Jim's Inaugural Speech in the House
Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour for me to give this speech today. I would not have predicted this outcome of the general election six months ago. However, I am very pleased that the people of Assiniboia had the confidence to elect me to this Assembly.
First of all, Mr. Speaker, I must commend you on your election. It is of particular significance that the first elected Speaker is of Inuit descent, which honours you and a founding nation. It is also significant that you obtained a majority vote during the first ballot. This demonstrates the confidence of this House in terms of your ability, impartiality and wisdom. In the short time I have known you, I have learned to appreciate your wisdom, sense of humour, which I am sure will serve you will in the upcoming Session.
I would also like to congratulate the member for Wellington (Mr. Santos) on his appointment as Deputy Speaker. His experience and knowledge of the House rules will certainly serve him well. Finally, I would like to give my thanks to Binx Remnant, the Clerk of the House. His guidance and information certainly was very much appreciated and certainly was a guide to me, and I am sure most other new members, in our orientation to this House. Thank you very much for his patience and support.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the people of Assiniboia for electing me to represent them in the House. During the last election, the NDP garnered 1,750 votes, and this time we obtained the support of almost 4,400 voters. This is almost a 250 percent change in level of support, and I promise to represent all Assiniboia with energy, determination and commitment and live up to this vote of confidence.
As all members know, each of us in this House are addressed as members from, rather than by our own names. I intend to take this tradition very seriously and listen to the concerns of my constituents and represent them well in this House. I will work hard and try tirelessly to represent them to the best of my abilities. As you know, the election was very close, and I would like to thank my spouse, family, friends and volunteers who worked on my campaign.
This election showed that the efforts of a small determined group can really make a difference and that every single vote counts, especially the last three of them. Everyone who contributed to our amazing campaign and each of the voters were responsible for this amazing victory. This election demonstrates that democracy is healthy in Manitoba and that everyone can make a difference in the outcome of the election and that no election result is predictable.
I would also like to commend Joy Smith who also had a five-week delay in her election. I know that it was very nerve-wracking, and I wish her well in her sitting in the House because I know it was a long and arduous time getting there. Of particular note, I would like to thank Orma Sozansky, a long-term Assiniboia resident and NDP supporter
for nominating me. I would also like to thank my constituency association for their support in the impossible task that we undertook. We were truly the little engine that could and in fact did. It is of particular note that our constituency association started out with eight people and ended up with about 25 at the end of the election. That is probably the smallest constituency association that won in an election. It was a hard-fought election that focused on the issues of importance to Assiniboia. I would like to thank the other two candidates and all the volunteers who worked on all three campaigns for the hard work, dedication and democratic process. I would like to thank my predecessor, Linda McIntosh for her hard work and on an election well fought on all the issues. Thank you.
Now, following the traditional talk, a little bit about Assiniboia and the Assiniboia constituency which I am proud to represent. We are located in the northwest part of the city beginning at the city limits and proceeding along Portage Avenue until Vimy, then around Ness to the airport and then north along the Perimeter until it reaches the area where Saskatchewan and the Perimeter Highway meet.
In this area, there are approximately 20,450 people and it is a very diverse area. It encompasses everything from PMQs to very affluent areas, different apartments. So it is a very unique combination of people.
In Assiniboia, there is a large amount of facilities and resources which is available to its people and individuals. One of the examples is the St. James School Division. It is responsible for the delivery of public education. It operates a number of good schools and accommodates about 9,000 people. I will talk a bit about some of the
schools. Firstly, Voyageur School where I went to today as far as to their daycare. It is a wonderful school which tries to bring parents, staff and students together to enhance literacy, numeracy and to have total school development.
We have Buchanan School which is really trying to do a lot of parental involvement and is really trying to reach out to the community. Crestview School, again another daycare that I visited today which is really focusing on academic, social and behavioural skills and has a very, very active daycare program and full-time kindergarten program. Heritage School, which is working very, very hard to create an environment which fosters positive self-esteem and responsible social interactions. Ness Middle School has an excellent academic tradition. It also has a good volleyball program, and as a previous volleyball coach, I was really impressed that it actually won the division volleyball title.
Sturgeon Creek offers a unique combination of programs including plastics, a printing program, et cetera, which attracts people from across the city and across the province to participate in its programs. Hedges Junior High, this is a school where I began my educational career. I started student teaching when a Mr. Carlyle whom some of you may remember was the principal, and that was my first stint at teaching. John Taylor Collegiate has a proud history of academic and athletic accomplishments, again, another very strong volleyball program. I graduated from that school in 1976. I am proud of its continued academic excellence and its athletic abilities.
The School for the Deaf is also located in the constituency. I was able to go to their craft sale, and it was really impressive to note all the community participation, a lot of the development of parents into the school, a lot of outreach into the community. It is a really exciting school with great facilities, great staff, a good administration that is just really vibrant. It is nice to see how the students fit into the community itself.
