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Ottawa, Ontario

 

Thank you Robert (Bouvier). Good morning everyone.

In coming to meet with you today, I couldn’t help but think about a speech given to the Teamsters.

It was an address by President Franklin Roosevelt, on September 23, 1944, to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

It is known as “the Fala speech”, named after President Roosevelt’s pet dog, a Scottish Terrier.

The President spoke about the other political party’s attack ads against him

The President’s opponents unwisely included Fala in one of these attacks ads.

The President said, “I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them…he was furious (and) he has not been the same dog since.”

A few weeks later, FDR was elected President for the fourth time.

I’m no Roosevelt, of course, but I do derive a certain encouragement from this story.

But I want to add that Zsuzsanna and I have a new kitten – Mimi.

And if anyone runs a political attack ad including Mimi, there will be hell to pay.

Your slogan for this convention is Values, Vision, Action.

In explaining this theme, your convention material says that there is no reason why supporters of the right and left must be in constant opposition to one another.

It states, “We believe that pragmatism is a powerful common denominator that benefits everyone.”

I agree.

Pragmatism is a good word. It means putting ideology aside, putting partisanship aside, focussing on results for the people who elect us.

We need a new politics that replaces spite and spin with civility and common purpose.

We need to be inclusive.

Our vision of economic recovery must not leave any Canadian out in the cold.

A Prime Minister must not fail by setting province against province, group against group, region against region, individual against individual.

We must turn crisis into opportunity.

We must unite Canadians again, to feel the strength that comes when they know they are acting together.

The Liberal Party is working hard to ensure that Parliament achieves results.

That’s what the people tell me they want us to do. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Liberals supported the budget when the other opposition parties would not.

It was a flawed budget, but we needed to start money flowing out to Canadians.

The Liberal Party did what needed to be done.

But we Liberals told the Prime Minister that we would hold him to account.

Before the end of this session, the government is required to table a record of what it has been doing.

We will wait to make our judgement until we have seen that report.

But already we know the following:

The $12 billion surplus we left them in 2006 became a $34 billion deficit in February.

Since then it has ballooned out to $50 billion or more.

The government’s promise to get infrastructure money flowing has failed.

There have been lots of announcements, but under 10 percent of the money has actually left Ottawa. That means lots of construction workers aren’t going to be working this summer, when they could.

We told them there was a fast way to get the money out of Ottawa. Use the gas tax transfer direct to municipalities. We pioneered this in the Martin government and we know it works.

But the Prime Minister is one of those politicians who will reject a good idea just because it has another party’s label on it.

That’s the reverse of pragmatism. That’s ideology.

The government said that their infrastructure plan would create 190,000 new jobs.

Well, the country has lost more than 400,000 full-time jobs since the election in October.

There are now more than one and a half million unemployed Canadians.

The Teamsters Union has pragmatically recommended an intelligent way to both stimulate the economy rapidly and help hundreds of thousands of families in need:

Change the EI rules to create a uniform standard of eligibility.

Half of the unemployed do not qualify for EI, even if they have been paying EI premiums.

Help end the recession by making the rules the same in Kitchener as in Kenora, in London as in Lévis, in Windsor as in Winnipeg—for as long as the crisis lasts.

I have made the same proposal.

So have a number of the Premiers, including Conservative Premier Stelmach of Alberta.

But the Prime Minister refuses to listen.

He’s gone back to that tried and true Conservative strategy: turn Canadians against the unemployed.

Instead, he attacks those who have lost their jobs by saying we cannot let them collect EI for life.

What he is really saying is that those who have been laid off would try to scam the system.

Mr. Harper has mangled the truth about this important issue.

Let me lay out the facts:

Hundreds of thousands of Canadians have lost their jobs as a result of the recession.

On every paycheque before they were laid off, those Canadians paid into the EI system.

If they quit their jobs, rather than being laid off, they aren’t going to receive benefits under any proposal made by the opposition parties.

It’s only if they have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.

Those Canadians have paid for Employment Insurance—and now they need that insurance.

But half of them cannot receive it because we have different rules for different people, depending on where they live.

There are no new jobs.

So, let’s help those Canadians out by making them eligible to collect on the EI they paid for.

Let’s get immediate, targeted stimulus into the communities that have been hit the hardest, by helping unemployed Canadians pay for food and shelter and transportation.

It’s the right thing to do.

It’s the smart thing to do.

We’re talking about allowing Canadians to receive payments of a few hundred dollars a week.

And despite what the Prime Minister says, they are only going to be eligible to collect EI for a limited period of time.

Trust me, I know there are commentators who say that the EI issue isn’t that big a deal.

I also know that those commentators haven’t been laid off.

If they had been, they’d be whistling a different tune.

Canadians don’t want an election. I know that.

I want to make Parliament work.

But we’re talking about the suffering of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.

If the Prime Minister has an option—to be fair to those who have lost their jobs during the recession.

It’s up to him.

We have made Parliament work and we still want Parliament to work.

And I don’t care if the Prime Minister runs attack ads on me from now until eternity, as long as he will give a square deal to unemployed Canadians.

The Prime Minister can attack me all he wants. All I care about is that he gets help to Canadians.

Looking beyond the immediate is a key function of leadership. Seeing the big picture is what counts.

Canada needs to make major progress on a number of vital issues.

An equal chance for all our kids to have world-class learning and child care.

A knowledge society where every Canadian gets a shot at training and learning, their whole life through.

New opportunity for the disabled.

Environmental responsibility.

Hope for farming communities, small towns, and rural and northern regions.

A return to leadership on the world stage.

Support for science and creativity.

More jobs for your members – the grocery workers, the long-haul drivers, the dairy workers, the teachers and social service employees, the warehouse workers.

There is a great deal to accomplish as we build a better, brighter future for our country – a country of hope and optimism.

But there is one particular issue to which I want to draw more attention – and that is pension reform.

This is a matter which Teamsters Canada is really pushing hard.

It is a very serious issue – especially with an aging population.

Some of the numbers are disturbing. The value of assets held in pension plans fell by more than $80 billion in one quarter

Over the course of 15 years, the percentage of employed Canadian men with a registered pension plan fell from 49 percent to 37 percent.

It is bad when nearly two-thirds of employed Canadians aren’t in a pension plan.

It is equally unhealthy that so many Canadians who are in a plan risk losing everything when companies go out of business, or when investments turn sour, or when so many plans are not fully funded.

It worries retirees to think their monthly benefits might be reduced or ended.

Pension reform is the biggest issue on our horizon as Canadians.

As a Liberal, I’m proud that the Martin government got the Canada Pension Plan on a sound footing in the good times. Now we need to meet the even tougher challenge of pension adequacy in tough times.

We need to work together—government, business, and labour—to move forward on the pension issue.

The Teamsters have made some practical suggestions for pension reform and I look forward to meeting with you and discussing these ideas further.

We need to work together to clean up the mess that the Conservatives have made of our economy.

And we need to work together to make sure that the one doesn’t come at the expense of the other—that we don’t expect those who can afford it least to pay the most for our recovery.

So, thank you to Teamsters Canada for showing leadership on pensions.

It is a good example of your theme – Values, Vision, Action.

Overcoming Canada’s challenges and making the most of Canada’s incredibly exciting possibilities is going to require just that from Canadians – Values, Vision, Action.

But we have done it before.

We have done it in every chapter of our country’s history.

And together, we will do it again.

Thanks for listening.