The member for River Heights (Mr. Radcliffe) was saying the way you counteract having lived in the same neighbourhood for most of your life is to travel. Well, I mean, that is so classic, Mr. Acting Speaker. It is so simple, right? You live in a neighbourhood. The way you expand your horizons, the way you broaden your horizons is you travel. People, poor people in the city of Winnipeg cannot even travel these days within the city of Winnipeg because of the change that the City Council put forward for bus transfers and bus passes. I can make an argument that part of that is due to the fact the City of Winnipeg is being starved by the Province of Manitoba.
Just parenthetically, two of the people, the city councillors--and this is not the responsibility of the provincial government--two of the city councillors in the City of Winnipeg who represent the poorest people in the city of Winnipeg and two of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country voted in support of the bus pass changes.
An Honourable Member: Who were they?
Ms. Barrett: Councillor Amaro Silva and Councillor John Prystanski.
Mr. Acting Speaker, the bus transfer situation is an example of how important it is to have--how important city councillors are in--[interjection]
The Acting Speaker (Mr. McAlpine): Order, please. The honourable member for Wellington is speaking to Bill 36, The City of Winnipeg Amendment and Consequential Amendments Act. There are members in the Chamber that are making contributions to this debate that have not been recognized by the Chair, and I would ask those members to refrain from making their comments at this time and ask the honourable member for Wellington to continue.
Ms. Barrett: I do think that a lot of the time the dialogue that goes back and forth in the Chamber that is not always caught on Hansard helps facilitate the discussion, but there are times on both sides of the House where the dialogue is not necessarily conducive. I have been heckled by my own caucus colleagues on numerous occasions.
Back to the problem with neighbourhoods today, the poverty statistics are outrageous. We all know, whether we believe it or not, I think we all in our heart of hearts know that the whole concept, the whole reality of poverty has huge implications and ramifications throughout our society. One of those is the whole problem with gangs. It is a problem of resources, the need for resources for public schools. It is the need for community resources to be in place.
Back to what the member for River Heights (Mr. Radcliffe) was saying, you broaden your horizons by travelling, you broaden your horizons by reading. I am sure you would say you also broaden your horizons by going to the cottage in the summer and by going skiing in the winter and by heading south during those awful months that we sometimes have in January and February.
Well, Mr. Acting Speaker, that sense of reality permeates, that vision permeates Bill 36, which is that people have the ability to do these things. Well, some people do have the ability to do these things, and for them travel, reading, recreation are accessible, and they do make for an educated, aware citizen. There are many people in the city of Winnipeg and the province of Manitoba for whom those avenues are closed. That is why the elements in Bill 36 are so essential to our discussion. I will be getting to that at a later date.
But when you have whole neighbourhoods, whole wards in some cases, the majority of the residents of which do not have access to cars, do not have access to enough money to be able to even go to a movie, who certainly do not have access to the ability to travel, as I have stated, even within the city of Winnipeg, but never outside, who have never gone to the Fort Whyte Centre, many of whom--and I mentioned this in my grievance yesterday--kids who used to be able to go on field trips with their schools to the Children's Museum cannot do that anymore because the schools have been cut back, funding has been cut back.
That may not be such a terrible thing for kids in affluent sections of the city, but it is a terrible, terrible tragedy for those children and those families in neighbourhoods in the city who cannot, who do not have the personal resources to be able to engage in travel and recreation and reading.
Reading, libraries--people who are poor need public libraries. In my community, a community of 2,500-3,000 souls bounded by a geographical community where the vast majority of the residents are lower income, many of whom do not have--[interjection] Libraries, something that I, and I think most of us, grew up thinking was a right of every neighbourhood to have. It is one of those things that lead us to having an educated citizenry. Neighbourhood after neighbourhood after neighbourhood in the city of Winnipeg have had their libraries closed.
Those neighbourhoods are losing those resources. They are losing the ability to provide the resources that kids and families should have in order to be educated, in order to be good citizens of the city of Winnipeg and the province of Manitoba and their country.
Madam Speaker in the Chair
There are other neighbourhoods where the City of Winnipeg is saying: you run your own community centres and your own arenas. Some of these situations are in communities where, again, the parents and the adults in these communities have a hard enough time putting food on the table for their kids, or they have two incomes or two people in the family working, or they are working three or four part-time jobs. This is the challenge facing the neighbourhoods in the city of Winnipeg, and one of the challenges, one of the most important challenges, and one of the reasons why we need a City Council that is accountable, transparent and democratic. If we are going to meet the challenge of our neighbourhoods and access the potential of our neighbourhoods, we have to have accountable, open city government.
Urban sprawl, I am not going to get into that whole issue, because that again is another two or three hours. I am not going to rampage, I am not going to highjack, I am not going to run over or roll over, but one of the challenges, actually I am going to go back a bit to the neighbourhoods and the challenges facing the neighbourhoods before I get to urban sprawl or the challenges facing the Capital Region and Winnipeg's part of it.
