to as being seven-feet high.
Yesterday members of my caucus who went to try and get those documents found that copies were made available to media representatives when, in fact, our colleagues and our research people had to read the documents and thereafter request a Xeroxed copy of the information that they were looking for.
I am not suggesting that there is a double standard here. But I am wondering if the minister could take under advisement my suggestion that this matter be looked at and perhaps a way found in which to expedite the relinquishing of that information so that it is made available, not just to representatives of the media. Because this is a major issue affecting the country, we think that it ought to be made available quickly and promptly to all members of Parliament.
I mention that in the spirit of trying to get all of the information.


Harvie Andre: Certainly, Mr. Speaker, that is the intent. What might have happened is that a number of members of the media had put in access to information requests. As you know, in that regard there is a cost associated. The applicant pays for the duplicating costs and so on. There is no intent to try and put obstacles. On the other hand, there is a very real concern that we may be saddled with several hundred thousand dollars worth of bills for duplication and so on if it is thrown wide open. I can assure the hon. member that I will communicate the facts he just informed me of and see what we can do to make sure that the information is accessible.


Mr. Kindy:: A point of order.
Routine Proceedings


Mr. Speaker:: Perhaps the hon. member would hear the Chair first.
The exchange that has taken place is, I hope, helpful. I have to remind the House that is getting well beyond a point of order.
Is the hon. member for Calgary Northeast on the same point?


Alex Kindy: No.


Mr. Speaker:: I will hear the hon. member.


RECORDED DIVISIONS
Alex Kindy: Mr. Speaker, I wanted a clarification from you concerning the votes of June 3, in particular vote 150. The question is of pairing. I see that some members were paired with people who have died. This may be an error. It happens that Mr. Malepart is appearing as being paired with somebody.
The question of pairing as such concerns me because Erskine May, 21st edition, defines pairing as a "system that enables a member to absent himself or herself, and to agree with another member that he or she will be absent at the time of the vote. By this mutual agreement, a vote is neutralized on each side of a question, and the actual size of the majority is not affected".
I see that members on vote 150 are paired and have voted and are on the same side. I would like you to clarify for me and maybe for other members and for the public generally just how it works.


Mr. Speaker:: I understand that the Deputy Speaker has addressed the House on this point. I will consider very carefully the intervention of the hon. member for Calgary Northeast and report back to the House if that is appropriate. In any event I will be in touch with him.



ROUTINE PROCEEDINGS


Hon. Mary Collins (Associate Minister of National Defence and Minister Responsible for Status of Women):: Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege to table today in accordance with Standing Order 32(2) the report of the Minister's Advisory Group on Defence Infrastructure, in both official languages.

Routine Proceedings
I would ask that this report be referred to the Standing Committee on National Defence and Veterans Affairs for its consideration.


HOUSE MANAGEMENT
[Stage Direction]
43RD REPORT OF STANDING COMMITTEE PRESENTED
Alfonso Gagliano: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present the 43rd report of the Standing Committee on House Management, on the broadcasting of the proceedings of the House.
[Editor's Note: See today's Votes and Proceedings.]


CRIMINAL CODE
Ms. Barbara Greene (Don Valley North) moved: for leave to introduce Bill C-348, an act to amend the Criminal Code (gun control).


Mr. Speaker:: Pursuant to Standing Order 68(2), the motion is deemed adopted.


Barbara Greene: Mr. Speaker, the purpose of this bill would be to establish a system that would enable the authorities to know the number and kinds of unrestricted firearms that are being acquired by Canadians after the coming into force of this act and to trace those firearms when they are subsequently disposed of, lost or stolen.
The police forces throughout this country and many, many groups in the community are asking for this kind of firearms registration system.


Mr. Speaker:: Ms. Greene moves that the bill be now read the first time and printed.
Pursuant to Standing Order 69(1), the motion is deemed adopted.
Bill read the first time and printed.


PETITIONS
Mr. Don Blenkarn (Mississauga South):: Mr. Speaker, I call for unanimous consent of the House to move a motion:
That notwithstanding Standing Orders 132 and 140, the petition for a private bill from Green Shield Prepaid Services Inc. presented on Monday, June 1, 1992, and reported by the Clerk of Petitions TUcsday, June 2, 1992, be deemed to have been filed within the required time limit and received by the House.


Mr. Speaker:: Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to move the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Mr. Speaker:: The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.


Mr. Jim Edwards (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of State and Leader of the Government in the House of Commons):: Mr. Speaker, I think you will find there is unanimous consent for the following motion:
That four members and two staff members of the subcommittee on acid rain of the Standing Committee on Environment be permitted to travel to Washington, D.C., June 16, 17, 18, 1992 in relation to its study on Canada-United States acid rain reduction programs.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

James Scott (Jim) Peterson: Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by 50 people from right across this country.
The government is proposing to add to its GST by taxing the printed word. These citizens protest this move as much as they protest the GST. This is even worse. It strikes a blow at learning and the transfer of information.
June 5, 1992

I commend my colleague from St. Boniface for the efforts he has made in this area.


Mr. Speaker:: I would remind hon. members that remarks at the presentation of a petition should be brief and should not get into the realm of debate.


Hon. Warren Alltnand (Notre-Dame-de-Grace):: Mr. Speaker, I have a petition signed by 50 Canadian citizens asking Parliament to rescind the goods and services tax on books, magazines and newspapers.
In their petition they point out that the dissemination of the printed word is a cornerstone of democracy. They also point out that prior to the goods and services tax, going right back to 1867, there has never been a tax on books in Canada. They ask that this tax be rescinded.


Catherine S. Callbeck: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to present this petition today signed by many Canadians. It is a petition concerning the tax on reading. They indicate that since Confederation there had not been a tax on books, magazines and newspapers until as we know, this government brought in the GST on reading. They call upon Parliament to have this tax cancelled.


Mr. John Manley (Ottawa South):: Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions that I wish to present this afternoon.
First is a petition from constituents from Ottawa South asking the Government of Canada to consult with the people of Canada by way of a national referendum on matters of constitutional amendment.
Presumably legislation adopted in this House yesterday will contribute to safisfying the request of these petitions.


John Paul Manley: Mr. Speaker, I also have a petition, signed by residents of the riding of Ottawa South, who call upon Parliament to consider the possibility of reinstating the Court Challenges Program which gives all Canadians equal access to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Routine Proceedings
Your petitioners deplore the fact that the government has abolished the Court Challenges Program.


Donald Alex Blenkarn: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour of presenting a petition signed by a great number of people from Mississauga objecting to the purple and white trim on the Canadian colours worn in the Olympics last winter in France and praying that the government makes sure that Canada's team be represented in the Canadian colours of red and white in Spain this summer.


Shirley Maheu: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to present a petition pursuant to Standing Order 36 from many people from the provinces of Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta reminding this government that since Confederation we have never taxed books. They are begging and humbly asking to reaffirm this historic principle embodied in tax-free status for the printed word by returning the zero rate in GST legislation.


Ron J. Duhamel: Mr. Speaker, I have a petition from many Canadians submitted to me. It states: "Don't tax books, don't tax reading. It is a bad policy, bad for business and it is bad government. It is contradictory, completely so, to our fundamental democratic principles. Books and reading materials have never been taxed in this country." The petitioners ask that it be abolished and be abolished now.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I continue to receive petitions from Canadians who are asking the government to reconsider its position on the Court Challenges Program and pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have the opportunity to present these petitions to the House.


Kenneth David Atkinson: Mr. Speaker, I would like to present a petition signed by residents of St. Catharines asking for a referendum of the people binding upon Parliament to accept or reject constitutional amendments proposed by the government.

Routine Proceedings VICTIMS OF VIOLENCE


Derek Vincent Lee: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to present a petition signed by over 700 Canadians from British Columbia, Alberta, and various municipalities in Ontario including Oshawa, Mississauga, Orillia, Pickering and Barrie.
The petition articulates the sorrow, pain and loss on the death of Helen Groat, a victim of violence. They note the increase in murder and manslaughter by individuals on early release.
The petitioners call upon Parliament to restrict the leniency and the issue of day passes and early release so that all of us may be better protected.


Edward Allan Horning: Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I have the honour to present two identical petitions with a total of 729 names, signed by constituents from my riding of Okanagan Centre, requesting the Government of Canada conduct a binding referendum on all constitutional amendments.


Beryl Gaffney: Mr. Speaker, I have two petitions to present today. One is that the Government of Canada has seen fit since Confederation to apply a zero rate of tax to magazines, books and newspapers and now proposes to include them in the GST, in fact it has imposed it.
The undersigned 100 petitioners from across Canada humbly pray and call upon Parliament to reaffirm the historic principles embodied in the tax-free status for the printed word by returning the zero rate in the GST legislation and regulations.


Beryl Gaffney: The second petition is from 41 Nepean petitioners with regard to the recent budget, where the government eliminated the $100,000 lifetime capital gains exemption on real estate purchased after February 1992. These people again call upon Parliament to reinstate the $100,000 lifetime capital gains exemption as it certainly affects people of the middle class and their savings.


Mr. Joe Comuzzi (Thunder Bay-Nipigon):: Mr. Speaker, I have the honour today to present a petition on behalf of the Croatian community of Thunder Bay whereby they implore the government to keep using whatever means are possible in order to bring some peace and harmony to their troubled homelands.


Mr. Bob Kilger (Stormont-Dundas):: Mr. Speaker, I have four petitions to present to the House today, the first being from Canadians from the province of Manitoba.
The petitioners humbly pray and call upon Parliament to amend the Income Tax Act such that child related benefits and deductions for child care are fair and equitable to all family structures based on financial need, irrespective of child care choice.


Robert (Bob) Kilger: Mr. Speaker, the second petition is signed by residents of Cornwall and other eastern Ontario communities in support of the parents of Nina de Villiers and I am sure I could add, regrettably, of others since.
Therefore, the petitioners request that Parliament recognize that crimes of violence against the person are serious and abhorrent to society and that it amend the Criminal Code of Canada, the Bail Reform Act of 1972 and the Parole Act accordingly.


Robert (Bob) Kilger: Mr. Speaker the third petition again is signed by residents of Cornwall.
The petitioners call upon government to recognize that a referendum of the people be binding upon Parliament to accept or reject constitutional amendments proposed by the government.


Robert (Bob) Kilger: Mr. Speaker finally, I have a petition signed by Canadians from the province of Nova Scotia.
The petitioners humbly pray and call upon Parliament to reaffirm the historic principles embodied in the tax-free status for the printed word by retaining the zero rate in the GST legislation and regulations.


Mr. Lyle Dean MacWilliam (Okanagan-Shuswap):: Mr. Speaker, I have eight petitions with the names of 326 people from communities throughout Okanagan-Shuswap. The petitioners are from Armstrong, Vernon, Falkland, Kamloops even, Enderby, Lumby and Salmon Arm.
They are concerned about the plans to divert a portion of the North Thompson and to sell that water to the California market. They are asking the government to state categorically that it will not permit our fresh waters to be dammed and diverted into the U.S.A and to state that Canadian waters are not for sale.


Lyle Dean MacWilliam: On another issue, I have a petition signed by a number of residents from the Vernon area in the Okanagan-Shuswap asking the government to hold a referendum upon the constitutional amendments as proposed by the government.


QUESTIONS ON THE ORDER PAPER
[Stage Direction]
(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk)
James (Jim) Stewart Edwards: Mr. Speaker, Question No. 293 will be answered today.


Mr. Milliken: What were the production and publication costs of the government's report entitled "The State of Canada's Environment"?


Hon. Pauline Browes (Minister of State (Environment)):: Production and publication costs for The State of Canada's Environment and accompanying highlights document and brochure amount to $1.5 million over a four-year period. This amount includes design, editing, typesetting, printing in both official languages, contracts for non-goverment authors, as well as nearly 100 external peer reviewers.
Supply
The report is being sold and distributed by the Canada Communication Group, which comes under the Department of Supply and Services Canada. The sale price is $29.95 plus shipping and taxes.


Mr. Speaker:: The question as enumerated by the parliamentary secretary has been answered.


James (Jim) Stewart Edwards: Mr. Speaker, if Question No. 228 could be made an Order for Return, the return would be tabled immediately.


Mr. Speaker:: Is it the pleasure of the House that Question No. 228 be deemed to have been made an Order for Return?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.


Mr. Boudria: Which government department and agencies are currently developing computerized information systems and for each project not yet operating as intended, what was the original completion date, the revised completion date, the original cost estimate, the actual expenditures so far, and the revised cost estimate?
Return tabled.


James (Jim) Stewart Edwards: I ask, Mr. Speaker, that the remaining questions be allowed to stand.


Mr. Speaker:: Shall the remaining questions stand?


Some hon. members:: Agreed.



GOVERNMENT ORDERS


[Stage Direction]
The House resumed consideration of the motion of Mr. Lee (p. 11449).
[Stage Direction]
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The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: There are seven minutes remaining in questions and comments to the hon. member for Ontario. The hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood had the floor.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, just a short preamble of my comments before we went into Question Period.
I indicated parts of the member's speech where I quite frankly agreed with some of the statements he had made.
As I pointed out, we are not here just to assist those who are advantaged. We are also challenged and it is our primary responsibility on this side of the House to speak for those people who are going through difficult times in all communities across Canada where there are people unemployed.
There is room for the Government of Canada to do more work with the 1.7 million entrepreneurs in this country. The greatest hope for job creation lies within that sector of the economy. I believe that with low interest rates and low inflation, it improves their position to participate in bringing people off the welfare and unemployment insurance rolls.
This is what I would like to ask the member. Does he not share the view of many that there is a real problem with confidence in that particular sector of our economy, namely the small and medium-sized entrepreneur? We are always being challenged here to present ideas. Does he not think that it would be a good idea to review the standing committee that put forward employment opportunities for the 1980s? This report was produced in 1982, I believe. The Minister of State for Finance and Privatization was part of that committee. There are 186 ideas within this report that the government could review or pick and choose. They are all ideas on how to put Canadians back to work.
What is wrong with reviewing that? What is wrong with taking some of these ideas and using them to lever the entrepreneurship of this country so that they can be motivated to take a chance on the 1.5 million Canadians who are out of work? If each company hired one person in the next 60 days we would have a much better economy on our hands and we would reduce that $35 billion to $40 billion draw which is all taxpayers' money. It would even give us some opportunity or option to reduce taxes.
Why does the government not see if it can use that force to put Canadians back to work?


René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the questions from the member for Broadview-Greenwood.
The member is certainly correct in talking about low inflation and low interest rates being of benefit to the small business community and the entrepreneur. He should also of course agree that low inflation and low interest rates are also significant benefits to the unemployed and those on fixed incomes, whether they are senior citizens or others. Inflation is the worse curse that they face. There are some real positive things and I think the member has acknowledged some of that in his comments.
I am sorry I am not personally familiar with this 1982 report. I guess the report that the member refers to talks about many opportunities. From 1982 to 1992, if I heard the minister correctly today, there are over 2 million more people employed in the work force. That is not to say that we should be satisfied at that level. I am sure that specific ideas could come out of that. This could be combined with some of the ideas that are in the budget this year such as improvements to accessing funds for small businesses and the re-regulation of the financial industry to allow entrepreneurs access to funds. There are many things that can be done.
In conjunction with the member, I look forward to the government coming forward and saying: "Look at item number 10 in that proposal and let's do it". It could also be number 11 or number 12.1 suspect that many of them have already been implemented.


William Warren Allmand: Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Ontario in his speech this morning criticized the remarks of my colleague from Scarborough-Rouge River who pointed out that the policies of this Conservative government had forced tax increases on the municipalities and the provinces. The hon. member for Ontario said that if municipalities had increased taxes then that was their doing and we should condemn them and not the federal government.
I want to ask the hon. member this. Does he not realize that when his government, the Conservative government, cut unemployment insurance benefits, as it did a few years ago in Bill C-21, and when it made it more difficult to qualify for unemployment insurance and when it shortened the benefit period and made other
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cuts, that it was in fact shifting the burden of the unemployed to a great extent to the municipalities in Ontario and to the province? If you have a large number of people who are unemployed, and they do not have unemployment insurance, there is no place else they can go to keep them alive but to the welfare system. The welfare system is financed in Ontario by the municipalities with the help of the province. Either the member did not know what he was voting for when he voted for Bill C-21 a few years ago or he did it and is now concealing the fact. The fact of the matters is that thousands of people who would have been eligible for unemployment insurance and covered by the federal program are not now covered by that federal program. Since we do not believe in letting people starve to death the only recourse for those people is to go to the municipalities.
I was on the committee that studied that bill. We went to Sudbury, Ottawa, and Toronto. Every municipality said: "Do not do that because you are going to increase our tax burden. You are going to put a big burden on us to take care of the unemployed".
I ask the hon. member how he can say that the policies of his government were not responsible for that enormous shift to those municipalities in Ontario for the unemployed? Nobody else can take care of them if they do not have unemployment insurance.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. member has one minute to answer that question.


René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I could use the whole day.
The fact of the matter is that in the unemployment insurance scheme the higher the unemployment insurance rate in a particular region, the higher the benefit time available to individuals. Throughout Ontario there are tremendous programs through unemployment insurance. These include many training funds which help keep people off the welfare rolls.
It was not the federal government that increased the rate of payment to welfare recipients by 28 per cent. I should point out, contrary to what the member says, that it is the federal government that helps fund the program with 50 per cent of the dollars. It is the provincial government that spends it willy-nilly as though there are no controls required.
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There is a substantial difference in outlook between me and the member. I guess I would take our approach as being a far more constructive approach to the issue of taxation in Ontario.


Mr. Dan Heap (TVinity-Spadina):: Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to have this opportunity to speak to the motion of the hon. member for Scarborough-Rouge River. I commend him and his caucus for putting forward this motion.
The motion is:
That this House condemns the government for its negligence
toward the worst social and economic difficulties faced by residents
of Ontario in modern times.
We all know the signs of trouble in Ontario, as well as in other parts of this country. Some previous speakers have given some of the statistics on the matter. Some speakers following me from all sides will quote statistics. Therefore, I do not wish to go heavily into the statistics of the trouble signs. The main one is the increase in unemployed as a percentage to 11.2 per cent. This is one of the very highest rates that we have had in my lifetime since I was a boy during the Depression.
Worse than that, factories have been closed and even dismantled at twice the rate they were during the last recession in 1981-82. Those jobs are not going to return if good times-as they are called-return. They are gone. The factories are gone. They have been dismantled. There is a little bit of employment among some of my friends in the millwright union for dismantling factories, but it is not what they would rather do. They would rather be building factories.
In Toronto, on College Street where I live, there are homeless and there are beggars. People come to my office who have been quite demoralized by experiencing the downturn in the economy as it has affected them, their families and their friends.
We have seen a youth riot in Toronto. We have seen gang fights and general signs of considerably demoralized youth. This includes the drop-out rate in the high schools.
There are some things that can be done, even by the provincial government, which the Ontario government is trying to do. It has borrowed money to restart some jobs. For example, there is highway construction and the building of 20,000 units of non-profit housing. The president of local 183 told me a couple of weeks ago how

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pleased he is that at least 5,000 of the 12,000 members of his union are working.
He is very pleased to see 50 construction cranes around the city. He says that if it were not for the non-profit housing program of the Ontario government hardly any of that would be happening.
There are 20,000 day care spaces to be opened under the government's program. The government has also taken a risk, a well considered one and I hope it will be a successful one, to prevent the Algoma Steel mill in Sault Ste. Marie from closing. When the crisis broke the provincial government moved in quickly and organized a task force including all stakeholders: the community, the union, the company, the banks, the provincial government and the federal government.
I must commend the federal government because, although it delayed long enough to cause considerable worry, it nevertheless joined with the Ontario government in a program to subsidize older workers' early retirement so that the people of Sault Ste. Marie do not lose all their young men and women by forcing them to leave Sault Ste. Marie to find work.
However, I do not want to dwell on the remedial programs that may be used, that may not be used, that should be used and so on. I want to deal with a large fundamental problem that needs federal action, which is the impact of the free trade agreement and of the proposed North American free trade agreement in terms of destroying jobs.
The federal government must cancel the existing agreement and cease negotiations on the present North American agreement until it can be fundamentally reorganized along different lines so that it does not put all the burden of change on working people.
I want to quote from a recent report of the city of Toronto's economic development committee to the city council on the-


An hon. member:: Communist.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: The hon. gentleman across calls Mayor Rowlands and various other people communists. I will leave it to him to sort it out with them.
This is a report of the city of Toronto. It will be considered in a couple of weeks at a meeting of the city's committee on this issue. It concerns the impact of trade liberalization on the city of Toronto.
There is not enough time to go through the whole report because it is a very detailed report based on many other documentary surveys. For example, it points out that there has been a great shift of head offices from Ontario to the United States. Pillsbury has moved and Avis has terminated 16 of its head office positions. Head offices in the city of Toronto experienced a 16.2 per cent drop in employment from 1989, following the free trade agreement, to 1991, a loss of 7,254 jobs. This is happening in the head offices of our country.
Another segment of industry that has been very hard hit is the food processing industry. There is a great deal of food processing in and close to the city of Toronto and metro Toronto, though not as much as there was. In the period from 1989 to 1991 the food processing industry lost 21.4 per cent of its jobs in the city of Toronto and 8.6 per cent in metropolitan Toronto as a whole.
Many of those industries moved to the United States, partly as a consequence of a wave of mergers and American takeovers of industries like UNICO which then either shut them down or seriously reduced them.
The Ontario Food Processors' Association which hopefully supported the free trade agreement in 1988 is now pointing out that although the federal government promised transitional assistance-it was recognized there would have to be transitions in the industry and the federal government promised transitional assistance to those industries negatively affected- this assistance has not been forthcoming, at least not so far as the association is concerned.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is of the opinion that the free trade agreement has not presented the industry with the open markets of the United States that were promised. This is widely understood. It has even been acknowledged by some of the people who helped to negotiate the agreement, such as Mr. Ritchie, that the Americans have not kept their side of the bargain and it looks as if they are going to be less
June 5, 1992

willing to keep their side of the bargain. This has had a very serious effect on this industry.
The union also wants to know what has happened to the promised restructuring and retraining assistance that was promised by the Prime Minister during the last election.
One of the sections of the city planning department, the Workers' Information and Action Centre, has pointed out that Kellogg shut down its Etobicoke plant in June 1991 laying off 380 workers. VS Services of Toronto announced in its annual meeting in February that 1991 was the worst year for the food processing industry in its history. It cited the effect of the free trade agreement on closings as one of the causes.
Nobody pretends there has not been a recession around the world. However, the rate of job loss in manufacturing in Canada has been 23 per cent over the last three years and the rate of job loss in the United States for the same period has been only 6 per cent. We have lost jobs at four times the rate of the United States.