We also have the Assiniboine Memorial community club, which is a curling rink which has produced a number of national champions, has produced a lot of great curlers in its time and in which I have often been beaten, so I have enjoyed that place. The other facilities include the Assiniboia West Recreation Association which has three sites and offers a lot of programs including New Year's Eve dances, et cetera, which reach out to the whole community; the Centennial Pool, where my mom exercises three times a week and I tried to keep up in the seniors aerobics, is also a neat facility.
Assiniboia Downs is the centre of the Manitoba horse racing industry, and that is also within the riding. This is an area which attracts people from across the West, across the States and is attended by many hundreds of thousands of people; Red River Exhibition park, run by the Red River Exhibition Association, is host to a number of activities, including the Red River Ex and also participated in a lot of activities for the Pan Am Games. It is a wonderful site. Many thousands of Winnipeggers and Manitobans participate, and I would encourage all to come out.
Besides the wonderful facilities, the wonderful people in the area, I would also like to talk a bit about my past motivation for entering politics. I had the fortune of being brought up in an armed forces family which was able to travel different parts of Canada and the world. This foundation provided me a strong interest and appreciation of other cultures and languages. It also forced me to learn how to adapt to new environments, not be afraid to meet new people or try different things. It is certainly a great, great orientation to politics.
I spent a good deal of my youth involved in scouting at the Sixth Winnipeg group. It was a group that did a great deal of canoeing, camping and trips. We had great leaders, including Mr. Harry Dow, who taught me a great deal about leadership and responsibility. We participated in a lot of events like the P.E.I. trip for National Jamboree. We went down to Texas. We also built a scout cabin which we used for a lot of winter camping. We also went on canoe trips, some of which were weeks long, and it taught me a great deal for the appreciation of nature and the environment. It also gave me a lot of lifelong friends. I still call a lot of these friends, even to this day. We get together, we go on canoe trips even to this day, and we also spend some time together. It is really nice because these are people who have branched out but we still remain in touch, and I really hold that part of my history very dear.
It was during this period I was involved in recycling used tires to earn money for special projects. If you note, the Metro One had a neat caricature for me in there. What we were doing was we were recycling tires. We were gathering these tires from different garages and different locations around the city and selling them to companies that made either blasting mats or doormats. This is how we funded thousands and thousands of dollars to pay for the trips and the different projects that we did, and that is how come, again, the Metro One used the newspaper article sorry, picture. I was really appreciative of the picture, because it brought back a lot of fond memories and interesting times.
I had the pleasure of attending both of our fine city's universities during my post-secondary education. I went to the U of W to get my B. Ed. and then went on from there to the U of M. I also was involved in both universities' councils, first the education student council at the U of W and UMSU and also the education student councils at the U of M. I think this is where I started my real interest in the formal part of politics. I then had the pleasure of working as an educator for the last 19 years.
I will tell you a little bit about it. I started off in St. James as a student teacher and then as a sub. Then I went up to Norway House to teach there for three years. So from 1981 to 1983, I went up there to teach regular high school courses. I then came down to Winnipeg and worked as both a university seminar instructor and also as an adult literacy instructor, so I worked both areas of the spectrum. For the literacy instructor, I started working in the Selkirk School Division and Friendship Centre teaching adults who were functioning below a Grade 7 level. I learned that a lot of people are excluded from society because they do not have the ability to academically compete. They do not have the ability to be informed about what is going on. I then went from there to Keewatin Community College, as literacy co-ordinator up in Keewatin Community College, and there my job was to set up literacy centres throughout the North.
After spending a short time at Keewatin Community College, I went to Frontier Collegiate. For those of you who do not know Frontier Collegiate, it is a school that serves three-quarters of the province. Students from all across the North go to stay at Frontier, and it offers a wide variety of courses. There I taught special ed. These are the kids who do not fit into the regular system. These are the kids who cannot write a standardized exam. These are the kids who would not work in the regular program. So there I developed a lot of modified programs and work-education programs. That was really, really educational to me because I had to stretch my horizons, stretch my abilities to meet the needs of these students. It is also probably the hardest work but the most gain for me as a person. I felt the best about this time because the kids really, really did progress. I am happy to say that as of about eight years ago, almost all the students who participated in the course were gainfully employed. We are talking about 16 kids who were unemployable, had troubles in school. Then after this program and they were my students; I had them all day they were gainfully employed after working with them for long periods of time. It is neat to say that they also are very, very friendly. Every time I go up North, I am dragged in to have a home-cooked meal, et cetera, from some of my former students. I am really happy to see that.