I do not know if people saw this but Tuesday of this week in the Winnipeg Free Press in the Focus section there was a wonderful letter or article actually by a gentleman named Brian Mackinnon who was a teacher in the city of Winnipeg. He was talking about the location of the gym for the Pan Am Games, which he was saying was perhaps better focused not at the University of Manitoba but in the inner city.
* (1650)
But some of the comments, some of the reasons, some of his ideas I think bear repeating here, and I am going to quote.
This talks about the current situation in the city of Winnipeg and I am beginning my quotes by saying: "Winnipeg's inner city is one of the nation's worst human centres of poverty and it is dangerously inhabited with angry underprivileged youth, humiliated by poverty." Again, "one of the crucial problems with inner city poverty is that it creates inactivity and murderous boredom that inevitably lead inner city youth to drugs, gangs, violence, even murder--all criminal behaviour in quest of self-esteem and human empowerment."
He goes on to say, and again this relates back to my concerns raised at the beginning of this discussion about the vision thing, that there is a corporate vision that is--[interjection]
Madam Speaker: Order, please. Only one member has been identified to be debating, and that is the honourable member for Wellington.
Ms. Barrett: Mr. Mackinnon goes on to talk about the corporate agenda and, as I referenced in my comments earlier today, the vision involved and embedded in Bill 36 is a corporate vision, and Mr. Mackinnon says: "With the corporate agenda always busy in its narrow self-congratulatory world, it's not much wonder that, as John Ralston Saul suggests, Canadian civilization is in serious decay and that our liberal social conscience is all but buried under the corporate agenda. After all, the corporate agenda and corporate greatness is hardly the sole measure of civilization. The way that we treat our disempowered is a far greater, more critical, measure of how we conduct ourselves as a civilized nation."
I spoke earlier about the words that the minister used in talking about Bill 36, when he is talking about managing performance and using corporate language. I think Mr. Mackinnon, beautifully put, says what I have been trying to say and what we have been trying to say for many years in this House, that poverty is a scourge in and of itself, but even more, it leads to huge problems, and if we do not have an inner city, if we do not have a city as a whole that has all of its parts functioning, then we will not be able to come close to achieving our potential. As I said earlier, there are many, many positive potential things, positive elements about the city of Winnipeg. We are right, we are this close to losing all that. We are right balanced on the fulcrum and which way is the teeter-totter going to go. Bill 36 is not going to help maintain that fulcrum or is not going to help us balance towards a more positive city of Winnipeg. Bill 36, if enacted, is going to send us down the slippery slope to, as I stated before, an oligarchy, and oligarchies historically have never paid attention to the dispossessed.
Madam Speaker, if we have learned anything--and I think the two meetings that I attended with the minister last week, one was sponsored by a number of organizations, the Council of Women of Winnipeg, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, that had about 150 people attend for a couple of hours to talk about vision for the Capital Region of the city of Winnipeg was an excellent, excellent meeting, lots of wonderful ideas and that meeting and the event the next day, which was a housing forum sponsored by CentrePlan which brought together over 250 people to talk about housing needs in the city of Winnipeg, ostensibly, was another example of people getting together generating ideas and having a wonderful discussion about far more than housing.
Those two events say to me that people in the city of Winnipeg and outside the city of Winnipeg are starting to realize that we are balanced. The future of the city of Winnipeg, and by extension, the province of Manitoba, literally hangs in the balance. We are on the cusp. If we do not make some changes and meet those challenges that we have been talking about today, we are not going to be a first-rate capital city.
What I am saying here today, and what I will continue to say throughout my speech on Bill 36, is that the elements of Bill 36, the vision of Bill 36, the ideology of Bill 36, the process that engendered Bill 36, everything about Bill 36 pushes us closer to the abyss. I know I am using quite apocalyptic language, and I do not think it is because the Titanic has been part of our culture, well, for decades, but for six months since the movie came out, or the Godzilla is coming out this weekend, or Deep Impact was out, or Armageddon is coming, I mean, all of that is happening in our cultural situation.
But what I am saying is that if we do not address these critical issues that face us as a city, and because of our unique position in the province of Manitoba, face all of us as Manitobans, then we will not be able to achieve the potential, the great potential, the almost unlimited potential that Winnipeg has. Bill 36 does not address those challenges. Bill 36 addresses the structures, the political structures, the administrative structures that are going to have to address those challenges. The elements of Bill 36 that titularly address those challenges do not. They are going to, in fact, make the city of Winnipeg a poorer place in which to live, not a better place in which to live.
Madam Speaker, when I continue my remarks next, I will be talking again about a summary of the situation that has led up to Bill 36 from Unicity, and actually prior to Unicity a little bit, and I look forward to being able to begin that part of my speech the next time I have the floor.
Madam Speaker: Order, please. The hour being 5 p.m., this matter will remain standing in the name of the honourable member for Wellington (Ms. Barrett) and the honourable member for Selkirk (Mr. Dewar).
* (1700)