John Horton McDermid: If you want to know why read the Conference Board report.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: That is largely because of American takeovers and American ownership, and their preference for shutting down plants, such as Inglis in my riding.


An hon. member:: Read the facts.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: There will be an opportunity to ask the hon. member questions after his speech. I would like to hear it and I hope other members will give him the opportunity.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: In the film, video, and audio industry from 1989 to 1991 there was a 7.7 per cent drop in employment in the city of Toronto and a 3.6 per cent drop in metro as a whole.
In the radio and TV stations there was an 18.4 per cent drop from 1989 to 1991 in Toronto, and a 9.8 per cent drop in metro as a whole. There are many industries that are not listed here. Only a few of the key ones were picked for emphasis.
In the publishing industry other than newspaper publishing, newspapers seem to have done well, there was an 11 per cent drop in employment from 1989 to 1991 in the city of Toronto and 5.5 per cent in metro as a whole.
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Obviously the city of Toronto, being the centre of many of these industries, has felt a greater impact than metro as a whole.
The Canadian Printing Industry Association has estimated that 3,000 jobs were lost across Canada which were directly attributable to the free trade agreement. It maintains that the industry's current unemployment rate in metro is 14 per cent following a loss of 3,700 jobs. It also points out that the annual trade deficit in printed products has jumped by 214 per cent since 1989. That is a very big jump in the trade deficit in print between Canada and the United States over two years, to the disadvantage of Canada.
It went from $106 million to $331 million and it expects that with an annual growth rate this deficit will reach $485 million by the end of this year. This is the industry association speaking.
It also points out that another way in which government policies have hit this industry is the unexpected end of postal subsidies and the imposition of the goods and services tax on magazine publishers. These actions together increased the publishers' mailing costs by 40 per cent.
Magazine revenue dropped in 1991, and of course the result of that is staff reductions.
There was a study by Price Waterhouse & Company in 1991 that showed that Canadian book publishers have dropped an average of 6 per cent each year since the free trade agreement and that four publishers have gone bankrupt.
There was also a study by Employment and Immigration Canada that suggests that the economic picture of this sector would be further eroded under the proposed North American free trade agreement. It says that Canadian printing plants are expected to lose further market share to American competition, and says that investment may even be diverted to Mexico.
The industry which has lost the most has been the fashion, or garment, industry. It is called both. It dropped from 1989 to 1991 by 45.8 per cent. It lost almost half its employees in the city of Toronto. In metropolitan Toronto it lost 27 per cent. That is a very serious drop.
Many of these workers who live in Spadina are recent immigrants with origins in China, Portugal, or the West Indies who have not been able to find other work. When

June 5, 1992
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their place of employment closes they go to other places and they are not open, not hiring, or they are closing.
When I talked with some of the industrialists last year they blamed it on the goods and services tax, the high dollar that was hindering Canadian producers from getting the benefit of the tariff reductions, and on the high interest rate and the unwillingness of banks to lend to their industry at all.
One of them has moved his operation from Toronto, Ontario to Buffalo because he is getting a subsidy of $10,000 per job, as well as other subsidies from the state of New York, to move there to produce his jackets and sell them in Canada and in the United States.
Another one has taken to sourcing many of his dresses that he manufactures in Mexico or in Taiwan through the United States. He has cut his work force from about 100 to about 35, just to take account of small shifts in the demand.
These are people who need retraining, and as far as I can find out from them, the unions and the employers concerned, almost none of them have been able to get effective retraining.
The Canadian Apparel Manufacturing Association called 1991 one of the worst years on record for the Canadian apparel industry. This is its generalization. It applies much more widely than to just Toronto. According to the Apparel Manufacturers and Marketing Association of Ontario, the Consumer and Corporate Affairs figures show that the goods and services tax is having a disproportionately large impact on clothing prices in Canada.
The figures show that the GST added 1.1 per cent to the over all consumer price index. However, for clothing, footwear, and accessories the GST boosted the price by 4 per cent for men's clothing, 5.5 per cent for women, 5.1 per cent for girls, and 6 per cent for boys. It has hit this industry quite hard.
This is not directly a result of the free trade agreement, but it is related to the associated policies of this government.
It also points out that in 1991 the value of imports from the United States grew by 18 per cent while retail sales of Canadian-made apparel shrank by 13.4 per cent. This
relates to the introduction of American-owned chain stores and supplies from American sources, or from overseas sources through the United States, in good part.
Part of the effect of the destruction of almost half of the jobs in Toronto in the garment industry, which we have had for over a century is a great increase of home work. People, nearly all of them women, are pressured by poverty to take work home rather than working in a factory, which they would prefer. The wages are often around $2 an hour for piece work. This is even with their children sometimes helping and even with providing their own sewing machine, light and power and so on. What they can earn often does not go much above $2 an hour. This is vastly below anybody's concept of a minimum wage.
There are an estimated 2,000 of these home workers in the city of Toronto and they are definitely among the extreme working poor.
What we need is a basic re-examination of what has been done to the Canadian economy by the free trade agreement, by the goods and services tax and by the high interest rates. These rates have now come down, but during the two years following the free trade agreement, they added to the problems. There is also the high Canadian dollar which lost markets in the United States that might have been gained by the tariff reduction.
We believe the government should reconsider this and seriously consider giving notice to cancel the free trade agreement. It should break off negotiations for the North American free trade agreement and introduce policies that would help to revive the Canadian manufacturing industiy under independent Canadian ownership.


Donald Alex Blenkarn: Mr. Speaker,
I was wondering if the member had taken a look at the March trade figures where we had the largest trade surplus ever in our history. It was $12.8 billion. Of that $12.8 billion, $9.8 billion went to the United States- those terrible Americans-with the free trade agreement. Again, this was a record export to the United States. Where does he get the idea that the trade agreement is somehow destroying us?

He mentions the fact that the duties are less for goods and garments going to the United States. They are less. He mentions the fact that there are competitive problems. That is true. However, manufacturing in Canada increased in productivity by 1 per cent last year and 4 per cent so far this year. The Wood Gundy report says it will increase by at least 8 per cent this year and 12 per cent next year. We only increased the number of manufacturing jobs in the months of April and May by 40,000. This is the largest increase of any element in unemployment. Manufacturing is all of a sudden disappearing, but jobs are increasing.
I am wondering whether the member for Trinity-Spa-dina has been there too long and has not been out looking at what is really happening in the world and Canada. We are in a restructuring. We are in a global recession, yes, but we are in an industrial restructuring where we have improved the efficiency of the economy with the goods and services tax. We have improved the efficiency of the economy with our free trade agreement and with our trade agreements generally. We have improved efficiency and business confidence. The Conference Board of Canada suggests that business confidence is up 16.1 per cent.
Where has he been? There may be problems, but part of those problems are NDP problems in the province of Ontario where legislation introduced yesterday would make it the roughest, toughest labour legislation in all of North America.


Dennis Joseph Mills: The world.


Donald Alex Blenkarn: The world. Here is the member for Trinity-Spadina, a member of the New Democratic Party, who ought to turn his heat on Queen's Park. He should make sure that Queen's Park withdraws that stupid legislation and lets Canada build, grow and trade again.


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Mr. Speaker, there have been quite a few statements and very few questions, but I can take some of the statements as implied questions.
As for the last one about the Labour Relations Act, it is not true that it is harsher than in other jurisdictions. In fact, in many ways, it is less harsh, even as proposed, than certain parts of legislation in other parts of Canada such as Quebec and, in general, in the countries of Europe which are doing better economically, or at least as well as North America. They have a much stronger labour
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movement and they have a much stronger recognition of the obligations of employers to their workers.
It has been recognized, even by Bill L'Heureux who is the president of Hees Inc. that there has to be a balance of co-operation. He has commended the Premier of Ontario and his government for their conduct toward industry. He is not a nobody. He represents a great deal of investment. The way he spoke publicly on this matter indicates that he sees good prospects of co-operation between Ontario investors and the Ontario government in the creation of jobs.
The hon. member may want to disagree with Mr. LHeureux. He is free to get in touch with Mr. LHeureux and give him his views. Perhaps he will learn something from Mr. LHeureux.
On the matter of the recent trade surge, it remains to be seen how that translates into the employment and well-being of people in Canada. Unemployment in Ontario increased by 17,000 in the month of May. It has often happened that the over-all wealth of a country, in the usual way of measuring it, increases, but it does not get distributed where it is needed which is to the majority of the people. If the majority of the people do not have the means to feed their children well, if they have to go to food banks-as many have to in Ibronto-and if they do not have the means to get their children educated, then the economy will suffer. I think these are things that are being overlooked by the government of this country.


Alex Kindy: Mr. Speaker, I was listening with interest to the speech and the comments by the hon. member for Mississauga. I have a small comment to make.
I have a friend who is a big developer in Mississauga. I had occasion to talk to him.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I would hope the hon. member would direct his questions to the hon. member for Trinity-Spadina as he was the one who was speaking.


Alex Kindy: I had a discussion with this friend and he told me that even though he was strong financially and he built 180 houses, he could not sell 20 because there is a depression in Toronto. Here is a person who has been involved in development for a long time and he feels that Canada is moving toward a depression.

June 5, 1992
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Would you like to comment about it?


Daniel James Macdonnell Heap: Mr. Speaker, it is a very general question, but I am not sure I would say we are moving toward a depression.
A couple of weeks ago I heard somebody suggest on the radio that Canada had slipped back into the recession. I was startled because I never noticed that we left the recession. It must have happened at three o'clock in the morning when I was asleep.
I would say that we are in a depression. I hear these rosy predictions by the members opposite and the Minister of Finance, but they are being proven false by experience. I think we are in something like the 1930s again. It is something we have not had for 50 years.


Mr. Bob Speller (Haldimand-Norfolk):: Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to speak today about the economic crisis facing Ontario and facing my riding of Haldimand-Norfolk. Unfortunately we have an NDP government that has been running this province. As some hon. members across the way said, it has brought in some drastic legislation which I think is ill-timed and will ill-equip Ontario to compete globally and internationally in the years to come.
Ontario is at an economic crossroads. As a province and a country we face many challenges ahead. We all know that our economy is undergoing extensive restructuring as world economies become increasingly integrated. We see the effects around us every day and the reality is that we cannot compete.
As the same time, we are told by this government that we must become more competitive. However, this is without any real suggestions as to how we can go about doing this. Traditionally, we have placed heavy emphasis on our natural resources. In fact, our resource industries have been the cornerstone of our economy. We remain the leader of all industrialized countries in exporting unprocessed natural resources.
However, in recent years there has been a downturn in resource-based industries and Canada faces increasing competition from less-developed countries. We have yet, as a country or a province, to seriously deal with this situation.
The manufacturing sector, which is also an integral part of Ontario's economy, is in decline as well. This has led many people to argue that Canada, specifically Ontario, is in the process of deindustrializing. Hundreds
of thousands of manufacturing jobs, mostly in Ontario, have been lost since 1988 as a result of companies closing down or moving south of the border.
Most Canadians, I would suggest, blame free trade. Most would also blame the economic policies of this government for the downturn in our economy. Although I cannot disagree with them, I would also suggest that it is not only the fiscal and economic policies of the government, but it has been a lack of leadership, not only at the federal level but at the provincial levels, that prevents provinces across this country from really addressing the serious problem of not having enough well-trained people able to compete in this ever-changing global climate.
Whatever the case, there was a promise made by this government during the free trade agreement debate when it said it would bring in adjustment programs. It would bring in the best adjustment programs in the world. We have yet to see this happen. There are increasingly long line-ups of people who want and desperately need training. It is in my area and I am sure it is the same in the areas of all hon. members.
The people of this country, in my province and riding I would suggest, are far ahead of members in this House in knowing specifically that they are going to need training and better and more skills in order to compete. What they need from us is the dedication and the drive from members of Parliament within this Chamber in order to provide the programs whereby they can be trained.
Like many of my colleagues on both sides of the House, I understand the importance of becoming more competitive. I know that our economy is changing and that Canadian industry as a result has to adapt. I realize that we cannot turn back the clock, but we must move forward. The protectionist mindset of many Canadians, indeed of people on all sides of this House, must change. I understand these things are a fact. I understand that the government does have to play a role in restructuring our economy and I would suggest that it has been lacking in that role.
We have been told by the government that we need to become a more diversified economy and that we must become more competitive in the areas of manufacturing, science and technology, research and development and education. The studies are many as to how we can do this. There has just been a lack of any commitment by governments over the last few years on directions in
June 5, 1992

which we can take these studies and put them into action.
I am not talking about writing a blank cheque to welfare recipients. I am talking about investing in our future, investing in Canadians and investing in our country.
We need to invest in machinery, equipment and new technologies. We need to invest in infrastructure. We just cannot sit back and expect to survive. We need to control this globalization that seems to be affecting all parts of the world. As a country we need to take hold of that and make sure globalization does not control us but that in fact we control globalization.
I would suggest to hon. members sitting across that individual Canadians cannot do that themselves. It is going to take a role of government in helping individual Canadians to grab control of this globalization and to work it on behalf of Canada. We need to get Canada and we need to get Canadians working again.
Unemployment is too high. I do not care what figures are thrown out. I know Statistics Canada threw out some in the last few days. They are just simply too high. We have to address that problem first and foremost.
I would suggest that my leader has developed and put forward reasonable ways in which we can help deal with that problem. Let us get these people working first. Let us get them paying taxes, and then let us get them into the proper skills training they need.
Along with the resource based industries and manufacturing, Ontario also has an agricultural industry which is facing crisis. It really threatens the whole infrastructure of Ontario's small rural communities. Our agricultural industry remains one of the most important resource based industries we have.
As I have said before and I will continue to say-I know other hon. members on both sides of the House have said it too-in order for a country to be secure and to be proud, as you have said many times, Mr. Speaker, we must make sure our agricultural industry is the cornerstone of our economy.
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I believe the sovereignty of our country is inextricably linked to us sustaining a food industry within Canada. I hate to say this-and I know you are well aware, Mr. Speaker, because in your area it is the same-small town Ontario is closing down. A lot of these places are closing down as a direct result of the decline in our agricultural industries.
Our farmers are the most productive farmers in the world, and nobody can argue that. Farmers provide Canadian consumers with the highest quality of food in the world. We have higher qualities of food than anywhere else and they do it at reasonable prices too.
I suggest to those Canadians who go across the border thinking they are getting a great deal on food that they are not. In fact they are bringing back food that is not as high quality or as high standards as we have in Canada.
No other country in the world can make this claim. The future of the family farm or a rural life is not threatened because Canadian farmers are inefficient or because of competitiveness and globalization. Instead agriculture is in jeopardy because of international trading problems, international trading agreements. Although they are very important to Canada and to certain sectors of agriculture, they have no business interfering in our internal market programs.
The government must become more sensitive to the difficulties facing our farmers instead of constantly blaming other countries for our problems. We must beat them at their own game and we must be able to compete with them internationally. We must invest in our farmers.
As a result of the situation facing our farming communities and as a result of globalization, my community of Haldimand-Norfolk is at an economic crossroads. We are really facing an economic crisis in this country which I believe threatens our prosperity for both today and tomorrow.
As a province and as a country we can move ahead, but I would suggest very seriously that the government has to take some responsibility and to invest in Canadians.
I know they will say over there that they are spending billions of dollars, but I believe we have to be more focused in where we spend that money. I would suggest the first place to start is by putting our unemployed

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people back to work in some sort of program and to help with training and retraining them.


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his speech. It was a positive speech. It was well focused. It hit exactly on the problems and some of the solutions that have to take place. In all fairness I think he would admit, if he had stopped to think about it, that the budget of the Minister of Finance that came down in February emphasized helping businesses streamline and modernize.
He talked about new equipment and streamlining. One of the interesting or encouraging things about the increase in imports into Canada that we have seen-and we have seen an increase in exports as well and we still have a trade surplus there-is that the increase has been in new and modern equipment coming into Canada to streamline. We are seeing it everywhere.
I will be talking in my remarks this afternoon about the riding of my friend. One of the companies I had the pleasure of touring with him in his riding, in Stratford, was the FAG Bearing Company. It is not only bringing in modem equipment. It is designing it and building it for its own use. It is very exciting and it is happening here in Canada.
I agree with him. We increased the capital cost allowance in the budget to allow companies to write off that equipment quicker. We cut their taxes to encourage them to establish now, to create jobs and to streamline.
In all fairness, the government is doing that and I think that is fine.
I heard the member say that we should get people jobs first and then train them. That is a problem, because the jobs that are available need specially trained persons to fill them. It is kind of what comes first, the chicken or the egg? I listened to him and I heard what he was saying. I do not disagree. I would much rather have people working now, but the jobs that are available require the special training and therefore we have to concentrate on training.
I am, very pleased the hon. member would commend the Minister of Employment and Immigration for adjusting and coming up with another $150 million for training because of the high unemployment in the country today and the need for that retraining.


Robert (Bob) Speller: Mr. Speaker, I agree with a number of the directions in which the minister went in that budget. Unfortunately what I do not agree with in what he did was where he was getting the money.
I understand his problems with the debt and I understand the importance of bringing the debt down, but unfortunately he took money from one important area and put into another important area without really reinvesting new moneys in these areas. I believe very strongly that we need to invest new moneys. We could get these new moneys by investing in Canadians, putting them back to work and thereby, once they are back to work, collecting taxes.
I would start that by following the suggestion of our leader for an infrastructure program. We need to invest the billions of dollars it will take, quite frankly, because we will get a double investment back from the provinces. Who is going to win? It will not be the provinces. The federal government will win on this because we are the ones who are going to get back all the taxes. It would not take a lot of money out of our operating budgets now to do that.
Another area on which I disagree with the government is the whole sense of co-operation between Ottawa and especially my province of Ontario. I see this government going in one direction and saying that we have to cut the debt and we want to put emphasis on this area and the provincial government going in a completely different direction. It does not work for Canadians.
We have to put our political differences aside and co-operate both federally and provincially in sending a strong signal to Canadians that we will help them in these areas and in training.


