NDP Oppostion Motion – 12 Point Plan to Save Canada

Thursday February 28, 2002

The motion read: That, in response to Canadians’ desire to save Canada as a sovereign nation and strengthen our distinctive contribution in the world, this House calls upon the government to reflect in its budgetary policy the New Democratic Party 12-Point Plan to Save Canada.

1. Enhance Canada’s environment, including a national implementation plan for reducing green house gases, and ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, in 2002.  

2. Strengthen the role of Aboriginal, Métis and Inuit people in the Canadian family.  

3. Reaffirm Canada’s international peace keeping role and rehabilitate Canada’s reputation as respected internationalists.  

4. Re-establish the federal Government as full partner in funding health care and post-secondary education as public, not-for-profit systems.  

5. Implement a comprehensive strategy for the eradication of child poverty.  

6. Ensure all trade agreements include adequate protection for labour standards, and for human rights and the environment.  

7. Enable primary producers and Canadian farm families to compete with foreign subsidies, and reject continental energy and water policies that endanger Canadian control over our natural resources.  

8. Strengthen Canadian communities, large and small, by reversing the deterioration of our municipalities with stable funding and strategic infrastructure investments.
9. Celebrate immigration as a cornerstone of Canada, restoring respect for diversity and humanity in our immigration practices.

10. Reaffirm fair taxes, sound monetary policy and full employment as critical tools for accomplishing our collective economic and social goals, and reject U.S. dollarization.

11. Strengthen pluralistic and democratic discourse by means of appropriate regulation to limit media concentration of ownership and support for Canadian arts, amateur sport and culture.

 Strengthen Canadian democracy through parliamentary and electoral reform, including proportional representation.

    Mr. Bill Blaikie (Winnipeg--Transcona, NDP): Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to speak to the motion brought forward by the NDP caucus today having to do with saving Canada as a sovereign nation and strengthening our distinctive contribution to the world. In doing so our motion calls on the government and calls on Canada to adopt our 12 point plan to save Canada. I would like to go over as many of the points as I can.

    Madam Speaker, I will only have 10 minutes because I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Regina—Qu'Appelle.

    The first on our list is to enhance Canada's environment, including a national implementation plan for reducing greenhouse gases and the ratification of the Kyoto protocol in 2002. This is something that has been debated today. It is one of the things that has caught the attention of the House.

    Unfortunately, it has been a debate primarily among the NDP, the Alliance and the PC/DR coalition caucuses as to the wisdom of ratifying the Kyoto protocol. The NDP has been arguing that the costs of not ratifying are more significant and salient than the costs of ratifying, which the Alliance and the PC/DR coalition regard as more significant and salient.

    I would like to make the point one more time that in our view, there are costs to pay in not ratifying Kyoto, both environmentally and politically. That is to say in terms of impeding whatever momentum there may be now for ratifying the Kyoto accord and for arriving at global environment solutions, there are political costs to pay as well as an environmental cost.

    We do not believe that this would be a panacea, as we have been accused of believing, but that it would be a first start, a small baby step. We realize in some ways how insignificant Canada's contribution to this can be arithmetically. However Canada's contribution to this could be quite significant politically by helping to create the momentum by which some day even the United States may feel that it has to ratify the Kyoto accord.

    We would like to strengthen the role of aboriginal, Metis and Inuit people in the Canadian family. A good place to start would to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that reported several years ago. This is an outstanding injustice. It is an outstanding inadequacy in our national life. The sooner we get around to addressing it the better.

    I would have thought that the government may have wanted to support it. I understood at one point that the Prime Minister regarded this parliament and this mandate as a time in which he would address it, but since September 11, it appears that it has disappeared off the Liberal radar screen.

    We would like to reaffirm Canada's international peacekeeping role and rehabilitate Canada's reputation as respected internationalists. This refers to the way in which, in our view, the Canadian government, in dealing with the war on terrorism, in participating in the international military coalition led by the United States and in a variety of other ways, has not respected international law and has departed from Canadian tradition. We would like to see that tradition reaffirmed and respected.

    We talk about re-establishing the federal government as a full partner in funding health care and post-secondary education as public not for profit systems. If there is one social reality with which Canadians identify as being a particularly Canadian social reality, a particularly Canadian value system, it is the value system we find incarnated in our health care system.

    That health care system is at risk, as are so many other things we have regarded as distinctly Canadian over the years. They are at risk partly because of inaction on the part of the Liberal government, particularly on health care. They are at risk because of the Liberal government's withdrawal from the full federal-provincial partnership that medicare once was. They are at risk because of an unwillingness on the part of the government to consistently stand up for Canadian values in the global marketplace, whether it is the pressure to Americanize or privatize our health care system, the pressure on the wheat board or on the various other ways we have decided to do things differently.

    We have decided to do things not just differently but better in my judgment and I think a lot of Canadians share that judgment. We are saying that Canadians want to preserve what is distinct and what, in our judgment, is better about the way Canadians have decided to organize their economic and social lives.

    We want to implement a comprehensive strategy for the eradication of child poverty. This is something that the parliament of 1989 committed itself to in the fall of that year. Yet here we are two years after that year, the year 2000 being the year by which child poverty was to be eliminated, and child poverty is no where near being eliminated. We say it is about time we declared the equivalent of war on child poverty. It could be by federal-provincial strategies. We can do it in a co-operative federalist way. We do not have to offend Bloc sensitivities or anyone else's sensitivities, but we have to get serious about eliminating child poverty.

    We need to ensure that all trade agreements include adequate protection for labour standards, human rights and the environment. Ever since the implementation of the free trade agreement in 1988, the NDP has been concerned about the role that these free trade agreements have had on eroding Canadian identity and Canada's ability to control its own economic and social destiny.

