Bill C-2 (Historical)

Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act

An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Kingdom of Norway and the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Swiss Confederation

This enactment implements the Free Trade Agreement and the bilateral agreements between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Principality of Liechtenstein, the Kingdom of Norway and the Swiss Confederation signed at Davos on January 26, 2008.
The general provisions of the enactment specify that no recourse may be taken on the basis of the provisions of Part 1 of the enactment or any order made under that Part, or the provisions of the Free Trade Agreement or the bilateral agreements themselves, without the consent of the Attorney General for Canada.
Part 1 of the enactment approves the Free Trade Agreement and the bilateral agreements and provides for the payment by Canada of its share of the expenditures associated with the operation of the institutional aspects of the Free Trade Agreement and the power of the Governor in Council to make orders for carrying out the provisions of the enactment.
Part 2 of the enactment amends existing laws in order to bring them into conformity with Canada’s obligations under the Free Trade Agreement and the bilateral agreements.
Part 3 of the enactment provides for its coming into force.

Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak again on this matter.

Before I came to this House, I was a member of the Durham Regional Police Services Board. When I was there, I had the opportunity obviously on a regular basis to talk with officers around the changing technologies and the fact that our laws simply had not kept pace. People were committing fraud online or hiding behind anonymity on Internet service providers and performing serious crimes, and the police simply could not follow them.

I was first elected in 2004 and when I came to Parliament, I was pleased to support the work of the then Liberal government to create what was the modernization of investigative techniques act. That bill which was introduced in 2005 is ostensibly what is before the House today in both bills, Bill C-46 and Bill C-47, which is now being debated. Unfortunately, in 2005 the Conservatives precipitated an election and that killed the bill.

The member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine then reintroduced that as a private member's bill in the next session and again that bill was killed when the Prime Minister walked to the Governor General's office and then killed that legislation.

In this session of Parliament that same Liberal member of Parliament introduced that Liberal legislation yet again. We had to wait until the end of the last session before the Conservatives finally introduced it.

As I said, just before we began question period, it is a little rich to me that the Conservatives would be going on about the imperative need to pass the bill and how much it is needed for police and how critical it is when they in fact have had four years to introduce it and are the ones responsible for killing it in various stages at various moments in time.

When they finally did introduce it, they introduced it in the last week the House was sitting before summer when there was no opportunity to debate it, there was no opportunity to move it forward. Now, it has been left until the end of October before we are finally dealing with the bill.

It shows that the Conservatives' commitment to the bill is fragile at best. In fact, we have seen what they do on criminal justice matters. They introduce bills and let them languish on the order paper. Then they wait for a scandal or a problem to hit and then they seek refuge in those same crime bills, suddenly bringing them back with great urgency saying they need to be dealt with immediately and any opposition party that dares to ask a question on them is somehow soft on crime.

The facts do not measure up. The facts are that they have allowed these things to languish for years and something that should have been dealt with, the Liberal legislation that was introduced so long ago, has meant that those people are committing online fraud and the police officers who need those additional investigative techniques and tools have been left without them as the government has completely failed them.

I think it is important to note as well that this is not the only area where we have seen this problem with the government. I spoke a great deal yesterday about the importance of these new investigative techniques for police. My intention is not today to repeat all of those comments but to make a comment more generally on the direction the Conservatives are heading on crime.

Today, in the public safety and national security committee we had a couple of different witnesses. One of the witnesses was Dr. Craig Jones who is the executive director of the John Howard Society of Canada. His insights into the direction in which the government is heading on crime I think is very telling. I will quote from his comments today. He said at the beginning of his statement:

My second audience is the future. I suffer no illusions that I will be able to alter the course of this government’s crime agenda--which legislative components contradict evidence, logic, effectiveness, justice and humanity. The government has repeatedly signalled that its crime agenda will not be influenced by evidence of what does and does not actually reduce crime and create safer communities.

What we heard as well from Mr. Stewart along with Michael Jackson, who wrote a report about the government's broken direction on corrections and crime, is that we are walking down the same road that the Americans embarked on in the early 1980s, when Republicans came forward and presented the same type of one-type solution for crime, which is incarceration, more incarceration and only incarceration.

If we did not have that example and the example that was in the United Kingdom, perhaps the Conservatives would be forgiven for thinking that would work. The reality of the United States is that this is a catastrophic disaster. In fact, the governor of California is now saying the state is being crushed under the weight of the mistake of these decisions, that the prisons are literally overflowing. The supreme court of California had to release thousands of offenders into the streets because the prisons simply had no room for them.

We also see that these prisons become crime factories. Minor criminals go in often for drug-related crimes, break and enters or smaller but still serious crimes, but instead of getting help for the addiction or mental health issues they face, they get sent into prison environments where they learn to be much worse criminals. We could make the analogy of putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

In fact, in committee today the director of the John Howard Society quoted an individual who deals with aboriginal inmates and said that our prison systems are turning into “gladiator schools”. He stated:

So our federal prisons have become “gladiator schools” where we train young men in the art of extreme violence or where we warehouse mentally ill people. All of this was foreseeable by anyone who cared to examine the historical experience of alcohol prohibition, but since we refuse to learn from history we are condemned to repeat it.

Everyone can imagine that as we continually overpopulate these prisons and do not provide the services to rehabilitate people, it has to come out somewhere. Where it comes out is in a system that continually degenerates.