Joseph R. (Joe) Comuzzi: Mr. Speaker, today I would like to add my words in my support of the motion presently before this House.
I have been asked by my colleagues to represent the interests of northern Ontario in this debate. I thank them very much for giving me the opportunity to do so.
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The economy of northern Ontario is a microcosm of the economy of Canada. We in the north depend economically on our resource based industries: mining, softwood lumber, newsprint, container board and fine paper. We manufacture in the north among other products the finest commuter rail cars in the world.
Interwoven throughout this entire process is a need for a well maintained transportation facility, especially a viable seaport. We have the largest grain storage and cleaning facilities in the world and the most qualified work force in Canada. We are capable, if called upon, to handle over 20 million tonnes of wheat a year.
In my judgment I feel it is an honour that we in the north are referred to as the hewers of wood, the drawers of water and the miners of metal. We take great pride in those things we produce from our forestry and our mining based sectors when we look at how much they add to the total economy of not only the province of Ontario but also the Government of Canada.
The economic history I have just outlined is what I consider to be the wealth of Canada. The resource based industries in Ontario and in all of Canada when we include the energy from the west are what has propelled Canada to its present economic status and are the envy of every country in the world.
Let me caution that although we talk about northern Ontario because of our resource based industries are located there does not mean that the rest of this great province of ours, nor the rest of this great country of ours, does not benefit from what we do directly in northern Ontario.
Over 17,000 jobs in the city of Toronto are created as a result of the forest industry alone. Many thousands of jobs in the city of Toronto are created as a direct result of the mining industry.
Thousands and thousands of jobs are created throughout southwestern Ontario because of the container board we produce, container board that is used in the manufacturing process from everything from the cartoning of beer, to furniture, to the harvesting of tomatoes.
Eventually these resource based wages find their way into every grocery store, every clothing store, every drug store, every automobile dealership, and particularly into areas of our province where automobiles are manufac-
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tured. I am thinking of Brampton, Windsor, St. Catharines and Oakville.
With the wealth we have in this country where have we gone wrong? Where have we gone astray? Why do we have over 11 per cent unemployment in this wonderful prosperous country of ours? Why do we lack the spirit of enterprise that I sense we once had in our country?
I get the feeling that there is a sense of fear within our country. I suspect there are three fundamental reasons we are experiencing this feeling of fear or apprehension in Canada today. Fundamentally it is the direction we are trying to go from the federal perspective, from the provincial perspective, and indeed because of banking policies.
The federal government has attempted in the years it has been in office to try to change the base of the Canadian economy. It abandoned resource based industries in Canada, the very foundation of our economic strengths. It tried, with all good intentions, to convert our economy which is based on our resources to more sophisticated endeavours.
As a result we look, for example, at the job training program. What we are trying to do now is take the employees who have lost their jobs, both men and women, and retrain them to change the skills they have been able to develop over the years.
I think I have full agreement from all sides of the House that we have a work force in this country second to none when it comes to its skills that have been developed in mining, forestry, the growing of grain and in transportation routes.
We on this side of the House, and I am sure they do too, feel that we should be improving those skills so that we can be more competitive. In that way, we can keep our edge in the economic climate internationally rather than changing and trying to develop new skills.
In Ontario, which is the subject matter of what we have today, we have a provincial government that was not prepared to govern. It now faces the hard realities, as our friends have, of governing and can never in its wildest dreams deliver on the many promises that it made prior to that election in Ontario.
What it has done is what many governments do. We see what these people are doing on that side of the

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House. They are raising the expectations of the people of this country and of this province beyond what anybody can reasonably deliver.
Let me mention something else with respect to Ontario, that is the changes in the Labour Relations Act that were introduced just yesterday. Everyone seems to think that there is resentment toward these changes in the Labour Relations Act, and that resentment comes from the business community.
On the contrary. I take the position that those changes that are proposed in the Labour Relations Act affect very directly every working man and every working woman in the province of Ontario. What the government is doing through these changes is upsetting the very delicate balance that we have earned over the years in the very fragile institution of employer-employee relations.
In our labour and our management negotiations, it is attempting to upset this balance. By this very legislation, it has placed itself at every bargaining table in Ontario, a place absolutely no government should venture into. It cannot be the arbitrator of a decision-making process and also be a negotiator at the same time.
You will find that this legislation is non-operable. I am prepared to say at this time that it is ill timed. It is ill conceived. It will do more damage to the working men and the working women of this province than any other legislation that has been passed by every previous government. It upsets the very delicate balance of our labour relations enterprise which has been up to this time working the best it can.
Unfortunately, the banking policies in this country do nothing to help the revival of our economy. From where we sit in this House, Canadian banks have committed themselves to ventures on a transnational stage or in assisting non-Canadian companies in buying out Canadian enterprises, rather than emphasizing the need in every small community in this country where we have small banks to providing the wherewithal, the necessary capital to assist small business and small entrepreneurs to provide that necessary capital that they need.
There is no question that employment will only increase in Ontario from the initiative and from the efforts that small business people throughout this country place into that sector of our economy. Our Canadian banks just seem not to be interested in a policy of providing this service to the small entrepreneurs in this country.
There should be no mistake about the banking services in Canada. There is no mistake that it is simply a store. People go to get a service at a bank like they do at a drugstore. They rent money from the bank and they pay something back in the way of interest. There is nothing secretive about that business.
What is important is that if they are committed to providing a service for the small business entrepreneurs in this country, they should continue to do so rather than committing all of their resources to international corporations which really do not provide any jobs in this sector of our economy.
The policies to which I refer are just the initial. My time does not allow me to go into any greater depth. Let me say that what we plan to do on this side of the House will not affect our deficit and will not affect our debt inasmuch as that is a threshold in anything that we provide or propose. It must always be considered.
Our plan, the plan that I have emphasized here today, only requires the imagination of the people in this House. It requires the imagination of our citizens. It requires initiative that we all have. It requires that Canadians face the future with confidence. We cannot face a future in this country in fear. If we make those fundamental changes, our future, especially the future that we derive from northern Ontario and the rest of the resource-based industry in this country, will make us prosperous once more and make us understand that Canada is a country that anyone and everyone in the world wants to be.


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I will be brief. I want to thank the hon. member for his speech. I think it was a very good speech and touched all the buttons.
In listening to him, my feeling is that he wants to be positive about things. He wants to talk positively about the country, positively about the situation and I could not agree with him more.
In my remarks to him a little later on I am going to touch on that. I am wondering if we do ourselves a disservice in this House of Commons when our entire Question Period is made up of the negatives, of the hammering away and trying to do one up on each other as to solutions, et cetera. I am wondering if that does not present to the Canadian public a very negative scenario which offers the media of course the opportunity to put the negative clips on television. When we see this type of thing, it does nothing but discourage Canadians about
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spending money or going out and searching for employment or whatever it may be.
I am wondering if there is not some way that we co-operatively could present a better picture to the Canadian people, not diminishing the problems we have. We do have problems. We have got serious problems, but I think we are all working on those. I think we have to present a far more positive picture to Canadians, by us, by Canadians.
We take a look at the United Nations saying we are the best country in the world in which to live, yet when we listen to what goes on here sometimes, we wonder if that is in fact the truth.


Joseph R. (Joe) Comuzzi: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague very much for those remarks. I say that sincerely.
I am, as he is, troubled by the impression that the Canadian people may perceive as happening on the floor of the House because of the non-ability of some of us, perhaps being too partisan at times when the economy and the future of the country are at stake.
I will give the minister a small example of the parliamentary process that I think truly worked in the last two and a half weeks. It was with the Minister of Employment and Immigration. We were suffering some fairly severe consequences in Thunder Bay because of lay-offs and lack of retraining funds. I want to compliment the Minister of Employment and Immigration for the great assistance that he gave me in going through this process up to the announcement last night that $150 million was being allocated to the retraining and section 24 benefits in Canada, of which Thunder Bay will be a participant in honouring those commitments that had been made.
I do think the parliamentary process can always be improved if we approach the problems that are common to all Canadians, if we approach them with the assistance, the help and the desire to really make a difference.


Donald Alex Blenkarn: Mr. Speaker, I have a quick question. I was wondering if the member felt that the changes in the financial administration type arrangements in Canada with the Bank Act, the Insurance Act and the Trust Companies Act allowing those
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companies all to do commercial lending would improve the access to money sufficiently to make money more available to small entrepreneurs and whether he really felt that there was a tightness of money or whether there was a situation where institutions were being rather credit careful.
It seems to me that there is a fairly loose money supply right now, interest rates as low as they are, but the problem may be the credit worthiness.


Joseph R. (Joe) Comuzzi: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate what was just said. I cannot comment on banking in other centres. I can only comment on what I see happening in the community of Thunder Bay-Nipigon that I represent. I notice there is a tendency for small entrepreneurs, tree farmers who employ 20 people, who come in visit and ask me questions. There is a designer by the name of John Mackett whose concept has met with tremendous success. I do not want to use any numbers, but you will know what kind of numbers we are talking about when banks will not afford the venture capital for this young person with ideas to expand. His working capital is being generated out of the use of his credit card. That is how little he needs.
When we have industrious young people in this country who want to get ahead and dedicate themselves to doing this type of thing, employing people and not being given the opportunity to do so, says to me that there is something lacking in our banking system in this country when we will not take a chance on people rather than looking at just a balance sheet.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, just a short question.
I agree with the member's assessment of the banking industry. Maybe this issue of trust companies we can return to a little later because I think there is some room to market that new act.
I want to ask the member a very specific question related to transportation and tourism. It seems to me that there is tremendous potential to reverse the flow of dollars that are going out of this country on tourism in other parts of the world. It seems to me in the north, not only northern Ontario but all across Canada, there is

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great potential to put people back to work and learn a skill that is not only short-term but long-term.
I wonder if the hon. member could say whether or not in his region that the transportation and tourism support allows that possibility for job growth to sort of take root or take place.


Joseph R. (Joe) Comuzzi: I would just say that there are some developments going on in the north, but we need some additional developments.
Let me just say that we have the most magnificent shoreline along the north shore of Lake Superior right from Duluth, Minnesota in the United States through to Rossport. It goes by Red Rock and the port of Nipigon. That should be developed. It is the handsomest area on the whole of the Great Lakes and we should do something with it.


Barbara Jane (Bobbie) Sparrow: Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased to respond to the motion before us today that was put forward by the hon. member for Scarborough-Rouge River.
First of all I should start by pointing out some facts that are obvious to us sitting here in the Chamber today and debating this. I want to point out some facts about Ontario that not all people might realize. The population of Ontario is really approaching two-fifths of Canada's population. I guess 40 per cent of Canadians live in the province of Ontario.
In the way that we measure prosperity, Ontario has long been a have province. Ontario is considered not eligible to receive equalization payments because of its average per capita. It is based upon a formula that was agreed upon in 1977 for equalization payments. It is a measure that set out 32 ways a province can raise revenues or sources of raising revenues. When this was taken into consideration, Ontario, B.C. and Alberta were considered have provinces.
Most of the industry and most of the business centre of Canada is probably situated in Ontario. Ontario has long been "an engine of growth". We should not get into debate about that because when Ontario is successful, when Ontario is working and when Ontario is generating revenues and doing very well, it sure helps the rest of Canada. We have to see it in the context as a proportion.
At the same time, while I know the province is suffering, I also want to say that the problems that it is facing are also evident in other areas of Canada. Indeed, from coast to coast, we do have provinces and communities with similar situations of high unemployment.
One thing I have to say is that this particular issue we are discussing today is felt right across the country. It is more prevalent in Ontario because there are more people there.
Second, we Canadians have to pay our way. We really are not exempt from any world trends, I think the House realizes that. Some people see the economic conditions that have developed here as being in isolation to anything else around the world. We tend to stick our head in the sand. We feel that we are an isolated island, and that does not really help the situation.
What we must do in Canada is compete and thrive and go out there with the rest of the world. It is very important that we all look not just south of the border but at France, England, Europe, Germany, and Japan, right around the world, and see that a lot of people around the world are suffering from unemployment and a whole change in trade, because of globalization.
I would just like to make a remark on globalization. One of my colleagues across the way made a statement that we in Canada must control globalization. We do not control globalization at all. We are part of it. We work with GATT. We have the free trade agreement with our colleagues in the United States, who happen to be our biggest trading partners. We should be pleased that we have a free trade agreement so that we can work with them, and not be at loggerheads, to resolve difficult situations. We work with the 120 countries in GATT and all our trading partners to resolve difficult situations. We are not in isolation. We have to work in the broader world community.
Ontario is the business and industrial centre of our country. Some people think its happy state, its improved economy and growth during the 1980s should continue on and on. I really wish it would, and I am sure we all do. However, there comes a time when we do have peaks and valleys or ups and downs within the business sectors and the economy of the whole country. We have to stop and we have to restructure. That means governments must rethink positions. That means governments of the
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provinces as well as businesses and educational institutions.
The need to modernize or upgrade the infrastructure may apply to some sectors more than others. I think that is why Ontario at this time may need or may be asking for help and we may have to concentrate more of our efforts on upgrading this particular area. However, it must happen across all regions. We saw this in the 1980s with the recession, and we are seeing it again in the early 1990s. We must keep up with international competition.
Let us not be surprised in any way, shape or form that Ontario appears to be hurting more than any other province. I argue that is relative to the context of Canada as a whole. In the province I come from, Alberta, over the last three or four years we have lost thousands and thousands of jobs in the oil and gas industry. The whole of the petroleum industry is restructuring around the world. We have obviously moved away from that National Energy Program that the Liberals brought in. We have deregulated and we have gone to market prices. A lot depends on the world.
When oil and gas companies lay off thousands of employees the rigs do not work. As a matter of fact, in talking to CAODC, the Canadian Association for Oil Well Drilling Contractors, about 10 per cent of the drilling rigs are working. If the drilling rigs do not work the service companies do not work. That means the men and women who provide the infrastructure and the services to the rigs, such as the mud people-we utilize mud to keep pressure under control in the hole-and those who do fracking and testing are put out of work, as are the water-haulers, the welders, the corner store people, the man or woman who runs the motel. It causes a ripple effect right across the country. All areas of Canada have problems.
Let us return to the Macdonald commission of the mid-1980s. It foresaw a lot of this period of adaptation and adjustment that is needed. It was the royal commission that said we should set about making the changes needed in anticipation of increasing competitive pressures at the international level.
Part of that anticipation was the free trade deal and the current negotiations with the United States and Mexico. They are following along the same logic.
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Such adjustments are not easy and they do not come without pain, but we need to adapt. We cannot choose any other route. To use a colloquial or trite phrase, the world does not owe us a living. We have to make our own way, and most Canadians indeed know that we have to earn our own way.
They want governments to create a fiscal environment in which there are fewer regulations and fewer bureaucratic nightmares and let the private industry get on with its job. Private industry is the area in this country that promotes the jobs and develops the wealth. Governments do not develop wealth. I have to agree with a lot of the comments made by the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood.
Let us turn now from the economic realities to matters that are more social and domestic in nature. It is sometimes very tempting for all of us here in the House to concentrate on economic issues at the expense of social issues. In fact, our government does have a really substantial record of achievement on the social side.
I was watching the news last night about the tragic developments reported in Martensville, Saskatchewan, which none of us accept. It was totally devastating to hear that. It was the present minister of energy, when he was Minister of National Health and Welfare, who appointed Mr. Rix Rogers to advise him on the problem of child sexual abuse.
I do not think there is one person in this House who did not see what I saw on television last night. It is totally unacceptable. Mr. Rogers presented a report some years ago called Reaching for Solutions. Not one person can do this alone. It is only by working together that we can resolve these issues.
Mr. Rogers' report was instrumental in leading to the 1991 renewal of the family violence initiative with its special focus on child abuse. In fact, the whole area of family abuse-abuse of women, abuse of children, and abuse of seniors-has become an area of major concern for us.
The Minister Responsible for the Status of Women appointed a special blue ribbon task force some months ago specifically to look into the area of violence against women, but also taking into consideration all violence. I look forward to that report which will be presented later this year.

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I also want to draw members' attention to the 1987 drug strategy program. It had a similar impact. In 1987 we put forward a specific partnership with the provinces and the territorial governments, as well as non-government agencies, to review and come to grips with the fact that drug, alcohol and substance abuse is really at an epidemic level in this country. It concerns all of us in terms of the social problems.
To deal with substance abuse in these areas we need long-term commitments. It takes time to develop relevant and appropriate programs, not only for the urban areas but for rural areas. Our aboriginal peoples are in great need of help too.
Ontario is a full partner in that. There was success. If any members would care to read the proceedings from the standing committee on health and welfare the Minister of National Health and Welfare appeared before it about five weeks ago. He presented statistics and measurements on the success rate of the drug strategy program, and it was renewed.
I believe the figure is $270 million over four years. We will be working again with our provinces and with the Minister of Justice, the Solicitor General and the minister of financial institutions to help us get to the bottom of the laundering of large sums of moneys from the sale of illegal drugs.
I also want to remark upon the needs of disabled people. This country has over three million disabled people. They are an important resource to this country.
Over the past four to six years we have worked our way toward more tax credits, more exemptions, and more ways to not only accept but also to make all Canadians realize they are a very important part. The International Year of the Disabled was a great starting point.
The federal government has assisted provincial governments and will continue to do so through deinstitutionalization and also with independent living centres. In March 1992 there was a major conference that really focused on specific areas.
Let us take a look at senior citizens and what we have done to help them. Not long ago it was recognized not only here in the House but also across Canada that we
have a very large aging population. Drastic measures are not the answer. We all have to work together and come forward with some measures that we all can live by.
We need senior independence programs and we introduced that in 1988. We are demonstrating ways we can get seniors to become and maintain their independence. The new Horizons Program that my colleague's party introduced in 1972 has proven to be extremely successful.
So all these examples I have cited are national issues with regard to social programs. They all require longterm commitments and it is something I know each and everyone of us wants to work toward.
I would also like to say we need flexibility. Obviously, if programs are extremely structured and they do not work there is very little area for manoeuvering and we have to be able to be flexible.
We are a diverse nation and with our aging population we have to look at it and come to some solutions. We cannot sit back and lament. Those challenges out there on the social side also have to be met with fiscal accountability. So while we must be fiscally accountable, and I think this is a major concern of all our constituents, we also have to be socially responsible.
The interesting area has to do with transfer payments. I will look mainly at the estimated program funding for health, education, as well as the Canada Assistance Plan.
In 1984 the federal government transferred $6.13 billion to the province of Ontario which was about $689 per capita. In 1992 we are transferring $9,924 billion and that is about $972 per capita. That is an increase of $3.7 billion or 6.2 per cent. Maybe it is not enough but working with regard to fiscal constraint is most important.
How do we get into this? I think it is most interesting. In fact, let us all come back to reality. In 1969 the government had a surplus of about $332 million. There was no deficit. There was a debt of about $18 billion. You can just watch or chart the economic development, and indeed, the spending of the government through the 1970s and early 1980s where it took us from a surplus of $332 million to a deficit of $38.5 billion. The debt went from $18 billion up to $206 billion.

Over the past eight years, we had to be fiscally responsible. We have been cutting back slowly and now this government today operates on program spending with a surplus. We have done a $29 billion turnaround and we operate with a surplus.
We have to service the debt. Out of every dollar of revenue 27 cents goes to service the debt. That is passive spending; it does no one any good.
We are paying for yesterday's programs and we are not investing in the future. Program spending is limited to 3 per cent this year. All net GST revenues and revenues from privatization are going to debt servicing and reduction. We will see by the year 1995 that the government no longer has to borrow from outside. We will not be putting pressure on financial markets and our deficit will be $5.5 billion. That is something we all have to work toward.
I just want to refer to a statement one of my constituents wrote to me. It has to do not only with his personal income tax level and what he is paying, but he also talks about the social benefits that are out there for families. He also talks about the Canada Pension Plan that he and his employer contribute to and unemployment insurance that employees and employers contribute to. His bottom line was that he cannot afford the tax that is already out there and we simply have to get it down.
I think today in discussing what the hon. member put forward, we all have to live within financial accountability. There is only one taxpayer. Canadians cannot afford any more taxes. Canadians right across this country do not want an increase in deficits. Therefore, we have to spend the money more wisely.