After Frontier Collegiate, I then became an administrator at Frontier School Division, down in the board office in Winnipeg. There I started out as literacy co-ordinator, where we won a national literacy award for starting out on how to teach adults to read and write. We did a number of neat programs like child reading programs, et cetera, which helped the average person become literate. Then we went from there. I became work-education and literacy co-ordinator and did a whole bunch of transition programs into the community, where what we did was we got students the ability to work and partner in communities and worksites. This is showing how we can get people who would not normally be enfranchised, would not normally be productive, giving them abilities with a little bit of support to become productive, long-term members of society.
After this, I finally just finished as co-ordinator of adult education and high school initiatives, where I was involved in delivering distance education programs, writing curriculum for bump-up skills, et cetera, where we started again focusing on the kids who could not function right in a normal teaching environment. What we were doing was we were giving them an ability and the support so that they would be academically strong enough to survive in the system.
These experiences taught me the importance of creating a strong society where all citizens are able to go to school, have access to basic social supports and can succeed. What the trick was is to create a system that allowed people to be successful. It was not creating a bar that was not attainable; it was creating the support so that the kids could jump over the bar or the adults could jump over the bar and be productive members of society. It was not ignoring 10 percent of our society.
It is essential to assist all Manitobans to become productive members of society. We cannot afford in either human or economic terms to continue to disenfranchise any part of our society. Our aboriginal population has the highest growth rate, and long-term efforts must be made to harness this amazing potential. All society will benefit in terms of productivity, financially, and most importantly in human terms, when we take steps to include all segments of our society, not just certain parts of it. The high level of illiteracy in Manitoba is unacceptable. Statistics show that there is a direct correlation between education and health, education and employment, even education and crime. While the level of education rises, income and standard of living and quality of life increase.
While I was literacy co-ordinator, I saw how difficult it was for people who did not have the ability to read or write. Our jails are crowded with illiterate people. It is almost impossible to get a job if you are illiterate. Education does open doors, and we should be flexible to allow all Manitobans the time and opportunity to obtain the education and skills necessary to become contributing members of society. This investment will pay off both in human and financial terms.
The previous government had a system where what people could do is they could take courses for a certain segment of time, eight, 10 months, and then they would have to get jobs, or they would have to get out and do volunteer work. If you want to see long-term, meaningful increases in productivity and standard of living, what you have to do is provide the support so that they can be long-term, contributing members of society.
This brings me to the issue of child poverty. Recently I had the pleasure of attending the report card on child poverty announcement. I was appalled that, as we continue to approach the next millennium, Manitoba still has one of the highest child poverty rates in Canada. It is wrong to continue to allow children to go hungry. Children need to eat properly in order to learn and develop properly. Hungry children are unable to reach their full potential. We must be willing to share and assist others.
Poverty also contributes to a number of social difficulties, including increasing gang membership, crime, as well as the deterioration of housing which affects all Manitobans in terms of security issues and increasing taxes. It is far cheaper to educate and feed a child when they are young than to try to rectify the problem in later years. It is wrong to be penny wise and pound foolish. The answer is to provide long-term solutions, a positive environment and real hope for the future. It is necessary to open up schools and community clubs across the province and allow youth to become involved in productive activities.
For many years, I worked as a volunteer coach of the Winnipeg Eagles, an aboriginal men's volleyball team. This is a team of about 16 aboriginal young men at 16 years old who asked me to coach them.
I then started to coach them. What happened was this group became a very, very important support for each other, et cetera. What we did was that we went to the U of W. We practised twice a week, and we played twice a week. This group became very, very close. Other kids would come and practise with us. So we had 25 kids practising at the University of Winnipeg in the Community Access Program. This program was cancelled four years ago. Why? Because of decreasing funding to the universities, this program was cancelled so that other groups could use the facilities at the U of W and pay the $50-an-hour fee.
What then happened was the inner-city groups that had utilized the gymnasium were thrown out, and people travelled from the suburbs to use the U of W. What happened was this: we had a gym which was used till eight o'clock or nine o'clock. Community Access groups would use it for a couple of hours, and people from the central part of the city would have recreational facilities. We were very, very lucky to again find a school principal that would allow us to use the gym, so the group stayed together.
This group has been now around for 12 years, and I look at this group today. I see two teachers, business people; I see community leaders. Two or three are on band councils now. I see two policemen.
I see a man who has just finished his master's in environmental studies. Why these educated, productive people became that way was because they could form a supportive group and kept themselves busy by taking proactive steps rather than steps to remedy the situation after it was done. What happened was, by just opening the doors of a gymnasium, by creating an opportunity for kids to be good, this group became very supportive and did a great job as far as supporting each other.
They are now part of the role-model group. So they go to other youth groups who are having difficulty and talk to kids to try to convince them of the importance of having a vision and heading there. That is what we have to do as a society and as individuals.