In California the rate of recidivism, the rate at which people reoffend, is now 70%. Imagine that, 7 out of every 10 criminals who go into that system come out and reoffend, and those offences are often more serious than the ones they went in for first. In other words, people are going into the system and then coming out much worse.

We have to remember that even when we increase sentences, over 90% of offenders will get out. We can extend the length of time they are staying in there, but at a certain time they are going to get out, and it is the concern of anybody who wants a safe country or community that when people come out of these facilities, they come out ready to be reintegrated, to contribute to society and not reoffend.

The other fundamental problem with the Conservative approach to crime is that it waits for victims. Conservatives think the only way to deal with crime is to wait until somebody has been victimized and a crime has occurred, and then to punish the person.

Of course, we believe in serious sentences. We have to have serious sentences for serious crimes, but that is not nearly enough. If it were enough, if simply having tough sentences were enough to stop crime, then places like Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles would be the safest cities in North America. We know that is certainly not the case.

What the Conservatives are doing is slashing crime prevention budgets. Actual spending in crime prevention has been slashed by more than 50% since the Conservatives came into power. They have cut programs.

I have gone to communities like Summerside and talked to the Boys and Girls Clubs or the Salvation Army in different communities. They said they have either lost funding for community projects to help youth at risk or, instead of being given the power to decide how to stop crime in their own communities, they are prescribed solutions from on high in Ottawa, which is disconnected and often does not work in those local communities.

The net result is that the community, which has the greatest capacity to stop crime, has its ability removed of stopping that crime from happening in the first place, which means even more people go to these prisons, continually feeding this factory of crime the Conservatives are marching forward with.

When we look at the costs of all of this, not only does it not provide a benefit, not only does it make our communities less safe, as has been proven in the United States, but there is a staggering cost to these policies. Pursuing a failed Republican agenda on crime that not even the Republicans would subscribe to any more in most states and most quarters in the United States comes with a staggering cost.

The Conservatives are refusing to release those figures. The minister has been refusing to tell us what exactly the price tag is for all of these measures they are putting on the table. That is why I have asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to take a look at all of these measures and their approach on crime, and tell us just what the cost is.

That bears some important questions to be asked. Where are the Conservatives going to get the money to build these new super prisons that they are talking about? Where are they going to get the money to house all of these additional inmates? Presumably, they would provide programs and services to make these inmates better. Where is that money going to come from?

If the example in the United States is any evidence, or if the example of the Conservatives' own action in slashing crime prevention budgets is any example, then we know that they will cut from the very things that stop crime from happening in the first place. Imagine the irony of that. To pay for prisons, they are going to cut the very things that stop people from going to prison. It is a backward philosophy under any logic. Upon examination of more than a minute or two, one would recognize that it is a recipe for disaster.

If that were not bad enough, and I think that it speaks directly to this bill, the Conservatives have also betrayed police. I have talked with the Canadian Police Association about the government's commitment to put 2,500 new officers on the street. That association has called that broken promise a betrayal. However, we also know that, with respect to the RCMP, the Prime Minister went out to Vancouver where he made a solemn commitment to RCMP officers that they would get the same wage as other police officers and that they would receive parity with other police officers.

Right after making that promise and signing a contract, he ripped that contract up and broke the promise. Worse, as if that was not enough of an insult to the men and women who are our national police force, the government then challenged in court the right of RCMP officers to have the choice of whether or not they wanted to have collective bargaining. The government decided to challenge a right that is enjoyed by every other police force in the country.

At the same time, the government has ignored call after call by public inquiry after public inquiry for proper and adequate oversight. The reports and conclusions of Justice Iacobucci and Justice O'Connor made it clear that new oversight mechanisms were critical to ensure that public confidence remained in our national security institutions and our national police force, yet the government ignored it. In this example, it ignored for four years Liberal legislation that had been put forward to give officers the tools that they needed to do the job of keeping our communities safe.

In all of this, the government's response is to skew the Liberal record and be dishonest about what exactly Liberals have done on crime. Here is an inconvenient fact that it does not like to talk about. For every year the Liberal government was in power, crime rates went down. Every single year that we were in power, Canada became a safer place. The communities were safer and that is because we took a balanced approach to crime.

However, the government also says that we have blocked its crime bills. That is incredibly disingenuous. Here is the reality. Maybe I will go over a couple of bills just from this session. These are bills that the Liberal Patry not only supported but moved to accelerate and tried to find a way to get passed as expediently as possible in the House.

The government caused an election, so it killed all of its own bill. When it brought back Bill C-2, it included Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27 and Bill C-22, all of which we supported. We supported and looked to accelerate Bill C-14, Bill C-15, Bill C-25 and C-26.

That is the record of Liberals in this session of Parliament on crime, not to mention the Liberal record of reducing crime every year that we were in office previously.

Today I was doing an Atlantic radio talk show with a Conservative member of Parliament who ascribed the motive to the Liberal Party that we did not care about crime, that we are soft on criminals, and that we like to let people get away with things. I will say one thing about the Conservatives. I think that they believe what they say. I think that they honestly believe that these policies will work, even though they have failed. Even though Republicans have tried them and they have been utter disasters, I do believe that the Conservatives think they will work.

However, to ascribe motive to this side of the House and to say that we somehow care less about the safety of our communities is disingenuous. To say that I care less about the safety of my children, family or community is unacceptable. This debate needs to be about who has the best approach to crime.