Robert (Bob) Kilger: Mr. Speaker, I have listened with interest to the comments made by my hon. colleague, the member for Calgary Southwest, on this very important issue to Canadians.
However, the opposition motion being debated today seeks to condemn the government for its negligence toward the worst social and economic difficulties faced by residents of Ontario in modern times.
The latest unemployment figures prove this. According to Statistics Canada's figures for May, unemployment in Canada has hit 11.2 per cent. This represents an increase of 0.2 per cent over last month and is the
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highest national unemployment rate since November 1984.
There are over 1.5 million Canadians looking for work. The figures announced today clearly indicate that the government's economic program and economic policies have failed. The government has certainly failed to come through on its now stale promise of creating jobs, jobs, jobs. In fact, I want to point out to my hon. colleague that her government is actually preventing many unemployed Canadians from becoming employable.
I am referring here to the lack of funds for the section 26 fee payer option. This option provides funding for UI recipients to upgrade their skills and employment marketability by attending educational institutions and taking courses.
I recently met with 400 of my constituents who were assembled by Employment Canada officials to be told that their participation in the fee payer option would be terminated.
Yet the government is currently running some nicely worded ads on national television, boasting about how competitive Canada is. The ads contain statements like: "Upgrading your skills is the key to succeeding in today's economic market". Such a statement is contemptible in view of the fact that the government has torpedoed the fee payer option under section 26. This type of propaganda is shameful.
I would like to ask the hon. member how can her government run such ads when we have 1.5 million Canadians looking for work and when there are 400 individuals in my constituency alone being told that there is no funding left in the fee payer option for them to complete their studies or upgrade their skills in order to have a better chance of finding work?
On May 12 I asked the Minister of Employment and Immigration if he would provide the necessary funding to ensure that the fee payer program would continue. The minister declined to make any such commitment.
He did, however, boast about how much money the federal government has put into training programs in Ontario this year as opposed to last year. The minister must think that we are a little naive on this side of the House. By looking at the increasing numbers of unemployed in this country, anyone would realize that there would be a greater demand for additional funds to assist the unemployed in finding work. Thus, the increase in

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the funding of the fee payer option in Ontario should not be a surprise.
We have a serious unemployment problem in Ontario and throughout Canada. It is one which is even greater than last year with no relief in sight, especially given the lack of positive action taken by the government.
I would like to ask my colleague to address my question on the fee payer option. Can she tell us today what unemployed Canadians can expect to hear from her government on how they can find work?


Barbara Jane (Bobbie) Sparrow: Mr. Speaker, I certainly would like to respond to the specific question on the fee payer option.
I am not too sure whether the member is aware of the Minister of Employment and Immigration's announcement yesterday with regard to the additional funding into that particular area. I would certainly be glad to provide him with a copy of what the hon. minister was putting forward.
The fee payer option which allows for training is extremely important and we do recognize, and some of your colleagues do recognize, especially the members for Thunder Bay-Nipigon and Broadview-Greenwood, that unemployment is too high and we all should be working together.
It is nice to debate with people who have specific and positive responses and I want to say I hope the member will address his little eyes to what exactly the minister said yesterday.
The member got on to the ads that are on TV and in the papers. What is interesting is that there have been over 200,000 responses to those and it proves that all Canadians are most interested and indeed want to compete.
I really have to ask a question with regard to Bill C-21 when we amended the unemployment act. One specific area was moving funding over to training and job retraining. It was actually even allowing funding for what I would call moving people from one area of the country to another where the jobs were. The unfortunate part was it was well over nine or twelve months that the bill was held up in the Senate and I do not think the hon. member has to look too far to see exactly who held that up.
Yes, we need more training. Nobody is going to deny that. Yes, we need better education. Yes, we have to become more competitive, but for Eleaven's sake why is the member always so negative?
There are positive stories out there. Training has improved. He has just heard the hon. member from Etobicoke make his statement and there are better ways. We will all work together to see that this country prospers.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, I listened with interest to the member talking about how well the Tory government has done on the social program side.
She talked about child abuse. She raised the issue of sexual child abuse and the whole initiative on family violence. The government put $137 million into the family violence program spread over five years and there will be a total expenditure by the end of 1992-1993 of $34 million. That is for all of Canada to deal with family violence.
At the same time, the government cut back on the Canada Assistance Plan payments to the province of Ontario alone in those three years $3.5 billion by the end of the year 1992-1993.
What was that $3.5 billion to do? It was to protect women in abusive situations. It was to provide transition houses for women. It was to investigate child abuse and child sexual abuse. So what did the government do? It dumped the responsibility solely on the province of Ontario.
The government cuts $3.5 billion and then tries to say it put back in $34 million.


Lee Richardson: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker, after the diatribe from the NDP the hon. member should be given the courtesy of a response.
I am sure we could get unanimous consent of the House to allow her to reply.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, the member for Calgary Southwest made a very sound, constructive speech. I wonder if we could ask for unanimous consent of the House to extend for a few more minutes the time to finish off proper questions to the member.
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The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I could ask for unanimous consent. If there is unanimous consent, I will allow the hon. member to answer the question.
There is still a number of speakers. I would hope that there would be no complaints come four o'clock. The hon. member for Calgary Southwest could answer, please.


Barbara Jane (Bobbie) Sparrow: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues in the House. With regard to the question put forward by the NDP member regarding cutting back over $3 billion to Ontario, that is absolutely not true.
I would like to say that yes, there was a cap put on the Canada Assistance Plan but there was about a 6 per cent increase to the province of Ontario. The cap is a cap of 5 per cent over the year before every year and each and every year, so while we are watching our expenditures very carefully, maybe the province of Ontario with regard to its social services needs to take a look at itself.
On family violence and child abuse, there is nobody in this House who will stand for any sexual abuse of children. We have put funding into it and we are working with the blue ribbon special task force.
In conclusion, I want to say we have put out a lot of funding. We are working with all agencies. We are working with all governments at all levels and we look forward to any assistance that we can get. Some people may say that it is a provincial responsibility. It is everybody's responsibility.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, the member in her capacity as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Health and Welfare talked in a portion of her speech of the violence against women and children and the fact that the government has recently appointed Rix Rogers.
I wonder if I could ask the hon. member to arrange for a briefing from that section of the department of health and welfare or make it available. I personally would like to see if she could use her good offices to arrange that for me.


Barbara Jane (Bobbie) Sparrow: Mr. Speaker, I would be glad to arrange a briefing for any colleague in this House or indeed the other House who would specifically want more information or wish to participate in putting forward ideas with
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regard to child abuse and sexual abuse. I will get back to you within the next few days.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I feel that there is a danger in this debate that those of us who are members from Ontario may be sending out a signal that we are only concerned about the problems in the economy in our own province or in our own city.
All Canadians should know that even though there is more of a primary focus on Ontario and Toronto today, and being a member from Toronto, all of us in this House really do have the same concerns for every region of this country. Traditionally in Toronto, as the member for Calgary Southwest so aptly described in the opening remarks of her speech, Ontario has been a province that has always enjoyed a very aggressive economic state of health.
For the first time, certainly in my lifetime, those of us who are from Toronto are feeling deep economic pain. I think if we can regain the confidence, that sense of "let's take a chance", that entrepreneurial spirit that is basically there-it is latent in our community, but it just needs to be reignited-then that will be of benefit not only to people who are living in Ontario, but in every region of this country.
Make no mistake about it, the people of Ontario always have shared the wealth and resources of our province with every region of this country. We do it happily and generously, and we will continue to do so but we need at this moment in time to figure out a way to get that economy going again.
This morning I had a group of students who were visiting me from my riding, Earl Grey Senior School. I had breakfast with them at the Holiday Inn on Dalhousie Street. The minister from Brampton smiles, but there is an old expression: "Out of the mouths of babes".


John Horton McDermid: I've been there.


Dennis Joseph Mills: I would like to say to the minister that this was eight o'clock in the morning. It was not eight o'clock at night, and there is quite a difference.
Rather than me speak to them, I went around to each one of the students and mentioned that I was gong to have this opportunity to debate in the House today. I asked each and every one of them what were the issues that concerned them, and what were the issues that

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concerned their mothers or their fathers when they sat around the breakfast table, had dinner or just chatted with them during the evening.
I must start off by saying that many of the students said that they felt things were okay. I do not want to say it was an experience where everybody was negative. There were a lot of those young people whose mothers and fathers were both gainfully employed. They felt good about things, so it was not all negative chat.
We went around to each and every person. I am not going to read off the names of everyone who was there, but I am going to put it to the table of the Elouse and to Hansard because I hope there is some way that I can give them credit for their remarks. My ideas are basically their ideas.
They were telling me things that they had heard from their parents. Interestingly enough, it seems to be the same things that most people in this House are talking about. The number one concern for the parents of these children were taxes. They really felt that with regard to the tax designs in this country, the tax systems-they did not use the words "tax design" but the word "taxes"-I know all members are hearing this-we have to meet the challenge of making our tax designs in this country more simple and more fair.
It is important to do that because if students in grade eight are beginning to hear that taxes, taxes, taxes are a negative thing, that they are a disincentive to productivity, it is going to be a part of their language, a part of their thought process. By the time they are 18, 19, 20 and get into the work force, they are going to have a negative attitude toward the system.
Before we get to a point where there will almost be a revolt in this country, we should meet the challenge of reforming our tax system.
The second thing that concerned the students of Earl Grey was the issue of job creation; finding jobs for the people in their community who were out of work. I could not help but remember a young student named Paul Stuart Vanderburg who was living with his grandmother. He was telling us that yesterday or the day before his grandmother, who looks after him, was about to lose her job. They had no other source of income except her job. The two of them lived alone in an apartment. I personally cannot imagine what that would be like, to be living
alone with my grandmother and all of a sudden she was going to lose her job and there I was in grade eight about to go into high school. That must be a real frightening experience for a young person.
Young people are concerned about the fact that somehow we get the job creation programs that do exist.
I said earlier in this House that it is incumbent upon us to put ideas forward, but there are ideas that exist in this House of Commons. The Government of Canada has to go back to some of these ideas. We do not need to re-invent the wheel. Where is this Work for Ibmorrow- Employment Opportunities for the '80s? There are 185 job opportunities there, many of them linked to entrepreneurship, giving incentives to the enterprises of this country. Rather than sending people to school to be trained, and I am not opposed to that, let the entrepreneurs of this country take people on to their payrolls and train them on the job rather than just leaving people at home on welfare or UI and becoming frustrated because they do not have anything to do, not to mention the loss of dignity. That was the second issue that concerned the students of Earl Grey Senior Public School. There is another challenge for us.
Mr. Speaker, you are signalling me that my time is running out. Another issue that concerned the students was to put more support to tourism in this country. We know that it is the No. 1 job creator. The other thing they said is that government should eliminate waste and abuse of the system. Remember, these words are coming from 12 and 13 year olds. One teacher said to shift some of the defence budget to youth programs.
There was one teacher there who was an American and she said: "You know, Canadians have to be more patriotic." We need to be more patriotic. This American teacher, Mrs. Quinn, was so right when she said that we do not appreciate enough what we have in this country in terms of standard of living. Fear of job loss was another problem.
I realize I only have a short time today, but these thoughts represented here today are those of Earl Grey Public School. I support each and every one of them, but I do want to add two of my own. I think the banking institutions of this country have to re-examine the way that they handle credit with small and medium sized business. I know that the Minister of State for Small Businesses and Tourism admitted yesterday in this House that the financial institutions need to be checked on that issue. I salute him for admitting that.
June 5, 1992

I appreciate you giving me that extra minute, Mr. Speaker, but I wish I had half the afternoon.


Kenneth David Atkinson: Mr. Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's speech and especially the portion on taxes. I know he has done a fair bit of work in regard to simplifying the taxation system. I think that is something we all want to see. In reading his book, it seemed that as he got into the system he found that he had to make exemptions that were similar to the ones that already exist in the tax system to take into account various matters that we need to do in terms of our social structure. I also noticed that a lot of the calculations take place off the particular paper itself. As I said, I welcome the attempt to simplify the tax system.
I have a couple of questions about the tax system. I know he is interested in the environment. Should there be incentives or should we be using the tax system with regard to environmental matters? What does he feel in that particular regard? I would certainly like to know his feelings on that.
There is also the whole idea of the third party who seemed to feel that all we have to do is to put more tax on what they call the rich and all our problems will be solved and the middle class will not have to pay its share. We have to raise a certain amount of revenue and we are all going to have to pay, no matter what percentages we put on it.
The third party in Ontario has apparently defined a rich person as earning $53,000. I would like the member's comments on those particular items.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity of addressing those issues.
First, I want to deal with the issue of the single tax. I have been working on this for the past three and half years with many other tax experts who are much brighter than I will ever be on tax issues. We have made sure that there are some progressive features in this tax design. Yes, we did put in a tax credit for seniors, families with children and charities. We left the RRSP in place. Beyond that, there are no other special categories.
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On the corporate side we made sure there was a $100,000 tax credit to make sure that entrepreneurship, or small and medium sized business, has that very progressive break on the first $100,000. In other words, under the single tax, there would be no tax on the first $100,000, but after that it would be 20 per cent. There is a lot of room for simplifying the tax system.
I want to address the point specifically on the environmental issue he asked about. No, there should not be any special tax breaks for the environment. I am as much committed to the environment as any other member in this House. That is the problem with the current tax system. We have been trying to run every sector of the economy through the tax system. That has created so many rules and regulations and exceptions and exceptions to exceptions in every sector of the economy that it is no longer an intelligible system.
We, as the Government of Canada, may decide that the environment is a priority issue. I believe we all agree that it should be and it is a priority issue. In that case, any money it requires can be handled through direct funding. This would be either interest free loans, low interest loans, grants or whatever, but let us not bury these grants or incentives in the tax system. Ten years from now we will be back where we are today with a system that is unintelligible.
What was your last point? I am sorry.


An hon. member:: Taxing the wealthy.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Oh, taxing the wealthy. I used to believe that those in the NDP were into causes, but I learned my lesson this week. This is a group that is only driven by tactics. What they did to me this week I will remember for a long, long time.
What do you mean: "Thx the rich?" I have absolutely no problem with people paying their fair share. The harder people work, the more incentive they should have.
Mr. Speaker, just give me one second on this. Under the current system there are many people who pay no taxes and obviously that is wrong. However, the harder you work the more you want to punish people. That is

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what the NDP wants to do. I think that is bogus. Remember, those people with entrepreneurial skills who build wealth also create jobs and that is what the NDP fails to understand.


Don Boudria: Mr. Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to take part in the debate this afternoon.
I would like to start by congratulating my hon. colleague from Scarborough-Rouge River on his excellent initiative to draw the attention of this Elouse to the Tory government's negligence with respect to the economy of our province, Ontario.

Little did we know yesterday when we asked for this debate that we would hear statistics this morning in the House telling us that the economy had gone from bad to worse because more people are unemployed.
I see the Minister of State for Finance saying no while
4,000	full-time jobs have been lost in one month in this country. That is not good news no matter how you cut it.
The minister said awhile ago, in response to another hon. member, that the problem with all of us is that we did not congratulate the Tories enough. The problem with all of us is that we were negative. It is coming from the disciples of Eric Nielsen that we Liberals, according to the disciples of Eric and the disciples of Harvie the chair stormer, that we are negative. Is it not something to hear that from a member across the way?
That statement is a little less than accurate. Of course,
I have to use those kinds of words because the rules of this House oblige me and properly so.
I want to say something about my own region of eastern Ontario. Unemployment has gone up to the tune of three-tenths of 1 per cent. That includes the city of Ottawa. If you remove the city of Ottawa for statistical purposes from rural Ontario, imagine how much unemployment has gone up in rural areas.
The number of unemployed has increased from 48,000 in eastern Ontario to 50,000. It is certainly quite appropriate and it is our duty to raise these things in the House of Commons today.
That is why the member for Scarborough-Rouge River should be congratulated, not just by Liberals, but by all members of this House for bringing this issue to public attention because it has to be brought to public attention.

There are those who, like the minister, will say that the opposition criticizes the government but fails to offer alternatives. That is hardly fair, since the Leader of the Opposition and next prime minister raised this matter and brought it to the attention of the media some time ago.
I refer you to a press release dated January 21, 1992, in which the hon. member for Beausejour, Leader of the Opposition and soon to be prime minister, suggested and even begged the government to set up five-point programs for economic recovery. In each case, the Leader of the Opposition explained how program expenditures would be covered. More specifically, the Leader of the Opposition asked, on behalf of all members on this side of the House and for the sake of all Canadians who are unemployed, that the government set up a program for renewal and upgrading of municipal infrastructures, including bridges, for instance.
If you ever used Perley Bridge in Hawkesbuiy in my riding, Mr. Speaker, you would find it in disgraceful condition for this day and age. It must be replaced.
The same goes for the sewers in some municipalities and for other services. We are not asking the government to build pyramids, as John Maynard Keynes emphasized long ago. We are asking it to participate in necessary projects that must be done, instead of paying people to stay home and do nothing on unemployment insurance, people who would ask for nothing better than to go back to work. We are asking the government to establish programs to give these Canadians in Glengarry-Prescott-Russell and elsewhere some dignity, but it seems that the government does not want to understand.
June 5, 1992



My very distinguished colleagues, the members for Stormont-Dundas and Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, and I have been asking the government to establish a program to assist the economy of eastern Ontario. We have had meetings with municipal officials. Twenty-eight municipalities in eastern Ontario have signed a joint declaration asking for this government to establish a program to attract new industries to this area to get people back to work.
We have been writing to the ministers across the way for three years and nothing has happened. There is nothing for the people of Cornwall, Hawkesbury, Pembroke or anywhere else. We have even outlined a program that the government should undertake, such as the FEDNOR program which already exists for northern Ontario. We suggested that it should not spend oodles of money establishing something new such as a new bureaucracy, just extend the territory of what is there and put people back to work. Those few things do exist right now.
I was having a conversation with my colleague from Stormont-Dundas earlier today. We were talking about the economy of eastern Ontario. Do you know, Mr. Speaker, that the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Small Business Development Centre which is located in Cornwall has no investment money as we speak. That is funded by the federal government. It is a form of mini-bank. It put out advertisements funded by the federal government which told people: "Come in, we will help you start your own business".
Do you know what they are told when they get there? "We do not have any money". The bank has no money in the bank. It is a Tory bank. The bank that the government has established has no money in it. It advertises its program.
Last year it established the Self-Employment Incentive Program. The minister responsible for eastern Ontario, the Minister of Supply and Services, announced a whole series of these programs for all of eastern Ontario. It was, again, for Stormont-Dundas, for the Hawkesbury area, for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell and for Renfrew and so on. He announced the people who could apply. They were people on unemployment who could apply under this program and could get assistance.
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The local small business development centres put out ads in newspapers after the minister announced that he was giving the money. In one case, I believe, it was the Stormont Dundas Glengarry centre that was supposed to get about 30 placements. They put out ads inviting people to apply. After they adopted about six of them, they got notices from the department: "We haven't got any more money, stop sending them to us". They said: "This doesn't make sense. How can we not have any more money. We applied for 30". It was whatever the number was. The reply was: "Sorry, but that is the way it is. We've got no money".
The government had announced a program and then cut the funds after it announced it. What kind of sense does that make? Meanwhile we have ads right now on television, as the member for Stormont-Dundas very appropriately and eloquently pointed out earlier today. He said that those ads talk about all this great training.
I was addressing people in my riding at T. R. Leger Alternative School in Alexandria last Friday. They said to me: "Why is the government sending us here and then in the middle of the program it is telling us to go home? We cannot finish our training because they have cancelled the money" Did they think of congratulating the government for that stupid ad on television telling them how great they are at training? Why don't they take the money from the ad and give it to the alternative school to train people to go back to work instead of giving it to their friends in the advertising agencies? Wouldn't that make a lot of sense, instead of wasting it on stupid Tory propaganda advertising? That is all we see because it is the run up to the election.
It is time the Tories smartened up if they want anyone to believe in them by the time the next election rolls around.


John Horton McDermid: That certainly brought down the level of debate in the House somewhat, Mr. Speaker. We have had a very good and wholesome debate until now.
The Minister of Employment and Immigration has been listening to the problems that my hon. friend enunciated where programs had run out of money because of the pressures of the numbers of people using it with the high unemployment we have. Yesterday morning cabinet approved and the minister announced

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yesterday afternoon another $150 million to tiy to alleviate the problem.
Rather than stand here and scream like a wild banshee, which makes us all look like jerks, it would be more proper for him to make representation to the government to ensure that some of that $150 million in fact went to help those people he was talking to last weekend, instead of stirring up emotions like that which are totally uncalled for.