    The model that was imbedded in the free trade agreement then went on to be replicated in the NAFTA, the WTO and now stands to be replicated in other agreements reached at the WTO under the rubric of the GATS, and perhaps a new agreement on investment somewhat like the MAI that was proposed but then did not make it. In our view all these things are a way of elevating property rights, investors rights, corporate rights over the rights of ordinary people to decent labour standards, to a clean environments and to control over their own lives through their respective democracies.

    At the heart of the matter for us is the conviction that free trade agreements, as they are now constructed, are constructed in a way to limit the power of government and of democracies to seek the common good and to protect the public interest. We will not rest until we have multilateral trading rules which are just that, trading rules, but not rules which trump the rights of labour, the rights of the environment and the rights of national legislatures and subnational legislatures to act in the public interest.

    We talk about enabling primary producers and Canadian farm families to compete with foreign subsidies. As a country, we need to decide if we want to protect and enhance rural Canada. Are we willing to pay the price? Other countries are. We cannot just keep lecturing other countries about their policies and how damaging they are to Canada. We need to decide ourselves whether our farm communities and our agricultural economy is something we want to preserve and protect and we need to pony up and pay to ensure they are protected.

    Instead we have a government that has left our agricultural sector much more unprotected than even international agreements require. In fact, it has used international agreements as a cover for withdrawing even more support from our agricultural sector and from our farm families and communities than it was required to. We say that has to end.

    We talk about rejecting continental energy and water policies that endanger Canadian control over natural resources. We all know they are acting in their own self interest. There is nothing particularly demonic about it, but the Americans would like to have a continental energy and water strategy, to the extent that they do not have one already, that would make it possible for them to exploit at will and without restriction our energy and water supplies.

    I am sure the member who follows me and others may well speak about some of the things that are left like reaffirming fair taxes, celebrating immigration as a cornerstone of Canada, restoring respect for diversity and humanity in our immigration policies and strengthening our cities. Our cities are deteriorating. The Liberals are fiddling while literally our cities deteriorate before their very eyes.

    We should be strengthening pluralistic and democratic discourse by means of appropriate regulation to limit media concentration in the country.

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    I remember appearing before the Kent commission 20 years ago. We were concerned about media concentration then. It looked like decentralized, scattered ownership compared to what we have now. Yet the government does not seem to be concerned.

    Finally, I end where I began with respect to reforming parliament and the electoral system so that the House can be more representative of the views that Canadians actually hold so that we would not constantly be a prisoner of Liberal inaction and Alliance fearmongering.

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    Mr. Svend Robinson (Burnaby--Douglas, NDP): Madam Speaker, just last month I was in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, with some 50,000 people around the world who gathered under the theme that another world is possible. Certainly the motion which my leader has put forward on behalf of the New Democrat caucus today calls on Canada to play a leadership role in helping to make that other world a reality. Another world is not only possible, it is absolutely essential at this time.

    I commend the hon. member for his speech. Could he could elaborate on the issue of democracy itself and the loss of democracy in the face of so-called trade deals. It seems more and more that we as democratically elected representatives at all levels of government, national, provincial, local and regional, are being told that we cannot make decisions in the best interests of our constituents and the environment because of some chapter or some section in some trade deal that has nothing whatsoever to do with trade and everything to do with entrenching corporate rights and corporate power.

    I specifically refer to chapter 11, the investor state provision of NAFTA. He has been here since 1979, as I have, and has played an important role in that struggle for democracy. Could he comment on the role of members of parliament and other elected representatives confronting these trade deals that effectively seek to strip away more and more power from elected representatives.

    Mr. Bill Blaikie: Madam Speaker, the hon. member and I could reflect together on the various ways in which the role of members of parliament, and the role of parliament itself, has been eroded since we arrived here in 1979.

    Many are the things that the parliament we first sat in could have considered as legitimate policy options, which are now proscribed and prevented by various regional and global free trade agreements. These are policies having to do with protection of culture and magazines; policies establishing and maintaining a generic drug regime; policies on regulation of the environment; and policies, if we believe the Liberal government, with respect to whether or not we can institute a national ban on the export of bulk water. The list goes on of things which the parliament that the member and I sat in 1979 and in 1980 had power over and that this parliament no longer has power over because of the WTO and because of NAFTA.

    Anyone who is concerned about democracy, and I invite my friends on the right wing of the political spectrum to consider this, should be concerned about this erosion of the power of the people's elected representatives.

    We often hear them going on about how the supreme court is somehow eroding the parliament. However it is okay to lose power to the WTO, which does not judge things according to all the criteria that a supreme court judge would, but only judges things on the basis of whether or not they impede trade, and generally that amounts to whether or not they impede the profit strategies of global corporations. It is not okay for the NDP. That is what unites all the people who are concerned about the current corporate globalization model.

    We know that the world is a smaller place. We know that we live in a global village. We were using this kind of language long before the right wing ever picked it up and used it as a cover for reducing the world to a global marketplace or a global flea market instead of a global community. We know that language. However we hate to see that language be perverted.

    What unites people on the streets of Seattle and Quebec City as well as in parliaments around the world is the concern that control of our social and economic lives is being abdicated to unelected bodies, unelected bureaucracies, which administer so-called multilateral trade rules that are designed by and for large corporations.

    It is a form of corporate rule which we reject and which we think the Canadian people reject, particularly when they see that this kind of corporate rule is systematically eating away at everything they value about being Canadian. Whether it is their health care system, their agricultural system, their cultural industries and so on, all these things are being attacked by this economic fundamentalism that we see enshrined in the WTO and elsewhere.