I would suggest that we have the best approach to stop crime before it happens, to build safe communities, to ensure we strike the right balance between being tough on those who commit serious crimes, but, most important, working with every ounce of our bodies to ensure those who begin to turn down dark paths have people who step in and intervene to ensure they do not commit those crimes in the first place. That is the type of approach we advocate on crime and it is one that I am proud of.

Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Madam Speaker, I find that comment by the member opposite very curious. I will start my comments by saying that I think he has forgotten who caused the last election. It was in fact the Prime Minister who walked over to the Governor General's residence and precipitated the last election, therefore killing every bill on the order paper, including a bill dealing with this very matter which was introduced by the Liberal member for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Lachine. I find the member's comment curious that he is blaming the frequency of elections, every single one of which the Conservatives precipitated in the last two instances, and using that as an excuse for why this was not adopted.

A point that bears mentioning is that in 2005 the Liberal Party introduced the modernization of investigative techniques act, which is essentially the same bill that we are working with here today. With very minor modifications, it is essentially the same legislation, so why would it take four years essentially to deal with the same bill that we had written so many years ago?

The member talked about things like voice over Internet protocol in terms of changes to Internet service provisions. All of those things were present four years ago when that work was done, yet the government refused to introduce it. Even recently, when this was brought back, the decision that was made by the government was to bring it in at the end of the last session. It was in the last week immediately leading up to the summer recess when suddenly this was a priority put on the order paper. It languished there for months and months and now the government is bringing it back. And the Conservatives have the audacity to try to talk about us delaying bills. The Conservatives themselves have had their crime bills sitting on the order paper, not only for months but in some instances for years, only to bring them back when they are a hit politically.

What they do is when there is a scandal, the most recent one being the cheque scandal, they decide to resurrect their crime bills that they have been ignoring for months on end. Suddenly it is an imperative national priority to deal with whatever particular crime bill they put on the table at that particular moment, when we all know that the real objective is to change the political channel away from whatever political troubles they are having. In this particular instance, it is the cheque fiasco. As this bill has been ignored and ignored and left to languish and we have been calling again and again for it to be dealt with, we can know that is essentially what their strategy is.

Now they have come to this bill and said that it is important to deal with it but only after we have been pushing for it for four years. I hope something does not distract them and we do not find this bill suddenly being lost yet again.

It is important to mention that the bill we have been advocating for the last four years is badly needed by police. Technology has changed and evolved in many different ways. While criminals have evolved with it, our legislation simply has not. For the last number of years while the Conservatives have been sitting on this, whether the criminals are involved in cyber fraud or are using technology like BlackBerries in the commission of crimes, to which the police cannot get access, the criminals have had a huge advantage against the law enforcement agencies.

One of the areas in which they have had a great advantage is in their anonymity. People are able to do things on line and police are not able to uncover who exactly they are, even if they know they are committing acts of a criminal nature. Police have been calling on us for years to change that and only now are the Conservatives bringing something forward to do something about it.

I have had many conversations with police, not just about things that were mentioned by the hon. member, but about other things, such as child pornography. Obviously child pornography is a deep concern and we want to root that out and give police every tool to be able to go after those individuals. I have also spoken with the police about instances where a criminal is known to have a particular phone and his whereabouts cannot be ascertained. The police want to be able to use the GPS tracking device in that device in order to figure out where the individual is. The current laws do not allow the police to do that.

I was talking to the chief of police in Calgary who was expressing deep frustration at the number of dial-a-dope operations. Individuals are using cell phones almost like a pizza service to deliver drugs to people's doors. When the police find these cell phones they are unable to access them because of the encryption software. The maker of the device is under no obligation to help open it up to reveal all of the phone numbers and the client base. It is a crime that is almost impossible to catch someone doing because it is locked behind that wall of encryption. That has been going on for years and the Conservatives have been refusing to give the police the tools they need to deal with it, even though solutions are present.

At the same time, it is important to mention that one of the things we are going to have to look at and study in committee is to ensure that there is balance. A number of people have expressed concerns that a law of this nature could be misused to allow access into people's searching history and people's personal messages or could be used maliciously by somebody to gain access to people's Internet search records and history. We have to ensure that balance exists. We have to protect individual rights to protect people's freedom to do what they want without somebody being able to go through willy-nilly, without warrant, their information. At the same time, we have to provide police with the opportunities to chase those individuals who we have reasonable grounds to believe have committed a crime.

It is worth mentioning as we talk about this bill, that the Conservative approach to crime is, I think, in general, disingenuous. We listened all day today to speeches by members about how the Liberal Party had held up a variety of bills. Of course, factually, that is entirely incorrect.

If we were to talk about the Liberal Party record in this session of Parliament in terms of bills that we have supported and helped to accelerate, I can list the following: Bill C-2, which was an omnibus bill which included provisions from Bill C-10, Bill C-32, Bill C-35, Bill C-27, and Bill C-22; Bill C-14; Bill C-15; Bill C-25; and Bill C-26. It is important to mention that in every instance we tried to get those bills accelerated and pushed forward.

That does not stop the Conservatives from talking about other parties holding up their crime bills. The problem is the facts do not match their rhetoric. In this specific instance and many others, the reality is the exact opposite of what they have said. In many instances, the Conservative crime bills have been languishing on the order paper, forgotten. They are sitting there waiting to be implemented. The Conservatives are not waiting for the right time for the public interest, not waiting for the right time to ensure there is adequate information to get the bills passed, but they are waiting for the right political moment to put the bills forward to try to turn the political channel.