Don Boudria: I thank the minister for bringing up that particular topic, the one on the government's so-called announcements of yesterday.
First of all, the minister should have at least set the record straight. What the government announced yesterday was not $150 million. It was $95 million. The other was already there. That is just nonsense.
It is just like saying I have money, I count it, I put it in my wallet and I count it again. That does not mean that I have twice as much of money. Counting it twice or three times means the same thing. Even this minister should understand that.
Let us talk about how much money has been going to my riding for training. Last year the amount given for all UI programs combined-I could enumerate every single one of them here; I have two pages of them-for Prescott county, in my riding, when the unemployment rate was not nearly as bad as it is now totalled $4,732,000.
This year-and I invite the member to pay attention-$1.3 million instead of $4.7 million. Two-thirds of the money has been cut off, I say to the minister across the way who was just bragging about how much more has been given to my constituents and others. Two-thirds of the money has been taken away.
I invite the minister to go behind the curtains, pick up the phone and phone the Hawkesbury Canada Employment Centre at area code 613-632-2759. The centre will set him straight. It will tell him. He just has to ask the people who work there. They have made a list for me of everything that has been received in 1991-92 and
1992-93. If we compare the $4,732,697 of last year and $1,310,479 of this year, it is less than a third. As a matter of fact it is just a little over a quarter of what we got last year.
How can anyone call that an increase? I invite the minister to dig out his calculator, figure out his new math, and answer that one.


Beryl Gaffney: Mr. Speaker, I wish there was more time for us all to speak on our colleague's motion in the House today but unfortunately there is not. The motion, as we know, reads:
That this House condemns the government for its negligence
toward the worst social and economic difficulties faced by residents
of Ontario in modem times.
I have listened veiy closely to my colleague from the Glengarry-Prescott-Russell part of eastern Ontario. I understand what he is saying. Different areas of Ontario are hurt in different manners.
The Economic Council of Canada has warned that Canada must make some fundamental changes in the structure of our economy or risk losing many qualities of Canadian life we all enjoy and take for granted.
I have a letter here from a constituent. I think this is what my colleague is saying but somebody across the floor is not hearing. I would like to hear my colleague's comment. This person writes to me and says: "I am 42, unskilled, untrained and can't get a decent job. In fact I can't get anything. UIC won't put me on an on the job training program because I am not on UIC. I can't collect UIC because I was on WC for an injured elbow. My employer says he doesn't have to take me back and put me on a lighter job load"-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Questions and comments are now terminated. Is there unanimous consent to allow the hon. member to finish?


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret there is not unanimous consent.


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I appreciate being given the opportunity to comment on the motion of my colleague from Scarborough-Rouge River today regarding the condemning of the government for the economic situation that we find in the province of Ontario, and indeed across Canada as my friend from Calgary South pointed out very clearly today.
It is not just Ontario that is hurting. It is the entire country. Coming from Ontario, the centre of Ontario, I am very concerned about the economic situation and
June 5, 1992

have been for a considerable amount of time. I want to put this in its proper perspective however.
We have gone through some very difficult times. We have all experienced employment problems within our ridings. There are many reasons for it. There are reasons of restructuring that is going on not only here but around the world. Of course employment is affected rather dramatically by restructuring.
We have seen our productivity in this country drop rather dramatically over the last three or four years, something that I am pleased to see has improved over the last year and will lead us out of the economic problem we have been experiencing.
There are other key reasons. We hear the free trade agreement caused unemployment. There is no question that the free trade agreement caused a rationalization of industries both here and in the United States. But that is a positive thing because that had to happen; it was coming anyway. We had to get through that period of time.
Some friends, some parliamentarians were visiting from Australia just yesterday. I spent a considerable amount of time with them in the afternoon. They are considering introducing a GST in Australia at the present time and were interested in our experience. I had some very good tips for them in those discussions.
They were talking about the economic situation in Australia today. Australia just had 22 per cent interest rates. Does that sound familiar? Its unemployment rate is now almost at 11 per cent and growing.
I was in eastern Europe and Europe recently. The same types of problems are being experienced everywhere because the rationalization is going on. The modernization or the changing global economy, has caused this country to reform, pardon the terminology, our economic bases and get on with the restructuring. That is what is going on.
My hon. friend from Glengarry-Prescott-Russell stood and talked about the unemployment statistics that came out today. One of the things he failed to mention was that there was an increase in the number of people able to work. Some 50,000 new people came on to the work force this past month.
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What he also failed to mention was that 31,000 new jobs were created. Unemployment did not fall by 20,000. More people came on to the labour market. There were not enough jobs for those people, but 31,000 new jobs were created. I might say 20,000 of them were in the province of Ontario, and that is what we are talking about today.
Over the last two months we have seen the manufacturing sector increase its employment by 40,000 jobs. There are not nearly enough jobs yet to make up the rate of unemployment that we have seen in the last two years and want to get down. Unfortunately when we go through restructuring and bring in new equipment, new machinery and so on and so forth, employment does not follow immediately. It always lags in recovery. I am afraid we are still going to see that here.
I heard my friends from Stormont-Dundas and from Glengarry-Prescott-Russell suggest that we throw money at it and create employment. Let us be frank about that. There is not enough money anywhere to make work projects for 1.5 million people. It is just not there. The answer to the problem is not make work projects for one or two months so that people can qualify for unemployment insurance.
The answer is to get the economy going again and to create full-time meaningful jobs. That is what it is all about. That is what the free trade agreement was about. The free trade agreement was in fact to improve our economy and to have companies restructure and in fact improve their situation.
Let me just give a couple of examples if I might. Right in the riding or very close to the riding of the hon. member who proposed the motion today from Scarborough-Rouge River there is a company called Canadian Thermos Products. I want to read this into the record because it is extremely important. Its product is insulated containers; its market is the United States. In response to free trade the United States parent upgraded Canadian operations at a cost of $25 million, creating 120 new jobs; closed its older facility in Connecticut; and began producing the entire North American market in Scarborough.
That is what the free trade agreement is all about. That is what is happening for Canada.
My friend from Stratford who is sitting behind me and I spent a very enjoyable day in the wonderful riding of

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Perth-Wellington-Waterloo in the community of Stratford. In the morning we had the privilege of participating in the opening of a $50 million addition which will create 200 new jobs.
One of the interesting things about this production was the new, wonderful equipment to produce precision bearings that are used in the auto industry, in the water pump industry and so on. It was fascinating to see the modern technology they brought in.
To be honest, the principals who were there from the parent company in Germany said to me that this plant in Stratford would soon be out-performing the home plant in Germany. That was good news to hear and it made me feel very proud as a Canadian, extremely proud as a Canadian.
It says an awful lot about the 900 and some workers in Stratford. As a matter of fact one of the workers received his 50-year pin with the same company when we were there. It was absolutely amazing and he is only 64 years of age. He joined as an apprentice at 14.
That is type of thing that is going on. We do not hear about these things from the headlines in the papers unfortunately. We always hear about the tragedies. We always hear about the closings. I cannot remember the last time I saw a plant opening announced on the front page of a paper or on any of our national telecasts in the news.
They might be on some of the local newscasts. I have to give them full marks, but when it comes to our national communications organizations we do not see them. If a plant closed, however, it is a front-page story. It is Chicken Little and the sky is falling in and so on and so forth.
There are a lot of very good things happening: 3M Canada in London with $30 million in a new tape manufacturing plant and Bertrand Faure Ltd. in Mississauga has just improved its production process, which is now allowing it to win new business with Japanese manufacturers locating in Canada. It is forecasting sales in the $60 million range and is investing in equipment. This is exactly what was talked about today in the debate. It is investing in equipment to improve productivity at its plant.
Basic International Network Ltd. in Woodbridge, involved women's fashion sportswear, is exporting about 15
per cent of its production to the United States and is thanking the free trade agreement for allowing it to expand into the United States.
These things are happening. I do not want to go on and on about it, but the point is that the restructuring is going on and the government is trying, to the best of its capabilities, to facilitate that change. The problem is that there is not enough money around to do what we would like to do.
I think that is fair to say.
The poor old taxpayer pays at the municipal level, in some areas at the regional level, at the provincial level, and then at the federal level. We politicians sometimes tend to forget that it is one taxpayer. There is not a group that pays the federal tax and a group that pays the provincial tax. There is one taxpayer.
We must do with the limited resources what we can do within the realm of possibility, without bankrupting the country, without borrowing more and more money or raising taxes more and more. We must do that.
We must be able to work with the resources that we have and work within a reasonable period of economic expansion. That is exactly what is happening.
I do not want to minimize the problem that we have at all, and if I left the House with that impression I did not intend to. The hon. member for Glengarry-Prescott- Russell got up, but he did not hear the quality of debate that was going on today and the discussion between our parties. In general, it has been pretty good.
I was not minimizing our problems at all. We have got them. We have problems. We all have them. We all experience them in our ridings all the time. We know what is going on out there and we are trying to help in the best way.
My friend from Broadview-Greenwood always has some positive thoughts. He is causing us fits in our ridings right now because he has some recording going around saying: "Call your local MP", and of course people are calling us and asking: "What's going on?" However, he is an original thinker. I do not always agree with him but I know people in his own caucus who do not agree with him, and that is all right. At least he is thinking and trying to do some positive things to get the economy going. That is what this is all about.
June 5, 1992

We appreciate that type of thinking.
There was an article in The Toronto Star. We are always knocking The Toronto Star in this place because-


Dennis Joseph Mills: Don't talk about The Toronto Star.


John Horton McDermid: The publisher is veiy up front, he is a Liberal.


Dennis Joseph Mills: He's not a Liberal.


John Horton McDermid: He professes to be a Liberal, and its editorial content is Liberal. That is fair ball. He has always been up front. He has never hidden that. However I have to give him credit for permitting an article in The Toronto Star on April 4 or April 5.
The article was written by Tom McCormack, who is an economist. He has his own company and a masters in economics from the University of Western Ontario. He has wide experience. He was one of the directors for the Anti-Inflation Board-


Dennis Joseph Mills: Good man.


John Horton McDermid: -between 1976 and 1982. Strategic Projections is the name of his company and it specializes in demographics and economic modelling.
The headline of his article says: "Get Ready Canada for the Next Boom", and the introduction says:
This country, which already enjoys the second highest standard of living in the world, is on the threshold of an unprecedented expansion, writes economist Tom McCormack. But this golden age of prosperity could be jeopardized by Canadians' pessimistic national mood.
He goes on in this veiy well written article, backed with statistics, figures and so on, to talk about the positive things in this country. He talks about what is coming down the road. He says that the difficult times we are going through now are necessary so that when we come out the other end we come out running, that we are in great shape to meet the challenges.
That is exactly what is going on in this country today. Although it is not obvious yet we are starting to see very positive signs. Never in the history of Canada did we have record exports like we did in March, and record exports to the United States of America. There was $9.8 billion worth of goods exported to the United States in March 1992.
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In the first quarter we had wonderful export figures. We export 25 per cent of what we produce. We depend on exports in this country far more than the United States. It only exports 12 per cent of what it produces, Japan's figure is 14 percent. It is so very important.
These signs of improvement in our exports are a sign that the economy is improving. If the economy in the United States starts to pick up we are going to see phenomenal progress because that is where we export most of our goods. We exported $3 billion to other countries of the world and $9.8 billion to the United States in the month of March. That is a good sign and it is starting to happen. We are very pleased about what is going on.
Everybody takes these statistics and figures and uses them. They can use them in many ways. Politicians have a great knack of doing so.


Dennis Joseph Mills: As you do.


John Horton McDermid: I do it too, sure. Of course I do.
There were 31,000 new jobs created, over and above last month. That is a fact. It is right there. I am not juggling the figures.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Part-time.


John Horton McDermid: I said that 57,000 or 58,000 came into the labour force this month, so there were 20,000 that did not get jobs out of that group. I am admitting that.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Let us talk about the unemployed.


John Horton McDermid: We want to get the economy improving and continue to increase these exports and manufacturing jobs that will create spin-offs, such as people buying homes and all the other things that go on. That is exactly what we are doing.
I just want to give one quick example, in terms of interest rates alone so people understand what is going on out there. If we took the interest rate of a five year mortgage, in August 1981-this may not be fair-if I had a five-year mortgage it was at 21.75 per cent.
Today that same mortgage is at 9.75 per cent. The difference to a family's pocket is $7,812 per year. That is money in its pocket. That is what it means. These falling interest rates mean that the mortgage rates on a five-year mortgage come down.

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On a one-year mortgage it is saving $8,652 per year. That is just in mortgages. Those are types of savings to the people who finance their mortgages.
Let us talk about a small business loan. Let us say a person got a piece of equipment for $100,000 in 1981. He was paying $1,979 per month on that loan. Today he is paying $688 per month. That is a saving of $1,291 per month or $15,492 per year.
That is what is helping the economy. The interest rates are helping the economy. There is no question that with lower interest rates we are going to encourage small business and we are going to encourage young people to buy new homes. Today I just found out that the three-year rate is at 9 per cent. I cannot remember when the mortgage rates were that low. I am pleased that they are so low.
I am convinced that because of this increased activity in manufacturing and in exports and the increased economic activity we are seeing in our country that we are going to see things improve, not only in Ontario but right across this country.


Beryl Gaffney: Mr. Speaker, maybe I could finish the question I started a while ago.
The member was in the House when I was reading a letter from a constituent of mine. I felt this person's letter quite clearly described the plight Canadians are in today across this country. I will not repeat what I said but he is asking for my help. He has no income whatsoever.
He says that social services told him: "Because my wife works I am not entitled to any help from the UIC", even when he offered to pay it back. His wife earns only $13,476 after taxes, Canada pension, and UI. Therefore, he is not entitled to any social benefits. He is not entitled to UIC. He is an unemployed man and is not entitled to anything.
He has been using his Visa to buy the gas for his car so he can go looking for work. He is not complaining. All he wants is the opportunity to go out and work. He is driving a 1980 car. He is in a position in which he needs to be retrained. He is not educated and needs retraining. We now know there is no money in the budget for retraining. He is asking me, as his member of Parliament, to help him out. What is there for me to offer this person? He is
only one of thousands in this country who are in this position.
I ask the member opposite, what can I tell this gentleman to do? Where can he go so that he can be offered some hope in this wonderful country of Canada?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I do not mean to demean the individual at all. We all have examples in our ridings of people who are desperately searching for work and looking for jobs.
I will reiterate what I said. There is unfortunately not enough money in this country alone to help everybody at this particular time. That is unfortunate, but there is not.
Yesterday the minister added another $150 million for training. Hopefully the individual the member refers to will be able to get into a program, but maybe not. Maybe it will be over-subscribed, maybe it is now. Maybe he is further down the waiting list. I do not know.
The hope I can give him is that the country is coming out of a recession and employment opportunities are slowly getting better. There were 31,000 more people employed in the month of May than there were in April. It is improving, though not fast enough for our liking. We would like to see it happen much faster. However it is improving and we have to hold hope out for those people.
If we are reading letters I can read out a letter that my colleague the Minister of Finance received yesterday. It is from an individual who is unemployed and who has been out looking for work for months. He apologized for his contribution to the party. It could only be $150 because he is unemployed. Yet, he said: "You are on the right track. Keep doing what you are doing because we can see signs that the economy is getting better and I am hopeful I will be able to get a job in the not too distant future with an improved economy". He understands the problem all levels of government in Canada are having. Here is a person who is unemployed and still believes in the democratic-


An hon. member:: Oh, oh.


John Horton McDermid: Members can make fun of him. They can sit there and laugh at him. They can make fun of the individual if they want to, but it is not funny being unemployed. Here is someone who believes in the democratic process and is prepared to participate. Do not sit there and laugh at an individual who writes a
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letter like that. I did not laugh at your constituent. You should not laugh at this one.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I listened attentively to the minister's remarks. He talked about the economist Tom McCormack, and I too read the article in The Toronto Star. I subsequently had some discussions with Tom McCormack and he sent me his latest papers on projections. They were good. I actually believe that the 1990s are going to be better than the 1980s.
However, what we are talking about here today is trying to do something, and not in 1994, 1995 or 1996. Today we are trying to address the problems of the 1.5 million people in Canada who are unemployed. Specifically, we are trying to put a tighter focus on the .5 million in Ontario who are trying to get back into the work force.
The minister was part of a parliamentary task force on employment opportunities for the 1980s. I have referred to this task force at least a dozen times in this House in the last 60 to 90 days. It is a good report.
The report recommends one thing over and over again. The report talks about apprenticeship training, but it talks specifically about linking training to on-the-job experiences. In other words, use the 1.7 million enterprises in this country as partners in taking people off unemployment and putting them into a factory or an office and training them on the job.
Would it not be a much more dignified productive experience if instead of giving out welfare or UI cheques to figure out a mechanism whereby the employer would take people off UI and put them into the factory? Would it not be a much better experience to have a joint venture using those funds and that business? Besides giving people back their dignity, they also become taxpayers and we would be developing skilled workers for the small enterprise which will provide that badly needed support to go into the nineties.
The minister was a part of that task force. Why does he not figure out a way to motivate his cabinet colleagues to make that happen tomorrow?


John Horton McDermid: Mr. Speaker, I am glad he asked that because I can say the minister did that a few weeks ago.
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The Minister of Employment and Immigration has a project now in New Brunswick. One of the problems, both technically and philosophically, is that it is a wonderful theory until we come to the employers because there is a union in there. The union says: "Look. Last guy on, first guy off."
If that report is thoroughly read, it will be seen that although we made those types of recommendations we listed all the problems. Canada for so many years has always had the luxury of importing its skilled labour. Because of that, we never really established good apprenticeship programs because when industry needed people, boom, off to England, off to Germany, off to Italy, off to France, off to Portugal, bring them in, set them up.
Today that same luxury is not there. We are behind in our training. Canadian businesses spend one-half of 1 per cent of their income on training. The United States of America spends twice that, about 1 per cent. Japan spends 2 per cent. That is four times what our businesses spend on training and retraining.
It has to change. I agree with the hon. member. We said that in our report but there are so many problems in getting employers to do that. Right now, when you say that you want to train somebody on the job, they say that right now, they have no work for them to train them on, or they say that they need somebody who is really specialized.
I might add one of the other problems in that report that has to do specifically with the hon. member's question is that industry does not plan for the future. This is one of the things my friend from Calgary West would tell you. I am sure the chairman from Montreal would tell you the same thing.
When the industries were asked: "What kind of a person are you going to need three or four years from now," they could not tell us what they needed. They could tell us what they needed next week, but they did not know what they would need four years from now. A person cannot be trained in a week to take a job.
There has to be attitudinal changes. I say to the hon. member for Broadview-Greenwood, I believe that report is as fresh today as it was back in 1981-82. I have no disagreement with that.

June 5, 1992
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That is why the emphasis on training is coming from this government and the money is being put forward for training. But we need more in the workplace as well.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to rise and speak on this motion this afternoon.
The debate has been quite interesting. It certainly has highlighted some of the problems that the largest province in Canada is now facing, problems that have been created in large part by the fiscal and economic policies of this government.
I just want to go back to a few comments other people have made and then come to the things I want to say myself.
One of the interesting things a previous speaker from Calgary was talking about is that this is a world-wide recession and that many countries are having downturns in their economies. The United States is suffering, Japan is suffering and other countries are suffering. There is some truth in that.
But there are also many areas where that is not true. Canada has lost 23 per cent of its industrial and manufacturing jobs. In that same period of time, the United States has lost 6 per cent. So in the Canadian economy Canadian manufacturing is shrinking by 23 per cent. The bulk of those jobs or a great number of them would be in the industrial heartland of Ontario.
The United States has suffered 6 per cent. Now that is quite a dramatic difference. It is said that in the free trade agreement the United States has lost jobs. Yes, it probably has in the same period of time. But it has lost 6 per cent and we have lost 23 per cent.
The member for Calgary Southwest also talked about Japan's economic downturn. Well, I happen to have been there a few months ago and I hate to inform the hon. member but there is a shortage of workers in Japan. There is a shortage of skilled, unskilled, any variety of workers. Japan, for the first time in its history, has to deal with the problem of foreign or itinerant workers. There are now somewhere in excess of 300,000 people from Baluchistan, Pakistan working in Japan. Many of them are there illegally but industries are dependent upon them.
So, when this government gets up and says that it is a world-wide problem and we have nothing to do with it, it really should examine this recession and its impact.
We went into the recession earlier, we went into it deeper, and we are going to stay in it longer. That is because of the government policies of introducing the GST, which has crippled our retail industry, because of the free trade deal, which has devastated our total balance of payments, and because of our high interest rate, which is still higher than in the United States. It has kept our dollar artificially high, thus making exports much more difficult and imports cheaper. This has been kept up over all the years that the Tories have been in power.
It has created difficulties, particularly in the province of Ontario, in the industrial heartland of Canada. So while the province is having economic difficulties because of the economic conditions created by this government, what has the government done to assist the province and the people?
I want to talk about just a couple of things that the government has done. The federal government of course has cut back on the Established Programs Financing which should be there for the provinces to assist in health care and post-secondary education, that great thing the government talks about, education.
There was a formula in place. The formula was based on so much going to the provinces increased by the increase in gross national productivity. It was not by expenditures, not by anything else, but as the country got more wealthy the money was to be transferred to the provinces based on the creation of additional wealth.
What happened? It started back under the Liberals. The Liberals decided that they had the formula but they did not like it and so they started cutting back. Even before the Tories came to power the cutbacks for Ontario amounted to nearly $300 million lost in 1982-1983 and another $360 million lost in 1983-1984. Today the losses are up to $2.6 billion a year. That should have been coming to that province based on the increase in the wealth of this country. A total of $11 billion was cut from the province, not only from health care but also from post-secondary education.