Manitoba has a number of basic advantages in terms of competitiveness, including expensive housing, cheap electricity, and a skilled workforce. This is an excellent start, but we must continue to look for the future. It is necessary to once again begin to invest in the future. Recently Manitoba has continued to expand the area of technology. Seed capital and financial assistance continues to be a problem. By assisting small business and the raising of venture capital, we will be able to support a sector with huge growth potential. We must support the growth of our economy to ensure all Manitobans are able to be employed.
We have a commitment to drop the tax by 1.5 percent. We also have a commitment for balanced budget legislation. This is important. As a financial advisor for Summit Securities and also as a small-business person who has owned a number of small businesses, I know how hard it is for the average business person. I also know how important it is to keep taxes reasonable, but on the other hand it is a balance between reasonable taxes and support for those who need it the most.
I know that our government has pledged for that. It is also important to enable Manitobans the opportunity to earn a living wage. With a minimum wage of $6 an hour, it would be impossible to afford to raise a family or even pay tuition for a post-secondary institution. We must give the opportunity for people to look after themselves. This means they must be able to earn a reasonable standard of living and pay for their education, if they wish to do so. We have to be able to have a system where all people have access to post-secondary institutions.
I believe that all Manitobans want a society where all people have access to basic needs, despite wealth, location and background. Good, timely health care is also essential. We cannot stand for hallway medicine, excessive waiting periods and inhuman working conditions for health care staff. Assiniboia is composed of over 30 percent seniors, and this segment of our population is particularly concerned about these conditions.
While I was canvassing, I was told of numerous situations where people were not treated appropriately in the health care system. Each citizen of this province must be able to trust and rely on an effective health care system. Each employee in the health care system must be able to do their job and feel like they have accomplished something. We cannot expect people in the health care system to go day after day beyond the call of duty. We have to treat them with respect.
The lack of post-secondary educational opportunities must also be addressed immediately. As Manitobans, we have the choice to compete on the world stage by heading in two different directions. The first method was being followed by the previous government which was trying to compete by creating low-wage, low-skill jobs and being the cheapest jurisdiction to operate. I propose that we invest in an educated, skilled workforce which has well-paid, long-term jobs.
Many of these jobs require knowledge and skills that can be delivered by increasing accessibility to post-secondary training. By doubling the college spaces over the next five years and controlling the costs of education, we will be able to compete in a knowledge-based society. We will be able to attract companies so that they can access these skilled workers. Our people will then have the ability to stay in our province, rather than be forced to leave or take part-time, minimum wage, low-paying jobs.
Manitoba is changing demographically and we must take steps now for the future if we are to have a future. We cannot accept short-term expensive band-aid solutions to long-term problems. As a government, we must give our citizens access to a first rate health system. And that means to have emergency rooms available. That means that we have to have staffing in our hospitals. That means that we have to have nurses and doctors on call so that they can work and have these situations. We cannot be driving our doctors out of this province because of excessive workloads. We have to take the time now. We also have to invest in community-based long-term solutions which are cheaper than institutional ones.
We must also have opportunities for youth, all youth in the province. It cannot just be centred on the city. I am proud to say that our caucus represents the entire province, geographically, culturally, et cetera. By having this breadth, we are able to represent all groups in the province and we are also able to talk about the conditions that we need to modify to make appropriate changes so all can participate. I know when I was travelling up North, just the access of a dentist, it is hard to access even dentistry. It is hard to go get specialized treatment. I know it was very, very hard when you are talking about even recruitment for teachers. It is hard because they are concerned about what infrastructure is available to them. We have to have a province where everybody has access to decent infrastructure, decent services and can afford a good standard of living.
As far as education, we really, really need a system where no matter where you are you have access to good long-term education, post-secondary and secondary. Simple things like let us work on developing distance ed, Internet technology so that all students have access everywhere, that not everyone has to leave their community to get a post-secondary education.
We also have to look at a government that is going to invest in long- term solutions. One of the things I was really concerned about is that in education you need to make an investment. You might see a product in about six or eight years, or 10 or 12. So you have to make long-term wise decisions.
As a small-business man, I know that our focus on creation of jobs, our focus on creating skilled workers, our focus on treating people fairly will in fact pay off over and over again. People will stay in this province, people want to stay with their family if given the opportunity.
Finally, we have to also have a fair tax burden. Our government, by keeping the pledge for the balanced budget legislation, will have fair taxes. I was very pleased with the 1.5 percent reduction in the federal tax. I think that is a good start. What it is, we have taken note that there is difficulty, we will hold the balance and we will continue to keep all of our citizens in mind, including the taxpayer. We have good long- term solutions. The tax burden will decrease over time while we have more and more people enfranchised into our society.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for having granted me the time to address this Assembly. I appreciate your patience, and I wish to thank my colleagues for having granted me the time and consideration for hearing my speech.
Thank you very much.
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