If that were not bad enough, the other reality is that they are fundamentally letting down the Canadian public by only offering one solution to crime, and that solution invariably is to lock up people.

I do not have any problem with the notion of tough sentences. We have to have harsh, stiff sentences for people who commit serious crimes. However, if tough sentences were the only answer, then places like Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Detroit would be some of the safest cities in North America. In fact, we know the opposite to be true.

The reality is that places with the stiffest sentences are more often than not some of the most dangerous cities in North America. Why? The Americans are being crushed under the weight of their own correctional system. They are literally in a position where there are so many people pouring into the prisons that they cannot possibly keep up with the costs of building all of the prisons, let alone the programs and services to ensure that people do not repeat offend. In fact, in California the situation has become so bad that its rate of recidivism is now 70%. They are creating crime factories. People go in for a minor crime and come out as a major criminal. It is like putting in a butter knife and getting out a machine gun.

That is the strategy the Conservatives are trying to bring here: a failed Republican strategy in dealing with crime that we know as a fact does not work. They are trying to apply it here to change the channel, to use it as a political game changer. If they are in trouble with the cheque fiasco, they talk about locking up people longer. If they are in trouble because a minister is caught in a fiscal indiscretion, they talk about locking people up longer. That is what they do.

I think most of them, I would hope most of them, realize that it is a disastrous strategy, that it leads to less safe communities, that it leads to billions of dollars in additional costs, and that it is exactly following down the road that even Republican governors say was a huge mistake to walk down. If anyone doubts that, I will point quickly to what has happened specifically with incarceration in the United States compared with Canada.

In 1981, before the United States began a similar agenda on which the Conservatives are now embarking, locking people up longer and longer, the gap between the rate of incarceration in Canada and the U.S. was much narrower. In Canada, 91 per 100,000 people were incarcerated, while the figure in the United States was 243 for every 100,000 people.

By 2001, Canada's rate had grown only slightly in terms of the number of people who were incarcerated, to 101 incarcerated for every 100,000 people, while in the United States that rate had soared to 689 for every 100,000, a rate almost 700% higher than that in Canada. In that same period of time, Canada and the U.S. had the same decline in their overall rate of crime. Imagine that.

The United States' rate of incarceration went up 500% over ours, and yet over that same period of time we had the identical reduction in the amount of crime. The only difference was that 500% more individuals were being incarcerated per 100,000 people, and it cost billions of dollars more.

In fact, if we continue to follow this model suggested by the Conservatives and we extrapolate to the same path that the Republicans took the United States, where they put them right to the brink, we are talking about roughly $9 billion a year in additional costs to have the same rate of incarceration.

As for the difference for public safety, well, unfortunately, I wish I could say it just kept it the same, that the only impact of that was the loss of $9 billion a year, but we all know that that $9 billion a year has to come from somewhere. We have already seen where the Conservatives' priorities are on crime. Let us take a look at the crime prevention budget.

Since 2005 the crime prevention budget has been slashed by more than 50%. That is actual spending. At the same time as they are increasing sentences and chasing after a failed Republican model, the Conservatives are slashing the money that is given to crime prevention. It is crazy. Anybody who would look at it objectively would say that this is a path to disaster, and yet that is exactly the road they have decided to head down.

There are opportunities here to be smarter on crime, to listen to police, to talk to them about what the real solutions are, to invest in prevention, to invest in making sure people turn down the right path instead of the wrong one. I had the opportunity to go around with the former chief of police in Regina and see a neighbourhood which is designated as one of the most dangerous in Canada. He was able to show me a home that had no septic system, no heat and where the child in that home was going to school hungry. That same child predictably, just scant years later, could be committing his or her first crime by starting to get involved in drugs.

For more than 60% of our inmates, addiction is the root cause of the problem and yet they do not get help. They get thrown into prison and forgotten about, and they come out worse because the core problem was never addressed. In this case it would be an addiction problem that sent them there. They go in for a minor crime, usually break and enter, and they have an addiction. They go into a system that is not providing them any rehabilitation services, and they come out and commit worse crimes. So goes the cycle. It is a constant cycle of things getting continually ever worse.

When we look at our prison system and we ask where these criminals come from, not often enough do we take a hard look at that. Imagine. Sixty per cent of those in prison face addiction issues. Over 10% face serious mental health issues. Not only are our prisons turning into crime factories, but the Conservatives are trying to use them as hospitals, by sending people with serious mental health issues into prisons. The prisons are so ill-equipped to deal with them that they are putting them in solitary confinement. They are often released directly from solitary confinement into the general population, only to reoffend again. Whether it is the facilities in St. John's, Grandview or different facilities across the country, we see this time and time again.

The reality here is we have a bill that has been called for by police for years. The government is only now finally bringing it forward, after its having been on the table since 2005. It is trying to use crime as a political game changer, misrepresenting what crime is really about and how to stop it, and at the same time it is taking us down a path that has been tried and failed before in the United States.

We need to do better than this. We need to be honest on crime and offer real solutions.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Minister.

This bill is an interesting mélange of initiatives that many of us have been pushing. You referenced reforming the NCC in your opening comments, which I certainly want to see. I applaud the government when it does the right thing, including the initiatives of Bill C-2, as you mentioned in your opening comments. I think it was important to separate the function at the top, so I concurred with the government's direction on that and supported it when Bill C-2 was going through the House.

