Charlie Angus

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

I am sorry, Mr. Speaker. I would like to ask the hon. minister when she became aware that R-CALF was going to do this. Was it a last minute thing that shocked her? Everybody in cattle country saw this coming a year ago.

[Canadian Livestock Industry, March 8th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member said that at the very last moment R-CALF stepped up to the plate. Well, the people in cattle country knew R-CALF was going to do this a year ago. I would like to ask the minister when were you aware, when did it dawn on you that R-CALF was going to do this to--

[Industry, February 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Industry has never come across a Canadian job he did not think would be better done overseas.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues with its plans to buy up the mines and smelters of Noranda Falconbridge and this Liberal government has no plan for the fact that the Chinese government is nationalizing our resources.

What steps has the Minister of Industry put in place to ensure that the interests of the mining towns in northern Canada are protected if this Minmetals deal goes through?

[Supply, February 17th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I was very upset to hear that she thought we were accusing her party of being an apologist for the auto industry. I think it is fairly clear what we were saying. The government stands up in the House and says that it loves little children, dogs and balloons, as we all do, and, therefore, why do we not all make the world a happier place?

We are saying that the government has absolutely no intention of coming through on anything to do with Kyoto. It would have us talk about the one tonne challenge and how we should not open our cans of paint because it would spend more than driving my car to Vancouver and back. I will go home this weekend and paint to see if that is true.

I like the idea of voluntary standards. For example, why do we not have a voluntary gun control registry? With the hundreds of millions of dollars we have spent, I think a lot of Canadians would like a voluntary gun control registry. No, the government said that it could not have voluntary standards. What about voluntary drinking and driving regulations?

How about if we take the voluntary drinking and driving regulations and turn it into this idea of credits? If people are sober, then they should be able to sell their drinking and driving credits to people who are drunk. With the logic of the government, what a fantastic idea. If I drive nine times sober, I should for the tenth time be able to drive through drunk because I can buy a credit from someone who does not like to have a couple of shots before he goes home from work. That is the idea of voluntary credits.

I would like to ask the hon. member this. Where in this world have we ever seen voluntary emission standards? The government brought in voluntary labelling of genetically modified foods, and we have not seen a single company comply. When we talk about mandatory, it so we can get something done. I would like to see if we will get it done.

[Alzheimer's Disease, February 16th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it is a real honour for me to rise tonight and speak on this motion.

I would have thought that there were certain issues in this House beyond the cynical take the money and run politics of the separatists, but obviously not. I do believe that this is an issue that rises above party politics. It rises above the provincial bickering that we see time and time again, because we are speaking about an issue that we need a national strategy for. I do not think it is a strategy that we are talking about putting a name to simply to say “we support this”. We need a comprehensive strategy to deal with Alzheimer's. It has to bring together the provinces. It has to bring together the national government.

It strikes us on so many fundamental levels. For example, a national strategy must look at pharmacare. It must look at the access to drugs, especially for low income people.

It has to look at accessibility to home care and the lack of home care we see in communities where old people are left without anyone to come in and see them.

We have to talk about tax credits. We have to talk about the financial impacts on families, which they are suffering day after day. Tax credits are part of that strategy.

We also have to talk about research. Research is something that we do need on a national level, because the impacts of this disease and the cause of this disease are what we have to look at.

I would like to say that for my own part in my riding of Timmins--James Bay I have been very active, as has my provincial counterpart, with the elder abuse awareness program in the Cochrane district, because we know that the devastating emotional impact Alzheimer's has on families is intricately tied to elder abuse.

In our region we brought together numerous stakeholders. I think it is a good example of where we can go in terms of who has to be brought into this. We are working now with the VCARS organization, community home care, the Red Cross, the Ontario Provincial Police, Timmins Community Policing, and the Golden Manor, which is an old age home in our region.

We have the legal clinics involved now. One of the fundamental aspects of elder abuse is financial abuse because elders are no longer able to look after their own resources. Now we are asking to bring in the banks, because it is a fundamental job of the banks, a fiduciary obligation, I would suggest, to play an important role in protecting the assets of people suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia.

We are trying to coordinate a strategy at our local level with these various groups. My office is very active and involved. I would support in any way I could moves by the government to bring in a national Alzheimer's strategy.

I would like to speak about this from a personal level. I spent my afternoons sitting in a room where the lights were always on, a room that smelled of cleanser and madness and loneliness. I spent those days with my grandfather, who was probably one of the biggest figures in my life, a man who had no formal education but a fantastic intelligence.

My grandfather spent 40 years working in the McIntyre gold mine in Schumacher, Ontario, where they pioneered the principle of forcing men to breathe aluminum dust every single day they went to work as a condition of employment. The aluminum dust was sent into their lungs as a way of coating their lungs; they said it was to protect against silicosis, but we knew that was not true. We knew that the coated lungs did not show up on the x-rays.

Thirty-five thousand miners across Ontario were forced to breathe aluminum dust for a period of 40 years. What are the effects of that? We do not know. I do not know if the damaged syntaxes in my grandfather's mind had anything to do with the aluminum he was forced to breathe, but again, this is where the area of research is so important.

In my short life, I have seen people die. I have been there for many people I have known, for family and friends, but I have never seen a death as lonely as an Alzheimer's death, because with Alzheimer's one lives alone and dies alone. It does not matter how much of the family is there; one is left alone because of the condition of the disease. With my grandfather, the worst was that he never succumbed to the balm of forgetfulness. He was acutely aware every single minute of the day of where he was: he was not where he should be.