This is at a time when government member after government member stands up and says: "One of the things that is going to save Canada and guarantee the future of young Canadians is for them to get an education". So the government cut back the money going to the provinces for post-secondary education. It was cut back dramatically in the case of Ontario.
Look at what has happened in Ontario as the impact of this recession hits it in terms of the number of people on unemployment insurance or relying on income assistance.
The government anticipated this recession quite nicely because three years ago, it bailed out of any responsibility for directly financing or even partially financing the unemployment insurance system. It dumped that responsibility on employees and employers. That includes small business, municipal infrastructures, hospitals, schools which had to come up with the additional money.
Even with that the government then reduced the number of weeks a person could qualify for UI, it increased the number of weeks they had to work to get UI, and even with that in Ontario the number of people collecting UI went up dramatically to over 23 per cent from November 1990 to November 1991. The number of people who exhausted their UI in November last year was 32,000 which is up 111 per cent over the previous year.
What happens to the exhaustees? They have to go on income assistance. The income assistance case-loads have gone up dramatically. The case-loads are up to a point where there are now nearly 600,000 people receiving income assistance in the province, an increase of 32 per cent from January 1991. That is the number of cases. The number of individuals involved is 1.131 million. That is 1.131 million people receiving welfare.
Of course the federal government realized that it had sloughed off its responsibility under unemployment insurance. It had dumped it down to the provinces, to welfare costs. But lo and behold, it was responsible for 50 per cent of the cost of welfare and thought: "Aha, we cannot have that. We cannot be held responsible for the unemployed. We cannot be responsible for mothers looking after children. We cannot be held responsible for the damage we have caused. We will have to limit the
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amount the provinces can claim so it is no longer 50/50. We will limit the increase to 5 per cent." It knew full well that the increase in demand was around 32 per cent to 35 per cent but it would limit its liability to 5 per cent.
What does that cost the province of Ontario? The costs to the province of Ontario amount to an accumulated total of something in excess of $3.5 billion. In 1990-91 it was $400 million and in 1991-92 it is $1.3 billion. In 1992-93 it will be $1.8 billion.
The federal government said that it was not only washing its hands of the responsibility for creating this recession, it was not only washing its hands of trying to create employment and get people back to work, but it was going to systematically slough off to the provinces the financial responsibility for the people who have been so adversely affected. It sloughed off in terms of post-secondary education, health care, the number of people on income assistance and those receiving other types of support.
The government did not stop there. There are now other areas where it is sloughing off on the provinces. It has totally cancelled the co-op housing program and its responsibility to provide social housing. It is now cutting back on other social housing programs. We now have cutbacks in social housing right across this country.
It affects Ontario specifically by reducing the number of units being built by 1,957. That is nearly 2,000 units. This has an impact on people's lives. It comes at a time when CMHC has estimated that 560,000 Canadians need social housing to obtain adequate, affordable housing. With 560,000 people needing housing, what has this government done but cut back. It also cuts back on jobs because housing is one of the fastest generators of jobs in this country. It is labour-intensive construction. It employs people directly in the trades, in home building, in the supply industry supplying materials, in the manufacturing industry manufacturing materials, light fixtures, air conditioning systems, furnaces, everything.
It also has a multiplier effect very quickly because if those people are working they buy from the retail stores, they eat out in restaurants and there is a very quick acceleration of employment. Housing is probably one of the best investments a government can make to stimulate the economy.

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There are other things that the federal government has done. I want to just briefly compare some of the things that the federal government has done and what the Ontario government has done in spite of the fact that the offloading has been on it.
Ontario started a job training fund in which it put in $1.1 billion over three years. It expects to create 100,000 jobs and provide training for another 800,000 people. An additional $930 million for worker retraining and adjustment is being scheduled for 1992-93. The federal government cut $100 million from the Canadian Jobs Strategy Program. It has no momentum to try to deal with the high unemployment. The Ontario government immediately committed to building 20,000 new non-profit housing units. The figure in the street is 2.12 person years of labour, work, for every housing unit, plus the spin-off, which is probably three or four times that.
What did the federal government do? It cancelled the co-op program and it cut 2,000 housing units from the social housing program.
Infrastructure programs: The Ontario government immediately put in $34 billion in capital funding for schools, roads, homes for the aged, and other public facilities. This will support 67,000 jobs in 1992-93 alone.
What has the federal government done? It has ignored calls by all of the municipalities, all the mayors across this country, to fund a municipal infrastructure program on a shared cost basis with the provinces, the municipalities and the federal government.
This is municipal infrastructure that must be done. These are not luxuries. These are things that if we do not do it now they are going to cost us more in three or four or five years to do. These are basic sewers, roads, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, schools, all of the things that form the heritage that our kids need to make the community strong, to provide the economic base and the economic infrastructure for our small businesses and our industries.
This motion in one sense is very timely today. It focuses on the real difficulties being experienced by people right across Canada, and certainly by people in the province of Ontario. It shows that this government is
either lacking in the will to solve the economic problem or the knowledge of how to solve it.


Dennis Joseph Mills: I cannot help it, but when I get an opportunity to ask a question of the New Democratic Party, I cannot resist the temptation.
The member talks about many of the problems that we are having in the economy today. One of the problems that we are having is the fact that there has been almost a 50 per cent reduction in the amount of foreign investment that has come into the province of Ontario. One of the reasons why there is a hesitancy to invest in Ontario right now is because of the uncertainty created by the labour legislation that is being put forward by the NDP government.
I want to be perfectly clear to this House and to the member that we are not anti-labour here. We are not talking about that. The member is a fair member and I know that he understands that. But 85 per cent of the jobs that are created in the province of Ontario are created by small and medium-sized businesses. There is a skittishness out there in the market right now because of this labour legislation which, rather than advancing the cause of labour, seems to be frightening off entrepreneurs and investors. Does the member not think that part of the problem we are having in the province of Ontario is as a result of what appears to be an almost indifferent attitude toward small and medium-size business and some of the difficulties they are having? I am talking about a kind of indifferent attitude from the NDP Government of Ontario toward that sector of our economy?
Could the member try to explain it to this House and to the people of Canada and specifically to Ontarians? I cannot understand the proposed advantages of this labour legislation that the province is putting forward at this time.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to have that question. One of the things that I want to make sure the member understands is that the New Democratic Party is probably the greatest supporter of small business in Canada and has been over the last number of years.
We realize that the generation of jobs in this country has been by small business. If we take a look at the jobs that were created up until the point of this recession,

most of those jobs were created by companies employing less than 100 people.
One of the things that we are also aware of is that many of the difficulties that small businesses have experienced in this country is because of the legacy that they have inherited from the Liberals and the Tories, particularly the tax unfairness of the tax system created by the Liberals. They at the national level particularly created tremendous tax loopholes for the very wealthy and the big multinational corporations. Who had to pick up the slack of those big tax loopholes? The average Canadian.
Small businessmen and small businesswomen are average Canadians. I know. I ran companies prior to being elected.
We have in Ontario a legacy left by the provincial Liberal government of not only a whole backlog of economic problems in terms of unfair taxation, but also a whole backlog of things that it never got around to doing that it should have done. One of them was to update and modernize labour legislation.
Even the Liberal leader in the Ontario legislature yesterday admitted the only thing that she could think of to say that was wrong with the bill that was being proposed was the fact that it was poor timing. It was good legislation, but poor timing. The Liberals and the Conservatives had 20 years to bring it in. That was poor timing and it will always be poor timing.
The New Democrats are certainly willing to bring forward and modernize labour legislation to bring back economic stability and a fair labour climate within the province of Ontario, as they will do in Saskatchewan, as they will do in British Columbia and as they will do in Canada when they form the next government.


Maurizio Bevilacqua: Mr. Speaker, now that we have established some of the weaknesses of the Government of Ontario, we perhaps could give a further analysis of what they are doing or should I say not doing on behalf of young people.
The member spoke at length about the importance of youth in Canada and indeed in the province of Ontario. I have a couple of questions. We have two examples of NDP governments, one in British Columbia and one in Ontario. On the one hand the same member that speaks
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to the issue of student support and support for young people must realize by now that the latest budget by the Ontario New Democratic Party basically stated that there was going to be a $10 million cut in Ontario's student assistance plan at a time when young people are desperately looking for work.
On the other side, in British Columbia we have another premier who has cancelled a very successful environmental youth corps for young people.
The NDP must come to grips with reality. We cannot be speaking and saying on the one hand. When we analyse exactly what is done I will tell you that we are suffering on both ends of the country.
We have a federal government that is Conservative, and we have a provincial government that is NDP. I will tell you that times are tough in the province of Ontario. We would like to soon have an election to re-establish things and have some order in this country.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, I was just looking at the figures that I have here in terms of the loss of federal revenue for post-secondary education.
Health and post-secondary education amounts to $2.6 billion in Ontario this year. One-third of that is for post-secondary education. That is around $800 million. It is not surprising that if they have $800 million less coming from the federal government that they have to curtail this by $10 million.
The bulk of those cuts in transfer payments started under the Liberal administration in 1977. It did it again in 1982 when it cut back on the revenue guarantee. It did it in 1983.
In British Columbia, one-third of all of the cuts to post-secondary education and health care that are now in existence came because of the Liberal administration in the early 1980s and not because of the Tories.
It was well documented. It is there. The Liberal government in the early 1980s started the erosion of health care and post-secondary education in its cutbacks to the provinces and all that happened is that the Tories learned from the Liberals.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: One more short question.

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René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I listened to my hon. colleague talk about Ontario and how short we are of money and at the same time about more government spending. He had a litany that took him 20 minutes to illustrate government spending. I would just like to give him a few statistics and ask him to respond.
About 10 years ago the budget in Ontario was $18 billion. Let us inflate that budget and go back 10 years in Ontario. We did not have a crowded health care system. We did not have an under-funded school system. We did not have an infrastructure that was collapsing. In fact things in Ontario were generally not bad relative to all those things that the member was talking about.
It spent $18 billion. Inflate that. That takes it to $28 billion in today's dollars. Add $5 billion because the population of Ontario has grown. That takes it up to $33 billion.
Would the member mind explaining to me why this year in Ontario they have to spend $52 billion to give in Ontario what 10 years ago $33 billion would have bought?


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, I think we should take a look at the history of increased spending and look at it particularly when Bob Rae inherited the terrible mess that was left over by the Liberal administration about 18 months ago.
The increase in the spending in those years was dramatic. That is where the difficulty is. During the boom years when Ontario should have been budgeting and planning for the economic downturn, it should have been building up reserves and doing all of the positive things. It should have made sure that its infrastructure was in place and that there were proper roads and schools and all of those things. It blew it. It frittered it away.
The Liberals just did not know how to spend. I want to contrast that to exactly what happens in Sweden under a democratic socialist government. It built into the economy mechanisms that during the boom times when things were good companies were forced to put aside so much money that they could then, when things were down, bring out for economic expansion.
They were forced to put aside money so that when things went down, job training and job creation could be brought out. You cannot expect to deal with the crisis and the mess left by this Tory and Liberal government after 25 years in Ontario and expect Bob Rae to solve it in 18 months. Give him five years and he will solve it and he will also be re-elected to serve as an NDP premier with Audrey McLaughlin as the NDP Prime Minister.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I have a very short supplementary here from the hon. member for Broadview- Greenwood.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, it will be a short supplementary. The New Democratic Party member made this reference that Liberals were not sensitive to small business. I just want to remind him and this House and the people of Canada that under Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, there were more small business start-ups in this country than in all the years of government put together. We should never forget the fact that it was under the Liberal Prime Minister that the Small Business Loans Act came into play. The expansion of the Federal Business Development Bank, not to mention numerous other incentives, used the power of entrepreneurship to put people back into the work force.
I remember when the member for Winnipeg South Centre was the minister of employment, he came out with that very successful NEED program. It put close to
330,000	Canadians back to work in a 90-day period during the last recession. We used small business. The NDP should just read the facts.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: Mr. Speaker, just before I answer that question, the Liberals and Tories seem to be enjoying this questions and comments period. I would ask for unanimous consent of the House to extend this period for another ten minutes so that I can continue.
It is probably true that under Mr. Trudeau there were probably more small businesses created than at any other time. They were probably all advertising firms or consulting firms that worked for the Liberal party.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. members:: No.


Kenneth David Atkinson: Mr. Speaker, I
appreciate the opportunity to speak today on the subject
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of the difficulties faced by the residents of Ontario. After that last exchange it is somewhat difficult to even respond.
If I may just digress for a moment, I might say that the labour legislation proposed by the NDP government of Ontario is causing some concern. As was mentioned by the member for Broadview-Greenwood, it certainly is in the area of investment in the province of Ontario.
There is one particular company in St. Catharines which is a multinational corporation which has kept it quiet, but made it clear, that there is no further investment to be made in their particular organization in Ontario at the present time. In fact, after reviewing the legislation, that may continue as well. That is the type of thing that is occurring in the province of Ontario now.
In addition, the member spoke about the tax system. It is very interesting that promises were made such that the tax system would be reformed. They had a commission on fair taxation. They were going to have a minimum tax on corporations. Lo and behold, when they looked at it they found out that maybe corporations were not going to have a minimum tax. Maybe they were paying their just due and perhaps putting an extra burden on them would affect their competitiveness.
It is surprising how the strictures of government seem to change the viewpoints and promises that are made during an election campaign. I am sure people will keep that in mind as they review these various matters.
Obviously, it has been a difficult time over the last few years. There have been difficult social and economic circumstances and, of course, this is extended to the province of Ontario as well. As my riding is in the province of Ontario, we have had some difficulties also. However, to say that it results from the negligence of the government and to lay it entirely at the feet of the government is not being completely above board.


James Capsey (Jim) Karpoff: I am sure it is.


Mr. Milliken:: Which government?


Kenneth David Atkinson: Let us look at some specific circumstances. My community has been hurt by the recession and by what has gone on.
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The announcement a few months ago that 2,300 jobs were going to be lost because of the closing of a General Motors foundry in St. Catharines was obviously devastating to the community. The immediate knee-jerk reaction was to blame the free trade agreement. That is interesting.
The auto pact has been in effect since 1962. It has done wonders for the North American automobile industry and the automobile industry in Canada has benefited greatly. It integrated the entire North American automobile market with certain safeguards, as they are called. One of those safeguards is that we will continue to produce as many cars as we consume here in Canada. The interesting fact is that we produce almost double the amount of cars we consume in Canada at the present time. We have benefited greatly from the auto pact.
The other safeguard is that the big three automakers are able to import parts from offshore duty free if they maintain a 60 per cent Canadian content level on the cars produced here above that which existed in 1962. They have always done that and they have continued to do that.
Mr. Speaker, I know you realize that you do not mix that with the 50 per cent content rule that exists in the free trade agreement. That does not apply to the big three although the big three have always maintained much more than that 50 per cent North American content.
On the day the announcement was made about those lost jobs in St. Catharines it is interesting that approximately 15,000 jobs were lost in the United States on the same day. The simple fact is that there is an overcapacity in the automobile market. This overcapacity has come about as a result of the imports. They are making greater and greater inroads into the North American market over what the North American automobile manufacturers are producing.
Unfortunately, a lot of that was the result of people thinking the quality of North American cars was not as good as the imports for quite a period of time. The big three have made certainly a great effort in order to improve their quality and the quality has improved. They are trying to win back their market but they have not been able to win back that market share. General Motors was set up throughout North America for a certain market share. That market share has been lost. Whether

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it will be regained or not is something we will have to wait and see.
Pessimists would say they are not going to regain that market and as a result the industry has to rationalize down to the capacity they need in order to meet the market demands. They have done that and as a result St. Catharines is going to be affected by that.
It would nice if people would purchase North American cars and get back to the capacity that previously existed. Then there would not be any pressure on them to close the foundry in St. Catharines. The foundry in St. Catharines cannot be expanded and as a result there are larger foundries n the United States that can take on the capacity that is necessary to meet the demands of the marketplace. The foundry in St. Catharines was modem and efficient, yet because of its mere size, this is causing the difficulties.
I also might mention that the foundry represents a portion of the entire factory in St. Catharines. It is not the closing of the entire factory. There are still approximately 6,000 jobs there, but of course they have to justify their existence just as the company in Oshawa has to justify remaining intact within the General Motors system.
The auto pact has worked well for us. It is intact. To say in a knee-jerk way that the loss of those jobs is a result of the free trade agreement is not being intellectually honest and cannot be allowed to continue in that manner.
Obviously we would like to save those jobs and see other jobs created. That is going to take an effort on the part of all of us in working together. To lump those 2,300 jobs together and say that that is a result of the free trade agreement is just not correct. These are the kinds of figures that the opponents to the free trade agreement come up with.
In the North American free trade negotiations-and this is where we may have an internal debate within Ontario-it would be nice to see the North American content be increased for the cars that are able to be exported duty free to the United States. I certainly would like to see a figure of 60 or 65 per cent come out of the North American free trade agreement. That will be beneficial to a community such as St. Catharines. There
will be an internal debate within Ontario with the import manufacturers as to whether that is going to be beneficial in their particular case. Something such as that would certainly help the North American automobile industry and I will be watching very closely for that.
That was one example of what has happened. The knee-jerk reactions of some people indicates that happened as a result of the free trade agreement when it is not a function of the free trade agreement. The auto pact is intact. There is an over-capacity in the North American market. To say that those jobs were lost, to lump them in with all the other jobs that were lost, and say it is because of the free trade agreement is not correct. In a lot of instances that is what is occurring in other areas as well.
There have been losses as a result of the free trade agreement, as the Minister of State indicated. There were losses as a result of the implementation of the auto pact as well.
It was interesting that a union leader came before the St. Catharines city council when I was there and said: "You cannot allow the free trade agreement to go ahead". We debated and asked: "What was your initial reaction to the auto pact?" He said: "We were opposed to it. We did not like it. We thought it was going to be bad for us". We asked: "What is your reaction now?" His answer was: "Under no circumstances can you allow the auto pact to be affected by the free trade agreement". It was not. I asked: "What happened to you when the auto pact came into effect?" His answer was: "I was driving cab for a while". He was driving cab for a while because the plant in St. Catharines, which had made all the components for cars produced in Canada at that particular time, switched over to simply producing engines. It had longer production runs and better quality. After that initial restructuring it resulted in more jobs being created.
More cars are produced in Canada than we consume. We have been a net beneficiary of the auto pact. Similar benefits will flow from the free trade agreement but there is going to be a period of restructuring. A recession and an over-capacity in the automobile market in North America cannot be used as excuses to say that the free trade agreement is not working. To say that is to be intellectually dishonest.
June 5, 1992

I am glad to see that the Liberals have changed their position. Now they are saying that the free trade agreement should be renegotiated. It will be interesting to see what points they say they are going to renegotiate. However, accepting the free trade agreement and accepting the globalization that has occurred it is gratifying to see they have realized that is going to be their position. That was the position enunciated by their government House leader in this House during previous debates.
Free trade has benefited the Niagara peninsula. One industry that has really benefited is the grape and wine industry. During the negotiation of the free trade agreement it was widely assumed that the grape and wine industry would be a big loser as a result of the free trade agreement. There was no protection for the grape and wine industry and it had to rationalize very quickly.
It is interesting that it has produced high quality products and this year it has seen its market share jump drastically. It used to be that all surplus grape products were purchased by the federal government. Unfortunately, the grape and wine industry went through a period where it produced what might be called "pop wines" and so on, and again it developed a reputation in terms of the quality of its products that was not the best.
As a result of the free trade agreement and the Ontario legislation preventing Lambrusca grapes from being put into the wines it has now developed quality wines that are winning awards around the world. Entrepreneurs have realized that and moved in and used the grapes produced in the Niagara peninsula to secure these awards around the world.
An example is Don Ziraldo at Inniskillin Wines. His ice wines have won many awards.
This year there was not any surplus, the industry sold its entire grape product. Ontario wines are being sold in the United States and they are being sold in England. Unfortunately interprovincial trade barriers in this country prevent Ontario wine from being sold to Quebec and other provinces. It is easier for Ontario wine to get into the United States and even England than it is to get into the provinces of this country.
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The result of the free trade agreement is that the industry has become more competitive, has produced better wines, and has succeeded. The fact that it cannot even sell in various provinces makes no sense. In that regard I certainly hope the constitutional negotiations succeed and we do create a true common market among Canadian provinces.
We spoke about training earlier today, and I think we all agree that training is most important. We will see what occurs from that particular aspect. The constitutional proposals indicate that the provinces will take over all training. That is something that causes me some concern because the federal government has done a commendable job in the training area.
It was interesting that in the testimony before the Beaudoin-Dobbie committee when the individuals who head the training assistance boards came before the committee they indicated that there certainly was enough money in all the provinces and the federal government for training. It was a matter of directing it. The provincial government itself has its skills training within 10 different departments. It is in the process of bringing those under one umbrella. However, the turf wars that will go on are going to hurt the individuals who need training. That is something we have to deal with.
The motion also refers to the social situation here in Ontario. I would like to touch on that briefly. My community has been hurt very badly recently by the deaths of two young girls and by what appears to be the accidental death of a third young lady. It has created a great deal of fear and anxiety about our system of law and order and the safety of our streets. This random violence has to be something that we all condemn, especially violence against women.
I am glad to see that the federal government is putting money into such things as transition houses and other things that will fight violence against women. However, there is also a role to be played through our justice system. I am glad that the federal government has taken some steps in that regard. They include the Extradition Act amendments which prevent individuals such as Charles Ng and Joseph Kindler from getting the benefit of being in our country and having the protection of our system here.