I note also in this bill that a large focus--and again, it is something that I and others have certainly been pursuing--is on protection of Gatineau Park. I'm just curious--and this is sheer curiosity--as to why you decided to put all these things in one bill.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you to our guests. It's good to see you again.

I wanted to start off with the fact that the record almost seems to be too good. I say that not because I'm looking for things that don't exist, but because I think it's interesting.

I'll get into a little bit of some of the points you made about how you see your office and its mandate.

I was on the committee for Bill C-2. For the record, I don't steer away from the word “whistle-blower”. I understand why you have it in your legislation. Many of the people I've worked with consider themselves whistle-blowers, and it's not a pejorative term to them. In fact, it's something they did for the public interest and they don't see it as a negative; they see it as something they did with integrity. So I guess it's in the eye of the beholder, perhaps.

You mentioned and enumerated the cases and what happened with each of them, and what direction they went, and I appreciate that. But I just find it unbelievable, to be frank, that we have no cases of wrongdoing to date. As I said, I think of this in terms of the fact that we've had an office in operation for not quite two years, but one that has being ongoing. I appreciate that it's new, but I just find it strange that we don't have any cases of wrongdoing.

So my question is, do you find that strange?

Royal Assent

[The Speaker, Liberal, Peter Milliken]

Order, please. I have the honour to inform the House that a communication has been received as follows:

Rideau Hall

Ottawa

April 28, 2009

Mr. Speaker:

I have the honour to inform you that the Honourable Thomas Cromwell, Puisne Judge of the Supreme Court of Canada, in his capacity as Deputy of the Governor General] signified royal assent by written declaration to the bill listed in the schedule to this letter on the 28th day of April, 2009 at 4:59 p.m.

Yours sincerely,

Dorothy Grandmaitre

for Sheila-Marie Cook

The schedule indicates the bill assented to was Bill C-2, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Kingdom of Norway and the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Swiss Confederation.

The House resumed from March 23 consideration of the motion that Bill C-2, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Kingdom of Norway and the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Swiss Confederation, be read the third time and passed, and of the amendment.

Marine Liability Act

[Paul Szabo, Liberal, Mississauga South, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate on Bill C-7. It is a subject which I have spoken on in the last Parliament. I do not think this bill is an easy read at all.

As a preamble to this, I would like to indicate to members that when bills like this come before us and they have consequential amendments to other acts, it takes a fair bit of work. I think the other acts to which this bill would make some changes are probably another 200 to 300 pages worth of legislative material.

Some of the changes here are referred to as “consequential” changes. To consider a consequential amendment to another act means that one has to have an understanding of the context in which the changes are being made. More often than not, it would be something that members would have to consult upon.

With that bit of preamble, the conclusion is that this bill has some fundamentals which I think members will understand and they will look to their critics for some explanations. There are some subtleties within the bill which have some important ramifications.

We have just heard the debate on Bill C-2 where we were talking about a free trade agreement and one of the industries being impacted was the shipbuilding industry. Of course, there are many other industries which would have some favourable or unfavourable impacts depending on the sector that one is looking at. It is difficult.

There is no perfect solution, no perfect trade deal, but certainly we are a trading nation. I hope that members will consider that in the same vein that I hope they will consider the provisions of Bill C-7, which is an act to amend the Marine Liability Act and the Federal Courts Act and to make consequential amendments to other acts.

This particular bill clarifies the liability rules and regulations with respect to pollution damage from marine vessels and marine transport of passengers. It will provide greater protection for Canadians in the event of marine accidents.

Most of the changes in the act will codify commitments that we have made to international conventions, and there are many. For instance, in my years on the environment committee, in dealing with the Great Lakes and marine liability with regard to alien invasive species, even that isolated issue turned out to be very complicated when dealing with the international joint agency that deals with matters which occur on waters that are shared with the United States.

Issues such as liability of adventure tourism and adequate coverage in the event of marine oil spills are issues that we believe will need to be examined further by the committee.

Members will know that this is a bill which requires listening to what the experts have to say to get the basis of the areas of concern, the interpretation of some of the consequential amendments, and to look at the precedence as well as some of the risk areas which Canada faces. Certainly, in our history there have been some very serious matters with regard to marine liability issues as they relate to the federal courts.

This bill proposes to clarify and update the liability responsibilities of marine transport with respect to the carriage of passengers and oil pollution damage. The changes proposed will make our marine laws consistent with the international protocols.

Specifically, as I fan through the bill, the critical area is changing the liability limits for commercial and public purpose vessels carrying passengers to a capital limit of $350,000 per passenger. The amendments further invalidate waivers or any other contracts that might relieve operators of their liability to passengers. The bill also introduces regulations that may require operators of commercial and public purpose vessels to maintain insurance to cover liability to passengers.

As one can see, we can very briefly capsulize the significant changes that are being introduced in this piece of legislation and understand that once we have looked at the legislation in other jurisdictions and the protections referred to in various international covenants or protocols, we can understand why this is an important area for us to update our marine liability legislation.

The changes do make some exceptions for vehicles rescuing shipwrecked or distressed persons, inflatable vessels and vessels using paddles or oars, such as those used in adventure touring. These changes make our legislation consistent with the international convention of liability for maritime claims.