My grandfather would sit in the old folks home and watch people sitting in chairs waiting. He wondered what they were waiting for. They were waiting to die. He used to think I was his cousin, and we were working on the day shift at the gold mine. One day he thought he was sitting in a bus station. He thought we were in Sydney to see the family and we were on our way back to Timmins. I saw him rifling through his pant pockets because he realized he did not have a ticket, nor did he have any money. He was in terror. He lived in terror in his final years and months because he never knew where he should be.

We see the effects of this disease on the family. I saw the effect it had on my grandmother and my mother, who spent so much of her life looking after this man. There was very little support. Fortunately we had a very good hospital where he finally ended up, but it was very difficult for our family to even send him there.

For families who do not have two caregivers at home or who do not have the financial support, the effects of this disease are devastating. We know that as the population ages, it will get worse. We know the change in our families with our 24/7 lives. We know we do not have the community supports that we had before to handle people with dementia.

When we talk about a national strategy on Alzheimer's, we are talking about a need to address a fundamental obligation of our society to protect and respect our elders.

I worked in the first nation communities of northern Quebec. I saw how important the elders were in that society. I see that among the people of the Mushkegowuk Cree where I work now as a member of Parliament. Respect for elders is a fundamental principle of their society and it should be a fundamental principle of ours. No one should be left alone to die of a disease like this, and no family should be left without supports.

Is this simply a matter of giving money to the provinces, then letting them go off and do their thing? I do not think so. We are dealing with a much bigger and broader issue. We need to come together on this. The New Democratic Party supports a national strategy for Alzheimer's. We need to work and bring as many people together as possible to make this work.

[Petitions, February 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36 I would like to present a petition today from people concerned about the plans to begin taxation of post-secondary funding for first nations people. We know how difficult it is for so many first nations students to get post-secondary education. The petitioners are very concerned about the efforts to tax them.

[National Defence, February 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. Minister of National Defence has become Canada's number one cheerleader for participation in star wars. He talks about our international reputation, our international commitments and our international obligations.

I would like him to tell that to the people of the James Bay coast who have been waiting for Canada to live up to its obligation to clean up the contamination his department left behind in the abandoned radar bases in northern Canada.

For 40 years the people of Peawanuk First Nation have been living with exposures to PCBs and chemical contamination. Nobody told them of the risk when DND walked away from those people.

We talk about deadbeat dads. DND is a deadbeat ministry. I am calling on the minister not to be a walkaway Joe. He has the fundamental, moral and fiduciary obligation to clean up the contaminated hunting grounds of the Peawanuk and Mushkegowuk Cree.

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have been listening to the hon. member's comments and I am still trying to find my way through the buzz words.

The issue here is not trade. The issue here is assuring Canadians that the government has a bottom line when it comes to fundamental issues, and that this is not a race to the bottom. Helping Canadian companies overseas is not the issue and is not what we are talking about here.

When a company is good in business it brands itself. That is a fundamental in business. We just need to look at Burger King. When it was a small company it came up with the phrase “Home of the Whopper”. I know a lot of people think that is the phrase of the Liberal Party, but it is actually the trademark of Burger King.

When we had the Canadian lapel pins that were branded “made in China”, the Liberals were perfectly proud of that until somebody found out and it then became a sense of embarrassment.

I would like to ask the hon. member a simple question which we asked earlier in the House but did not get any answer to. Air Canada, which is a symbol of this country, is a private company that has survived on millions of dollars worth of grants. It has just shut down jobs in Canada for maintenance and mechanical work and has shipped those jobs down south to El Salvador. From my history lessons in school, El Salvador was the land of death squads where Jesuits were murdered at the university. It has an horrific human rights record.

If we are willing to brand ourselves and be proud of our trade, how would the hon. members feel about Air Canada having a slogan stating “Air Canada, maintained and brought to you by the sweat shops of El Salvador?” Is that what we are talking about?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

The hon. member said they did not know that would happen. I was under the impression that the Liberals were very aware that it happened. A number of Liberals have talked to me about the fact that they have been outsourcing numerous symbols of Canada because they can do it cheaper. This brings me to the fundamental question I would like to ask.

Earlier this fall, we asked the government for assurances that when it allowed the sale of Noranda and Falconbridge to go ahead to the Chinese government, it would have a plan to ensure that certain fundamental benchmarks were addressed in terms of human rights and that certain fundamental benchmarks were in place to protect the copper mining communities, of which my region is one. Across Canada we have communities that are dependent on these resources. We could not get a straight answer from the government.

It is becoming very clear to me now that if we divide human rights into one department and trade into another department, it becomes very impossible for us to get a straight answer from the government. It makes it easier for the government to continue to say that it loves human rights, children, little dogs and ice cream, but it cannot do anything about it.

Does the hon. member think this is a lack of coherence or is it part of a much larger industrial strategy being pursued by the government, which is to take as many Canadian jobs as it can and outsource them to El Salvador, China,or wherever it can find the bottom of the barrel?

[Department of International Trade Act, February 9th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to be seen as taking exception to my hon. colleague, but I have to raise a question about his belief that the bill signifies a lack of coherence in government policy. I would suggest that it shows an extreme sense of coherence. The one thing I have seen from the government is it knows exactly where it is going in terms of international trade. It knows exactly where it is going with human rights.

Just last week we realized that with the Canadian flag. It is the symbol in which the government wraps itself every time members of the honourable opposition, mostly from the west, stand up to question the corruption. We understand now that the government sees the flag as though it were a symbol from the wallymart. If it can do it cheaper anywhere else, if it can bring in the cheapest deal, that is good for its so-called consumers.