June 5, 1992
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There is much discussion about the Young Offenders Act as well. It is interesting that the penalty for murder in the Young Offenders Act has been increased. Some people do not feel that is quite enough. There are jury considerations as to why the penalty of five years less a day was taken. Of course we should continue to review the young offenders' system. Perhaps through a system of education people will see that this system is not as lax as some seem to feel at the present time.
There is no provision for parole under the Young Offenders Act. Every sentence that is handed out under the Young Offenders Act is expected to be served for that entire term. Compared to an adult sentence, in a lot of instances the young offender is serving more time than the adult offender for a similar offence.
With regard to corrections, the corrections bill has been passed. I would like to read an editorial from the St. Catharines Standard, which says:
Judges should get a little more power and police should get a little relief as a result of a long overdue bill passed last week in the Commons.
Only criminals will regret the proposed law which will make it more difficult for violent criminals to get parole from prison. Victims and their families will welcome the fact that they will be provided with more information about offenders and their movements on parole or day passes, in addition to being allowed to attend parole hearings and give their views, regardless of a prisoner's wishes.
Defence lawyers and prisoners' rights advocates have criticized the bill, claiming it is a political over-reaction to a mistaken public belief that crime is increasing and the justice system is too lenient.
Fortunately, those who dispense justice and advocates of the rights of victims and society have finally had their voices heard, and Parliament has finally acted accordingly. It only remains for the Senate to do the same.
Improvements have been made and will continue to be made in the justice system. They include stronger firearms control, as well as the proposed rape shield law which is to be brought before this House. Also there is the drug strategy which is ongoing. I understand my friend from Scarborough-Rouge River discussed crack-houses. That certainly is something that must be considered in the justice area.
We have difficulties but we cannot allow them to darken our viewpoint and think that we are not going to be successful in this province and in this country. We are
going to be successful. There are many things that we can look forward to.
For my particular community the free trade agreement will provide opportunities that will be available in that community. We cannot turn our back on it and say that we do not want to have free trade in this globalized economy.
It is interesting that the NDP say that it wants to have none of it, that it wants to abrogate the free trade agreement. The opposite of the free trade agreement is tariff barriers around this country, tariff barriers around a country of 27 million people. That is not a sufficient market. It was at one time. It was during Macdonald's era and so on. It is not sufficient.
If we want to build tariff barriers around the country and throw a dispute resolution mechanism aside we do it at our peril. It has been negotiated so that we have access to the U.S. market and we have a dispute resolution mechanism. We do not want to return to tariff barriers. We do not want to return to a trade war.


An hon. member:: Go to GATT.


Kenneth David Atkinson: The member says go to GATT. That was the argument that was used during the election campaign. What has happened? We have not been able to reach a resolution at GATT.
What were we going to do? Were we going to just sit there and not do anything? Were we going to allow ourselves to just be dependent on GATT with our largest trading partner? Could the House imagine what would happen to this country? Could the House imagine how bad this recession would be now if we did not have the free trade agreement?
I am glad that the Liberals have finally seen the light, reversed their 1988 position and said that they are going to support the free trade agreement with negotiations. We are waiting to see what they want to change. However, do not throw away the one opportunity that we have to make this country better. Do not depend on GATT. We have seen that. We are going to try to negotiate it but do not depend on it, because it is not coming about. We certainly hope it will but it has not at this point in time.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret the hon. member's time has expired.


Dennis Joseph Mills: Mr. Speaker, I first want to congratulate my colleague from Scarborough-Rouge River who advanced this motion on the economy today on behalf of all members in the Liberal Party. I thought it was actually quite a constructive day. I think that Canadians will have a lot to digest when they review the tapes this evening.
I want to address the member for St. Catharines who always adds to the level of debate in this House. I say that, however I could not let the people of Canada think that we are in support of the government's position on free trade. While the government's position is a deal at any price our position is quite different. If we cannot correct the flaws in the free trade agreement-and our member for Winnipeg-St. James has said this repeatedly, and I know the NDP are playing this cute little game saying that we are in bed with the government-then we would call for the six month abrogation.
I know there is only a second left, but I would like to salute the member on his comments about law and order. I know it must be a very difficult time for his community because of the tragedies that have happened there. I would urge him to urge his colleagues to bring some amendments to the Young Offenders Act forward to this House at the earliest possible moment. All of us on all sides of the House would be behind him.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I believe those were all comments, but if the hon. member has a little rebut he can go ahead. I will listen to him for 30 seconds.


Kenneth David Atkinson: Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his comments, but I am going from what his House leader indicated here. They said they are going to abrogate it if it cannot be renegotiated.
My hon. friend is a business person. He knows what it is like to negotiate a commercial agreement. He also knows about the give and take that has to go on in that regard.
We would certainly welcome their indication, probably before the North American free trade agreement, as to what they would like to see changed. That would be helpful.
Private Members' Business


Dennis Joseph Mills: Chapter 14.


Kenneth David Atkinson: One of the things I would like to see changed is the content on automobiles. I would love to see it go to 60 per cent or 65 per cent as I indicated in my speech. If that occurred, that would be fine. Let us not have these amendments that appear to me are going to be made in the NAFTA and would go back into the free trade agreement, and then have the Official Opposition come forward and say: "Those are not the ones that we want. We want something else".


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: It being four o'clock p.m., it is my duty to inform the House that pursuant to Standing Order 81(17), proceedings on the motion have expired.
Pursuant to Standing Order 30(7), the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's Order Paper.



PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS


Ron J. Duhamel: that Bill C-331, an act to amend the Excise Tax Act (books), be read the second time and referred to a legislative committee in the Economics envelope.
He said: Mr. Speaker, at the outset I would like to ask the Chair if there is unanimous consent to have this bill made a votable item so that Canadians will know where their member of Parliament stands with respect to the taxing of books and reading materials in Canada.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret there is not unanimous consent.


Ron J. Duhamel: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I shall try again later.
I am pleased that at long last I am being given the opportunity to correct what I believe is a gross injustice in law. That gross injustice is the application of the goods and services tax on books and reading materials. It is an absolutely insensitive measure on the part of govern-

Private Members' Business
ment. I would hope that we could set partisan politics aside and look at this in an objective and open way.
It is a bad policy. It is contraty to fundamental, basic, democratic principles. This country has never had such a tax and most western countries do not have one. In fact Ireland tried it and the sales dropped so dramatically that it had the good common sense to remove it immediately. It is not only a bad policy, it is also extremely bad for business. There have been loss of jobs and loss of sales. We have demoralized our creative Canadians, those who write and create for a living, and we have picked on students who are very often those who need the most help. Some students in fact would not mind paying a tax I suppose if that money were returned to the coffers, but if you add that to the reductions in transfer payments, they are really very unhappy about what is happening.
It is a bad policy, it is bad for business, and I shall explore those areas with my colleagues, but it is also bad government.
It is bad government because I have received, and so have my colleagues, thousands of petitions asking the government to remove this undemocratic tax on books and reading materials. I went to an internal committee to see whether or not this could be made a votable item. I respected every single criteria which was before me. Yet the committee did not have the courage to make it a votable item.
I have requested a second time just now and I have been refused. How in the world could one consider that good government?
I am sure that Canadians will be extremely interested in what is going to happen here today. I want to remind my colleagues that it was in October 1990 that the Prime Minister indicated there might be some flexibility in this measure. It was in that same month that the then Minister of Finance indicated subsequent to implementation of the tax that there would be an opportunity to review it and to see whether or not it should be eliminated. The time is now. That was 20 months ago. Surely it is now time to look at this.
What has been the impact of that tax? What has been the impact? We can document every single point made here. It has reduced reading in Canada. It has driven
Canadians to shop elsewhere. You have heard about cross-border shopping. It has harmed our writers, our publishers, our bookstores, our libraries and our students.
No doubt it has contributed in its own way to reducing literacy in a country that already has too many functionally illiterate Canadians. That costs the nation over $10 billion per year. It has also contributed to a loss of jobs, many, many jobs. Some publishers are no longer around and some writers can no longer continue.
Let us not kid ourselves. This goods and services tax is a tax on literacy. It is a tax on education, training, retraining, on research and development. It is a tax on learning, knowledge, culture and it is indeed a tax on democracy itself. The goods and services tax is taxing books, magazines and newspapers out of the hands of Canadians.
Let me quote some facts. Book sales dropped 10 per cent the first year of the GST. Subscription response dropped by 50 per cent immediately after the GST. News-stand sales of magazines dropped 10 to 15 per cent last year. The tax on reading has caused the largest drop in Canadian newspaper circulation in 50 years. Circulation dropped 5 per cent last year. Interestingly enough, during the 1981-82 recession, sales dropped by less than 1 per cent in this particular area.
The goods and services tax is driving Canadians out of the country to buy books and magazines. Bookstore sales in some provinces have dropped 20 per cent since the GST was introduced.
U.S. bookstores report that sales to Canadians in certain sectors increased astronomically after January 1, 1991. One store in Vermont now calls itself "Montreal's best English language bookstore", the best English language bookstore, one store in Vermont. You can be proud of that if you want to, but I am not.
The GST is taking books, magazines and newspapers out of Canadian libraries. The rebates to those institutions have taken up to six months. When the rebates come back, do they go back to the libraries? Of course not. They go back to the general revenues. Why do they go back to the general revenues? Because of the reductions in transfer payments, the offloading. Of course
June 5, 1992

they feel that they need those revenues. So the libraries are losing those particular rebates in almost all instances.
What is extremely sad as well, quite apart from the astronomical increases in virtually every sector, the GST is silencing Canadian voices. It is a tax on creativity. It is a tax on culture. It is a tax on a fragile industry that is in peril. That is what the government has not understood. The GST gives a 7 per cent advantage to American magazines. A 7 per cent advantage. Tell any business person that they can have a 7 per cent advantage on a competitor and see what they do. They will take advantage of it.
I am told that there are more than 3,000 U.S. magazines that do not charge the GST on subscriptions.
The government cannot even try to collect it. At least 50 million magazines crossed into Canada tax free last year to compete directly with Canadian magazines on which the GST is paid.
The GST also gives a 7 per cent advantage to American books. Books imported by mail are tax free if they cost less than $20.


Don Boudria: Forty dollars.


Ron J. Duhamel: Forty dollars? Thank you. My colleague has corrected me. There has been a change now. It is even better for the Americans and harder for Canadians.
The only major Canadian book club has closed since the GST was introduced. Surely no one is proud of that. The GST stops Canadians from getting the books and magazines they want. Some companies refuse to send books to Canada because of the additional burden.
Others have jacked up the prices so high that we can no longer afford them. These are the results of the goods and services tax on books. The tax on reading is an expensive nightmare to administer. Very often it cannot be collected and when it is collected, it can cost up to $100 per collection, probably not worth the time or the effort.
The GST is isolating Canada from the world. Let me give an example. Book collectors are buying outside the country to avoid the tax. Some foreign dealers refuse to trade with Canada. One Canadian rare book dealer reports that sales have dropped 35 per cent since 1990.
Private Members' Business
During the last recession, sales in this sector grew. As I indicated initially, many countries have refused to tax reading. I want to repeat again. Most western countries do not tax reading. It is seen as a regressive measure, as an insensitive measure, as a measure that goes contrary to basic fundamental human rights and principles.
In our country where we supposedly place a priority on competitiveness, on productivity, on creating a learning culture, clearly this goods and services tax on books and reading materials is inappropriate.
I had indicated that Ireland had tried the tax, and it was smart enough to remove it.

I wish this government could muster the same flexibility and political will, instead of just letting things happen and providing all kinds of arguments I certainly have no intention of supporting.

The GST may only be the beginning. You have heard about the harmonization of the tax with provincial sales taxes. If there is a GST tax on books and reading materials-there is because that is what we are discussing today-and if it is harmonized with the provincial system, then why in the world would there not be an additional tax imposed by the provinces?
I challenge my colleagues to get up and make a guarantee to Canadians that that will not happen.
My colleagues will know as well that we have received thousands of petitions from all over the country, from all socio-economic groups, from all backgrounds who have asked that this undemocratic, insensitive tax that has never been imposed in Canada before be removed immediately because it is contrary to the supposed goals of government: increased and enhanced productivity, more competitiveness and creation of the learning culture.
What does it do? It ignores these petitions. I assure my colleagues, and I would be delighted to table them if they want, that this is but a small sample. Talon Books from Vancouver, B.C. has written a long letter, but I shall quote but one phrase:
I cannot express to you how important this issue remains to book
publishers, book readers and students in Canada.

Private Members' Business That is what Talon Books has had to say.
Oolichan Books from British Columbia also wrote in support of the removal of this tax which it sees as regressive.
I have another communique here from over 300 people from Simon Fraser University who say:
We deeply believe, as do the majority of Canadians, that written or educational materials should not be taxed.
We cannot afford to penalize reading and learning in Canada.
"fixing written materials not only discourages reading, it also discourages foreign publishers from exporting to Canadian distributors, penalizes Canadian publishers and distributors through increased operating costs and import prices, and restricts Canadians' access to and selection of books for their use-
It goes on. Let me just accentuate the next statement: "The costs of ignorance are immeasurable". That is what these people from Simon Fraser University are saying.
I have another communique from the Graduate Students Association of the University of Alberta which supports this bill to remove the goods and services tax on books. It says: "As Canada increasingly will be relying on jobs which demand post-secondary education, and as we move more and more toward a knowledge based economy, a tax on the vehicles of knowledge is doubly regressive".
I have a communique from a constituent, a professor, who shared with me a letter that he had received from an American publisher. The publisher says: "Canadian owners will be priced under other countries from now on rather than the former pricing under the U.S. and Canada label". The publisher explains that this is the result of high administrative costs connected to compliance with the Canadian GST that became effective January 1. Canadian members must also pay the 7 per cent tax on all orders shipped to Canada.
The publisher also says: "We will add the 7 per cent to the invoice we send to the society and the society should instruct members to include the 7 per cent GST in their payment to the society".
The publisher points to high administrative costs in connection with the goods and services tax and as a consequence is raising the prices to Canadian customers.
These price increases range from 14 per cent to 19 per cent.
A French-speaking constituent wrote as follows: [Translation]
"A dark day for Canada! You can count on our support. The GST is inhuman! How could anyone even think of making a case for a tax on reading, as if the revenue it produces could make up for the harm done to freedom of access to the written word!"
An author wrote not long ago: "Books are a gift from the dead to the living to help them live their lives." Need I say more?

I have two others. One is from my constituent, Mrs. Hart, who said: "I sure hope that you have success in getting the GST off books. It is disgusting to have this tax on reading materials". The second is from the Blais in my constituency. These are just excerpts: "We see the tax as a tax on reading. We want to see this particular tax removed from all books and magazines".
A final example is an article in The Globe and Mail that pointed out that the book Clinical Safety and Efficacy from the U.S., a technical publication, cost $110. After having gone through all of the hoops and hurdles that are there today it costs $224.28 Canadian.

Ladies and gentlemen, I think I have made a very clear case for the immediate removal of the GST on books and other learning materials. It is brutal, and it puts a tremendous burden on the industry and on all levels of society in this country. It also contradicts the basic principles of our society, as well as the government's so-called priorities, which are to increase productivity, make us more competitive and create a learning culture. Well, you do not create a learning culture, and you certainly are not going to motivate people with taxes like these.

I would like to complete my remarks with the following statement. I want my colleagues to listen very carefully. I seek unanimous consent of the House to adopt the following motion:
June 5, 1992

That, notwithstanding any standing orders and usual practices of the House, Bill C-331, an act to amend the Excise Thx Act (books), be read a second time and referred to a legislative committee in the Economics envelope.
Do I have that unanimous consent, Mr. Speaker?


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Members have heard the suggestion. Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret there is not unanimous consent.


René John Soetens: Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise on this debate as someone who as a member of the finance committee participated rather extensively in the hearings across Canada when the GST legislation was introduced in this House.
I note the explanatory note in the particular bill introduced by the member for St. Boniface says:
The purpose of this bill is to exempt books from the application of the goods and services tax.
That is fine for the explanation, but if we look at the actual clause to be inserted in the bill it says:
The supply of any book, paper, record, tape or other document published by a publisher.
I presume that not only includes written books but all tapes, records and videos: everything that has anything to do with the recording industry and movie industry. The list would be rather extensive. It is with that in mind I want to make my particular comments.
During the member's presentation he talked about what other countries have done. He referenced Ireland, and I will presume the information he provided on that country is correct. It is interesting in his presentation he would lead us to believe that literacy has in fact been reduced because of the implementation of the GST.
Most countries involved in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development have this kind of tax and in fact tax books. Two countries, Sweden and Denmark, have a value added tax of 20 per cent on books and reading materials. I might point out that neither one of those two countries is known for its high illiteracy rates. In fact probably the opposite is true.
He also suggested several other things relating to the impact of the tax on the cost of books, on students and so on. The member should be aware there are no GST charges applicable on such things as tuition fees or
Private Members' Business
entrance fees to universities or educational institutions. Libraries, schools and universities-I did not hear him mention any one of those three-qualify for a rebate of the GST. The GST has no impact on their cost greater than the existing cost that occurred when the old federal sales tax was in place. This argument that those institutions have somehow seen an added cost is erroneous, to say the least.
I want to comment further. In his presentation he used the word exempt. If one is at all familiar with the legislation, one has to understand that to make a category or a product exempt increases the cost of the product. I realize that is a difficult term, but let us put it this way. All the inputs related to the production of a book, a tape, a magazine or whatever, are produced by business. Businesses qualify for a rebate of all GST they pay on their inputs. The cost of paper they buy and the cost of services they buy, such as telephone, transportation, printing and typesetting, qualify for GST at the present time but at the end of the day they get the GST back.
Under this proposed bill the businesses would not qualify for a rebate of the GST. They would have to absorb that into their costs of operation effectively raising the price, raising the cost of production of all these things to which the member referred. Putting somebody in an exempt category is probably the worst place.
All we need to do is ask the insurance industry, the doctors and other members of the medical profession whether they like being considered exempt. We will not find one that likes being there because effectively it has increased their costs. This bill is proposing to increase the cost to the very industry this member is complaining is under special pressure.
I am not going to debate whether it is under special pressure, but part of the argument the member uses is that people are not prepared to ship books into Canada because of the added burden of the paperwork. That seems to be a real plus for the Canadian book industry. If the industry in the United States is not prepared to send books into Canada because of the paper burden-and I will accept the argument as it was put-the Canadian industry is at an advantage. The U.S. industry is not prepared to participate in shipping products into Canada. Conversely the GST has been good for the Canadian industry, using the very argument the member makes.