The bill also amends the Marine Liability Act to implement the International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution. Compensation funds can compensate those damaged by oil spills up to $545 million per incident. The damage from oil spills, however, can be much greater. Bill C-7 allows Canada to join the international supplementary fund protocol that increases the maximum compensation for oil spill damages to $1.5 billion.

This is obvious in today's world with some of the history that we have had with regard to the transport of cargo, which has environmental risks, such as oil spills. We have seen the implications not only to marine life but in fact to whole ecosystems. The cleanup required is tremendously expensive. This bill would provide the mechanism whereby there would be the so-called insurance to take care of the extraordinary costs that may be incurred.

The international funds derive their funding from levies placed on ports importing oil. Canada's levies would increase to approximately 28¢ per tonne of oil received. So there is a participatory cost, but it is effectively like paying insurance. I believe this is probably a very important element of the bill which I think members would understand should be supported.

Bill C-7 also includes changes such as including damage compensation for bunker oil pollution and amending provisions related to administrative and enforcement of offences.

In the bill the proposed amendment will result largely from a maritime law reform discussion paper that was released by Transport Canada in May 2005 and the subsequent consultations that took place with many stakeholders in all sectors of the marine community.

Just as a side note, I should indicate that we have a large number of pieces of legislation which have had some false starts in this place, not being able to get through all the necessary stages of the legislative process. It is unfortunate because we do have important legislation which in fact is way behind where it should be.

A couple that are very dear to my heart are from our own Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Both the Privacy Act and the Access to Information Act are 25 years old and have not been updated. With regard to the Privacy Act, and knowing the problems with identity theft and other cyber crimes, it actually came in when the best computer we could get at the time was the Commodore 64.

We need to be very vigilant about allowing legislation to languish because of Parliament having difficulty in keeping itself focused. We must ensure that essential changes that come before Parliament are dealt with expeditiously, as necessary, and get to committee in order to deal with some of the substantive questions that members will have and should have.

However, when it gets down to it, we cannot afford to delay legislation in this place, particularly when it has had false starts in the past.

With regard to the importance to Canada, Canada does have some of the busiest waterways in the world. For example, each year our waterways pass through 365 million tonnes of international cargo, 7 million tonnes of oil, 7 million tonnes of domestic cargo, 40 million passengers, 16 million automobiles on ferries and 1.5 million people on cruise ships. The liability provisions and the insurance provisions are extremely important to have in place for the protection of all stakeholders, individuals and businesses alike.

The intent of the legislation, according to Transport Canada officials, is to set limits on liability and establish uniformity by balancing the interests of shipowners and other parties. This is something that we come across all the time. It is very rarely that there is a linear approach to any bill. There are usually other stakeholders who have different forces on them. We saw that in the debate earlier on Bill C-2 with regard to the trade bill. There may be some benefits to one industry, like pharmaceuticals, but the shipbuilding industry would be at a disadvantage.

Balancing the interests of the stakeholders is always very difficult and it takes some time to understand the basic principles. However, in this regard, it is fairly straightforward. I know we will hear from other members about the importance of securing and protecting our transportation obligations with regard to safety, security and protection for all all stakeholders involved.

The government has presented this bill as an environmental protection act. In fact, it is not exactly that. In the event of an oil pollution spill, civil liability of the owner of the vessel, combined with Canada's participation in the international oil pollution compensation funds, can compensate those damages by oil spills by up to $545 million per incidence, as I said. Damage from the oil spills, however, can be greater and, of course, the supplementary protocol fund can provide that protection up to $1.5 billion. However, this may not be adequate for oil spills. The Exxon Valdez oil spill, for example, cost an estimated $2.5 billion to clean up. It was an extraordinary amount of money but in a very sensitive area. We can understand why there are still other considerations for us with regard to even the coverages that are available. Are they reasonable and does it make for good government?

The government seems to feel that this bill would better protect Canadians from oil spills and assure polluters actually pay for what they do. However, in the real world, whenever there are costs, like the levies for the international protocol and the supplementary coverage, those costs of a business are ultimately passed on to the users of the service and therefore passed on to Canadians. We cannot isolate this and somehow consider, as we often have, that all of a sudden the owners of vessels who transport people or goods and materials are somehow the bad guys and we can dump all the problems off on them. In the real world they exist because they are providing goods and services in the best interests of Canada, which includes in the best interests of its people.

I am not really buying in very strongly about how this would protect Canadians from oil spills, et cetera. It is not an environment bill but it would help to, I guess indirectly, provide the coverage to ensure there is a mitigating factor in terms of being able to remediate any of the damage that may be caused by some of the incidents referred to in the bill.

The last section has to do with amendments that provide for some exceptions to vessels using paddles and oars, such as those used in adventure touring. It is an interesting area and something that is somewhat frivolous but these kinds of vessels are a thriving industry in many regions of Canada. To impact them when the risks associated with high liability impacts by some accidents is out of line with the kinds of things that are contemplated by the bill and what motivated the bill itself.

Those are just a few of the issues on which I am sure members will be commenting. I hope members will be supporting the bill to go to committee where we should look at some of the issues related to the coverages and the consequential amendments to other acts. This is something, admittedly, that is very difficult for a member at this stage, at second reading, to have been able to do the kind of work that is necessary. Bills come flying through the House to us and to access those bills and look at the consequential amendments in the context in which they are meant makes it very difficult for an individual member.

We have good critics who take the time to do this work and have addressed the legislation and the number of schedules and annexes. I notice that there are some areas within the bill that would be enforced immediately on royal assent, but there are other sections that would be deferred or delayed until order in council comes up, which means there will be some regulations made that will need to be dealt with.

It is an interesting issue. I have often thought that members of Parliament are asked to vote on bills that require extensive regulations and yet those regulations are not even prepared or exposed to the members until after the legislation passes at all stages in both chambers. That is why there is a scrutiny of regulations committee. Every regulation that is made must be pursuant to an enabling provision within the legislation and it should not be a case of backdoor legislation, as it were, changing the intent or adding new elements to the bill that would constitute making law through regulations. Some refer to it as cabinet made law.

The scrutiny of regulations committee's job is to ensure that, as regulations come through, they are checked to ensure the regulations are properly enabled within the legislation. Therefore, members should not be overly concerned about that.

However, I would make one recommendation to hon. members with regard to regulations generally. In an area where it is unclear in the legislation as to the scope or the intent of the amendment to the legislation, members must have the opportunity to make either the recommendation or an amendment to say that such amendment must go to the appropriate standing committee for its comment or perhaps its approval if it is serious enough. It is something that has happened in the past with regard to the reproductive technologies act that we spent a lot of time on pursuant to the royal commission on reproductive technologies. It was going to take two years to do the regulations and all those regulations had to go through the health committee before they could be gazetted and promulgated.

We can see that if there are areas in which there are potentially serious consequences to regulations, members should make every effort to seek from officials clarification as to the timeline, the importance, the significance and whether there is other information that may impact our assessment of the effectiveness of the proposed legislation.

Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act

[Thomas Mulcair, NDP, Outremont, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate my friend and colleague, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, on all the hard work he has done on this issue.

At first blush, when we talk about a free-trade agreement with countries like Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, many Canadians might be a bit confused and wonder how we could have a problem with it. In fact, the countries I just named are very close to us historically and in many other respects. My colleague said as much, and another colleague from Halifax was able to prove it: Bill C-2 will destroy Canada's shipbuilding industry. Although I congratulate my colleague from Burnaby—New Westminster, I also want to thank the people across Canada, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, including the people from the Lévis shipyards. In fact, these shipyards are still known as the Lauzon yards, even though the City of Lauzon amalgamated with Lévis quite some time ago.

It is sad to see how the Conservative government is incapable of paying attention to detail in its work. It is as though once something fits with its ideology, the government refuses to believe that there could be any problem. In fact, this bill poses a major problem, even though other members who will vote for it to support the Conservatives said there were good things in it. Obviously, every time we can look at expanding certain sectors, some good will come of it. But we are able to walk and chew gum at the same time and we are able to negotiate an agreement with these countries without compromising a vital Canadian industry. And that is what we must do.

The Americans have never had any qualms about this. In the United States, ships had to be built there in order to access domestic waters. Some would call this protectionism, but the Americans think it is only normal, and this is part of what is protected every time the Americans sign an agreement in this matter. How is that Canada is the only country incapable of including a similar provision to protect itself, in light of the evidence that Norway in particular will take the lion's share, while we lose thousands of jobs in a sector that could be strategically important in the very short term?

It is an honour for me to speak to Bill C-2. I congratulate my colleague, the member for Parliament for Burnaby—New Westminster, for the titanic job he has done on this, and there is no pun on the word “titanic” as we talk about shipbuilding.

As people hear us speak on this issue today, they will be as surprised as we were that the Conservatives were unable to listen to the voices of the men and women who work in shipbuilding across our great country. Canada is the only country in the world that people can talk about stretching from coast to coast to coast because it borders on three oceans, the Arctic, the Pacific and the Atlantic. Shipping and shipbuilding have been integral in building our country.

We realize that shipbuilding industry in Canada, from British Columbia all the way to Nova Scotia, passing by Lévis-Lauzon, where the Davie shipbuilding operation is located and recently bought by some Norwegians, is in a great deal of trouble. That is why it is so disappointing and surprising that the government would be selling out our industry in that regard.

It is often heard, when we deal with trade issues, that some parts of the bill will be good, particular when one rhymes off the list of countries involved. In fact, it can raise eyebrows when we say that we find offence with the treaty with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. However, the government is throwing out a very important industry. It will be killing our shipbuilding industry if this agreement goes forward, notably to the profit of Norway, which has become a powerhouse in this field. This is most disturbing.

We know Conservative ideology. The argument of the Conservatives is any trade agreement is good in and of itself and we do not have to look at the details. However, that is precisely what we are called upon to do in the House. We are here to look at details, see how things will affect Canadians, go forward when they meet a certain number of criteria, including the fact that it will not take away Canadian jobs, and hold back when it will produce an undesired result such as the one I just described. However, they are not doing that. They are pushing it forward full throttle.

In this case, it is even more disappointing to hear that the Bloc Québécois will vote in favour of this agreement. When we know how many jobs are involved with a shipbuilding concern like Davie in Lauzon, I have a great deal of difficulty understanding why the Bloc Québécois supports the bill.

We know how many jobs are at risk and will be lost if we sign this agreement, including those at the Davie shipyards in Lauzon-Lévis. I simply cannot understand why the Bloc Québécois members are supporting this.