June 5, 1992
Private Members' Business
He says that competition does not want to come to Canada.
Let us go back to the exempt status for which he asked. One of the things we faced in our deliberations across Canada was the idea of compliance, the rules on how businesses would implement the GST, how they would sell their products, and how the government would refund the GST to them.
We can just imagine that across the country there are all kinds of small variety stores. Literally everything they sell is taxable under the GST proposal. There are many small gift shops, books stores and department stores. Let us just think where we can buy a magazine, a book, a tape or a film. What they would have to do is segregate their sales. They would have to list all sales that are taxable and keep separate records of all sales that are now exempt under this member's system.


Dennis Joseph Mills: They have to do that now.


René John Soetens: I would argue with the member for Broadview-Greenwood. The store that sells 100 per cent taxable items needs to keep no records. At the end of the month it is simply that everything sold is taxable.


Dennis Joseph Mills: What store is that?


René John Soetens: I can mention all kinds of stores. The member should go over to Eaton's and ask what it sells or go into K-Mart and ask what it sells. He has just to travel this country to see that there are thousands and thousands of gift shops where everything they sell is taxable. He asked: "What store?" There is no shortage of them anywhere in this country.
Everything in the particular store he walks by at the airport as he goes to fly home is taxable. He is now proposing that what it sells in the way of magazines will not be taxable. He is putting a burden on small business to keep a separate record of what is taxable and what is not taxable.
The donut shops of this country are already complaining because if they sell five donuts they have to charge tax and on six donuts they do not.


Dennis Joseph Mills: That is my point.


René John Soetens: Now they have to keep tax records because of that and he is going to say to those donut shops that also sell magazines: "Not only are you going to have to keep tabs when you sell more than six donuts; you are going to have to keep tabs on all the magazines you sell". The donut shops have a problem. With what the member for St. Boniface is proposing, not only would we be placing this problem on the donut shops. We would be placing it on every shop across the country that sells books, magazines, tapes, records, movies and what not.
If I need say nothing else that alone is good enough reason to oppose what the member is recommending in this particular private member's bill. It goes a little further than that.
During the debate that took place on the GST a lot of people came forward and complained about complexity. The simple solution to the complexity problem is to tax everything. There is a substantial group-and I am one of them-that shares the opinion that complexity was required because it was awfully difficult to tax every product that exists in this country. There was a trade-off and in making trade-offs we have to make some decisions. The decision was that books, magazines, tapes and all such other things would be taxable.
The alternative exists. If one wants to describe a particular text book, a book that someone may want to buy because it is a valuable education instrument, one gets into the same problem. One does not want those taxed and somebody can legitimately argue the reason for that. However, I suspect there are certain magazines that people think should be taxed much more heavily.
Although the member's bill does not particularly draw a line as to what is taxable and what is not, obviously it would put in place a supposed benefit by eliminating the tax on literally every product that has anything to do with recording information.
I would say that the tax was fundamentally correct. There are mechanisms to make sure that those who have difficulties at the low end of the scale, low income Canadians, get back enough through the sales tax credit to be able to afford the magazines and books they want. All in all this private member's bill is one that I simply cannot support.
June 5, 1992


Mr. Lyle Dean Mac William (Okanagan-Shuswap):: Mr. Speaker, I am really pleased to get an opportunity to stand and debate Bill C-331. I want to congratulate my hon. colleague, the member for St. Boniface, because I think this is a piece of legislation that is long overdue.
The fact is that the government's imposition of the GST which has been in place for some time now has amounted to an unfair tax on literacy.
In Canada, approximately 30 per cent of our adult population is functionally illiterate. The worst thing that this government could have done is to bring in a tax on reading which amounts to a tax on literacy in this country.
As a result of the imposition of this tax, the publishing industry has been hit extremely hard. Revenues in the industry have plummeted, partly because of the GST as I mentioned and also partly because of this government's made-in-Canada recession that we have been battling for some time now.
Across this country we have seen publishers reporting revenues down some 20 per cent this year as compared to previous years. That is a significant drop in revenues, much of that because of the imposition of the 7 per cent tax on literacy.
The chair of the Don't Tax Reading Coalition indicated that economists in the tax analysis branch of the Ministry of Finance told her: "They put books and magazines in terms of an increase in price resistance on the part of consumers somewhere around one and a half to two times the tax".
What we really are trying to say here if we put it in other words is that a drop in sales will be seen of some one and a half to two times the rate of the tax increase. By the look of the 20 per cent decrease in revenues compared to the 7 per cent increase in tax, we are seeing it is even greater than has been predicted by these economic forecasts.
The government did know at the time it imposed the GST that it would in effect be taxing literacy in this country.
Private Members' Business
I want to add that youth employment, particularly in lower job categories, but for that matter employment in all age categories has not been assisted by this tax on literacy. When we look at youth employment, university students in Canada who are already facing poor employment opportunities and increasing tuition are now faced with the purchase of books costing upward of $100.
It is very seldom in a university course one buys a single book. Often numerous books have to be purchased for a single course. Anyone who has gone to university knows that courses only requiring one textbook are few and far between.
This tax makes it hard on our university students, particularly those having to finance their own education. It is an unfair tax. It is a tax on literacy. It is a tax on opportunity for higher education. It is a tax that should be rescinded.
Countries in all comers of the earth are focusing on the development, the nurturing, and the educational opportunities for their young people. More money is put into schools and education and it forms the basis for a growing fertile mind. That is not the case in Canada. Not only does this country not put more money into education-in fact we see evidence of the federal government withdrawing funds from post-secondary education-but now it also taxes these growing young minds by taxing that which those minds need to grow in the first place and that is the tax on literature and books.
Over a year ago, the Prime Minister mused publicly that this government would reconsider the wisdom of the imposition of the GST on books. In the throne speech last year, I might remind everyone, he gave his commitment to developing a learning culture to enhance Canadian literacy. Yet this same government has refused to entertain the rescinding of this punitive tax on literature and literacy.
The government instead gave the publishing industry a $140 million boost. At the same time it has overtaxed the consumers of the products these industries produce. I would say in terms of this question the government has been anything but consistent.
The book industry is still appealing to this government to repeal the tax. Canadians who buy books just to enjoy them are leaving those books on the shelves because they are getting more and more expensive. The imposi-

June 5, 1992
Private Members' Business
tion of this 7 per cent increase in price has had a substantial effect on the purchase of those materials.
Canadians are cross-border shopping more and more. They are buying books and magazines south of the border because in the United States the cost is lower.
This government has placed Canada in the unenviable position of being one of the very few English-speaking countries in the world to impose a sales tax on reading materials and books for education. Some countries like Ireland tried it, but it quickly realized its mistake and at least had the courage to admit the mistake and rescind the tax. This government has not recognized the mistake. I suspect even if it has, it does not have the courage to do something about it.
The $140 million subsidy to the publishing industry was needed. It is recognized that it was needed, but it is not nearly enough for an industry that has been virtually sold out by this government with the imposition of this punitive tax on literacy.
The Baie Comeau policy which would have strengthened the Canadian publishing industry was simply ignored by this government. This new program, the $140 million fund for book publishing, will not be effective unless it is enforced with vigour.
I would submit that much can be done to assist the book publishing industry in this country. Much can be done to assist the learning culture in this country, and much can be done to assist the opportunity for education for our young people in this country by rescinding this tax.
The government should recognize it made a serious error in taxing literacy. It should have the courage to admit it made a mistake and it should have the courage to rescind its legislation. Yes, it should have the courage to accept the current bill that is before this House and to proceed with that bill.
It is time that this government withdrew the 7 per cent goods and services tax from books and literature and gave the booksellers and publishers in Canada a break. The industry needs more than the token relief that has been proposed.
This is a good piece of legislation. I congratulate my Liberal colleague for introducing it. I would ask that this House consider granting unanimous consent that the bill
be now read a second time and moved immediately to a legislative committee.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: Members have heard the terms of the suggestion. Is there unanimous consent?


Some hon. members:: No.


Don Boudria: Mr. Speaker, I have the opportunity this afternoon to speak on this very important issue. First, I want to congratulate the hon. member for St. Boniface for his foresight in bringing this matter to our attention. Need I remind the House that the member for St. Boniface is an educator. He obviously knows quite a bit about this subject, far more than many of us in this House. He is also a former deputy minister of education. He is a tenure professor at a university as well. He probably has a number of other credentials that this House should know about as well but I will not be describing them this afternoon because I want to get on with describing the bill that our colleague proposes.
The member for St. Boniface very astutely pointed out earlier to us today that the bill in question seeks to correct an injustice, one that other governments elsewhere in the world have corrected.
The hon. member from Winnipeg across the way will no doubt be aware that it was none other than the Prime Minister who promised in a speech that this whole business of taxing books would be examined again.
I would certainly not want to contradict the Prime Minister. I would never want to contradict the Prime Minister, but what I want to do now, and what my colleague wants to do, is take the Prime Minister up on his offer. We want to remove the tax on books, as the Prime Minister wants it.
Perhaps some members across the way will contradict the Prime Minister, but certainly not I or the member for St. Boniface because of our tremendous respect for the Prime Minister. We want to remove the GST on books, as the Prime Minister promised that he would.
My colleague from St. Boniface has talked about the loss of jobs in the Canadian book publishing industry, the Canadian magazine and periodical industry and so on. He is obviously quite right. I want to touch on an issue that has been raised in a peripheral way earlier today, but
June 5, 1992

one which I had been involved in. That is the whole issue of cross-border shopping, because many books are purchased that way.
There were not that many a number of years ago. I suppose we could argue that there were always too many because books are unfortunately shipped in great portions into this country compared to what we can export elsewhere. It is an unfortunate thing but it is going from bad to worse.
Many Canadians are members of book clubs, and some of these book clubs are based outside the country. There used to be a situation in which whatever you bought outside the country you had to pay customs on whenever it entered Canada. However, some four or five years ago the government exempted every purchase coming from outside the country so long as it was coming by mail and it was under $40 from all duties and taxes. That meant that someone could take a large padded shipping envelope and fill it up with books, or whatever number of books you could put in it as long as it totalled less than $40, and send it to a client in Canada.
If the client in Canada purchased $75 worth of books you just divided the books as evenly as you could between two bags and shipped two bags into Canada.


Ron J. Duhamel: Or three or four.


Don Boudria: Or whatever the number is, as my colleague from St. Boniface says. Three or four or whatever the number.
That loophole was in itself a disincentive for Canadians to buy books at home and an incentive to buy them elsewhere.
When the GST was added on top of that, there were two reasons to buy books outside of Canada. There was an exemption from whatever duties there might have been and also an exemption from GST. As you do not pay the GST there is no mechanism for the province to collect the provincial sales tax. However, in any case, I do not know of a province that has a provincial sales tax on books. Nevertheless, there was no way to collect that tax if a province were to have so chosen.
In any case, the GST does apply on books, and it and any duty is not collected.
Private Members' Business
The government now says: "We will fix that because we will now charge the GST and anything else that is applicable on purchases of $20". It has proposed a bill that is at report stage. It should be debated within the next week or so.
Nevertheless someone can still buy a book, or several books, for $19.90 and ship the order into Canada in various packages of $19.90. The government has now applied a $5 surcharge on every purchase coming into Canada by mail. It is an administration fee by the post office and that is not bad in itself, except that the U.S. post office charges roughly $10 in a similar situation.
It charges $8.40 U.S. which is roughly $10 Canadian. Actually, it is about $10.50 with the present value of our currency. If the Canadian government wanted to apply reciprocal rules why did it charge $5 instead of $10? If it really was serious about curtailing cross-border shopping of many goods, including books, it could at the very least have imposed similar fees.

So, Mr. Speaker, in the few minutes remaining to me, I would like to emphasize that this initiative is a bad policy and undemocratic. Of course it is bad for the book publishing industry, for editors and those who publish Canadian books. It creates more unemployment, as if we did not have enough already.
The government does not listen to Canadians, especially since, need I remind hon. members opposite, as I said somewhat jokingly a little earlier, the Prime Minister himself promised a group of Canadians a while ago to review this whole policy of collecting the GST on books. If the Prime Minister was serious then, I think he should take the opportunity in the next few minutes to telephone the members opposite in the lobby and remind them that he made the promise. The hon. member for St. Boniface did not promise Canadians that the GST would not apply to books, neither did the member for Glengarry-Prescott-Russell; the Prime Minister himself did. The member for Winnipeg sitting opposite should remember. I am sorry if I interrupt her to remind her of this fact, but she should know that.

Private Members' Business

The member for Ontario should know that as well, because I am sure the member for Ontario was aware that the Prime Minister made that promise. Both he and his colleague from Winnipeg sitting across the way, who are preparing right now presumably to destroy this good piece of legislation, should know that what my colleague has proposed is a mechanism to achieve that which the Prime Minister himself promised to Canadians.
If promises of the Prime Minister mean anything-


Some hon. members:: Be more accurate.


Don Boudria: Mr. Speaker, could you imagine Tories asking others to be more accurate? The Prime Minister told Canadians that he would look at this issue. If the member across is convinced of what he is saying then let this bill proceed to committee. Let him and any others who still want that tax speak before the parliamentary committee that will deal with it.
If his argument has any sense at all he can make it before all the parliamentarians on the committee. I will make a prediction that the hon. member and others would not risk that. Instead, it is gong to be easier to kill the bill on the floor of the House of Commons than to muster up the intestinal fortitude necessary to defend the policy before one's colleagues in a parliamentary committee. That is the sad reality that we are faced with this afternoon. It is easier to kill the promise of the Prime Minister on the floor of the House than trying instead to defend what it is that the Conservative members are saying they will defend before a parliamentary committee.
We will see in a few minutes just where the strength is of those members. They could right now agree to the motion that my colleague moved earlier today to refer this issue to a parliamentary committee and to study it. They will hear the witnesses from the book publishing industry. They have that opportunity. They have that power this afternoon. They have the full authority to do that. Let us see.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret the hon. member's time has expired. The hon. member for Winnipeg South.


Mrs. Dorothy Dobbie (Parliamentary Secretary to Minister of Consumer and Corporate Affairs and Minister of State (Agriculture)):: Mr. Speaker, I have a great deal of respect for my hon. colleague across the way whose bill we are debating this afternoon. I know that he is an educator and a person with a great deal of concern for people in general and particularly for students.
I want to ask him something before I launch into the rest of my remarks. Perhaps he could cogitate over this. How would he differentiate between what is educational and what is entertainment? Would he exempt from tax such publications as Penthouse or perhaps commercial catalogues. Those are all books and things that people read. Would he exempt from taxation music or adult videos which are educational tools? Videos are educational tools, but some of them perhaps are not educating people in the way that the hon. member has intended in his bill.
There are complications that I would like him to think about. I do not think that he wants us to exempt Sports Illustrated for example from the GST. I think he should think about those things.
We all know that the GST replaced a very destructive tax. It was 13.5 per cent and we all remember those days. When I was the president of the chamber of commerce and in business, business people came before us all of the time saying: "Get rid of this pernicious, underground, hidden tax on manufacturers". At the time that the tax was rescinded and the GST was put in place, it was 13.5 per cent. It was called the silent killer of jobs and there was good reason for that because indeed that is precisely what it did.
The GST actually replaced something that Canadians had been asking for a long time to be replaced with a 7 per cent tax. It is a point of sales tax on a broad base and it is a much fairer way of providing much needed revenues for all of the programs and services that we want in this country. One of these things in particular is education. My hon. colleague across the way would agree that this is a very worth-while activity for governments to engage in funding.
There are exemptions of course to this value-added tax that we put in place to replace the 13.5 per cent manufacturers' sales tax and they are important exemptions. These are exemptions that occur for residential rents for example, and prescription drugs and day care

services. None of these things have the GST applied to them.
In addition to that we have done more. There is a refundable GST credit for families that are earning under $30,000 a year. These are low and modest income families. This credit makes many of those families better off now than they were before the GST was imposed. All of these measures are very helpful to making sure that Canadians on low and modest incomes can access all of the books that they need in order to improve their education.
I think that even the members on the other side of the House will recognize that the GST is a modem and efficient way of raising funds that are needed by governments in order to carry on the business of government and to provide the kind of services that my hon. friend across the way-and the hon. member for Glengarry- Prescott-Russell who has just spoken-will recognize as being things that they themselves taught Canadians to expect.
Certainly we have to find the funds now to pay for these things. The GST is a fair way of doing this.
Of the world's most highly industrialized economies, members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 19 out of 24 countries rely on a value-added tax system in order to do the same things we want to do. That is to have a fair system, one that is modern and meets the needs of a modem world.
Hon. members know that Canada is just one of 48 countries, among them Sweden, Germany, even Japan, which have a value-added tax system. They have come to realize that this is a reasonable way of raising the revenues required to carry on business.
We have to recognize that this is a new world. This is a global community that we live in now, a borderless world. It is no longer possible to live in economic isolation. We can no longer have internal policies and programs that separate us from the the world economy. Therefore, we would not want Canada to fall out of step with those major competitors we have in the rest of the world.
This tax is part of that. This is part of a comprehensive measure that the government has in place to modernize Canada's economy, to make us more competitive so that in the long run, Canadians will be more prosperous.
Private Members' Business
Canadians will be more highly educated because they will have access to more educational materials, including books. This is just one of the measures which will make it possible for Canadians to realize the full potential of the wealth that exists in this country in a more fair and even-handed way.
The GST is undoubtedly the key to strengthening Canada's economy and to working out the fiscal problems which have occurred and grown over the past two or three decades as we taught Canadians to expect more and more from their government.
It is just one of the programs that we have created to try and produce a better standard of living for all of us. Since 1984, we have introduced many measures that would really enhance our economic viability in this country. Even my hon. colleagues would acknowledge that the GST is a more fair and sensible tax. I saw them vote in favour the other day of keeping this intact.
The GST has removed a tax burden from Canadian businesses that is enabling them to become more efficient. I might say that because the federal sales tax was levied at the manufacturers' level, even books suffered to some degree from the underground effects of that tax. If manufacturing equipment was bought on which to print books, federal sales tax and provincial sales tax were paid on that equipment. Or it was paid on inks or on hand cleaners, depending on what was being done. So there was a component of the tax in publications.
In addition to that, it is true that there may be an emotional appeal to removing the GST from books. But as I began by saying, it is an administrative nightmare to try and make a subjective judgment on what is educational and what is not, what should be taxed and what should not.
I believe that most Canadians would not want to see publications like Penthouse magazine or Sports Illustrated exempt from the GST or commercial catalogues exempt from the GST.
The government has put a system in place that gives lower income and modest income Canadians some additional funds to cover the cost added to the price of a book because of the GST. It has done something, and $140 million is quite something, to support the publishing industry in order to keep the cost of books down.

June 5, 1992
Private Members' Business
In order to make sure that people who are in the business of producing books are competitive and that we produce the kinds of books Canadians want to read, we want to reduce the burden of the administration of the tax such as the GST.
My colleagues across the way would agree with us when we say that we support literacy. The GST is not a literacy issue. We have done everything that we can to alleviate any of the possibility of adverse effects of the GST. We all support literacy and the GST is a fair way to raise funds for the future prosperity of our nation.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business-


An hon. member:: Mr. Speaker.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: I regret that it is five o'clock. On a point of order, the hon. member for St. Boniface.


Ron J. Duhamel: Mr. Speaker, I have been denied making this a votable item twice, once by the internal committee and once again today. I have been denied having this bill sent to second reading. I think that we can address the concerns that my colleagues on the government side have voiced and explore others, such as how this might contribute to a united Canada, how much we spend in
this area and how much we collect, so that we can in fact-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: That is debate. Does the hon. member-


Ron J. Duhamel: The Prime Minister has said that he may exempt books from the GST-


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: That is still debate. If the hon. member-


Ron J. Duhamel: I just want to make this request. I seek the unanimous consent of the House to discharge the order, withdraw the bill and have the subject matter referred to the Standing Committee on Finance.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: The hon. members have heard the suggestion. Is it agreed?


Some hon. members:: No.


The Acting Speaker (Mr. Paproski):: It is not agreed.
The time provided for the consideration of Private Members' Business has now expired. Pursuant to Standing Order 96(1) the order is dropped from the Order Paper.
It being five o'clock p.m. this House stands adjourned until Monday next at eleven o'clock a.m., pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).


[Stage Direction]
The House adjourned at 5 p.m.
[Stage Direction]
Monday, June 8,1992