I listened carefully to their arguments. They claim that there are other areas of activity, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, that could benefit from a levelling of agreements with a country like Switzerland. I have no problem with that. It is probably true. However, when such an agreement is reached, we must look at the overall picture and judge accordingly. There is no overriding reason why we should destroy the shipbuilding industry and Quebec's shipyards. I just mentioned the Davie shipyard in Lauzon, but there is also the very active Ocean Group Inc., which is located just a little further downstream from Quebec City on the north shore. There is no reason we should destroy this industry in Quebec. Those who vote in favour of this agreement with the European Free Trade Association will have a lot of explaining to do later on.

It is not unusual that the Liberals would vote for it. Over the past three years—this is the Conservatives' fourth year in power—their bootlicking has defied imagination. There is not one subject on which the Liberal Party has taken a stand. It does not have principles. It does not believe in anything, except for its own opportunism.

Therefore, that the Liberals would sell out again and vote for the EFTA agreement does not surprise us in the least. They have supported the Conservative government at least 70 times. We are becoming increasingly used to their conduct. At present, they have a right-leaning leader. He is a man who used the prestige of his position at Harvard University to support the war in Iraq. In some of his writings, he attempts to justify the use of torture on human beings.

We will see what the Liberals do with the gun registry. Probably the same thing they did to the Navigable Waters Protection Act, an important Canadian law that had been around for about 100 years. They supported the Conservatives, who scrapped it, and they also voted with the Conservatives to eliminate the right of women to receive equal pay for work of equal value.

That is the sad reality of just a few months with their new leader, a rightist who has shifted to the right. He should at least be identified and named so that the public clearly knows that the party whose name sounds like the word liberty, the Liberal Party, has become a weak version of the Conservative Party with its right-leaning leader.

Therefore, we are not surprised to see the Liberals rising to vote with the Conservatives time after time. What is surprising and disappointing this time is that, despite the arguments they made, the Bloc Québécois is voting with the Conservatives to impose this new agreement on Quebec and Canada that will destroy our marine industry and crush workers across Canada in this crucial sector.

In closing, I would like to thank and acknowledge the courage of all the men and women who wrote to us asking that we keep our resolve and fight this bill. We will continue to support the workers, to condemn the shift to the right by the Liberals who systematically support the Conservatives, and to lament the fact that, this time, the Bloc Québécois is throwing in its lot with the Conservatives to the detriment of the workers in Quebec and Canada.

The House resumed from March 23 consideration of the motion that Bill C-2, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Kingdom of Norway and the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Swiss Confederation, be read the third time and passed, and of the amendment.

Business of the House

[Jay Hill, Conservative, Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague, the House leader for the official opposition, for his multitude of questions.

First of all, as he indicated, today we will continue debate on Bill C-14, the organized crime bill. I would point out that it is thanks to the Minister of Justice, whose leadership this morning overcame an opposition tactic aimed at delaying Bill C-14 that we do have an agreement to move that bill forward. As a result of the minister's intervention, Bill C-14 will in fact be sent to committee at the end of today, pursuant to a special order of the House.

Tonight the House will consider a take note debate on the international conference on Afghanistan hosted by The Hague.

As I mentioned earlier, we adopted a special order for Bill C-14. Unfortunately that special order did not cover the second justice bill that is slated for debate today. In fact it is conceivable we would have already been into that debate had it not been for the delaying tactics of the opposition earlier this morning.

This is the bill that the hon. member referred to, Bill C-15, the drug offences bill. It is another key piece of our government legislation that will help curb gang violence, yet we do not see it moving quickly through the House. That said, I am hopeful we can complete the bill today or have it completed at the latest tomorrow, provided the NDP does not invoke another delaying tactic as it did this morning.

Following the drug offences bill, we have scheduled for debate Bill C-7, marine liability; Bill S-3, energy efficiency; and Bill C-13, the Canada Grain Act. All of these bills are at second reading.

On Monday, pursuant to a special order adopted yesterday, we will complete the third reading stage of Bill C-2, the Canada-EFTA free trade agreement bill. After considerable delay in this chamber, it will be nice to move that bill over to our colleagues down the hall in the Senate.

We will continue next week with any uncompleted business from this week, with the addition of Bill C-5 regarding the Indian Oil and Gas Act, which is at report stage and third reading stage, and Bill C-18 regarding RCMP pensions, which is at second reading. We will add to the list any bills that are reported back from the various committees.

Tuesday, March 31 shall be an allotted day.

In reference to the upcoming justice bills that the member might be referring to when he referred to the remand legislation, he is going to have to stay tuned. We will be bringing that forward very soon. I am sure he will be very pleased with the result and will want to move very quickly once it hits the floor of the chamber.

As he knows, the government is very transparent when it comes to government expenditures, including the upcoming expenditures of the accelerated economic stimulus contained in the $3 billion under vote 35. All of that of course will be revealed to the Canadian public and to Parliament in good time as we make those investments on behalf of Canadians from coast to coast.

[Carole Lavallée, Bloc, Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this evening's adjournment debate concerns a question I asked the Minister of Canadian Heritage on February 3, to which I did not receive a satisfactory answer.

I asked about cultural programs that were cut, such as Trade Routes and PromArt, which helped our artists travel abroad.

In his budget, the minister chose to spend $25 million on the so-called Canada prizes for the arts and creativity to bring foreign artists here and give them bursaries. The whole idea struck us as completely absurd and illogical seeing as our own artists have just had their funding for essential cultural activities cut by $45 million. I will come back to that later.

Now this government is spending $25 million on bursaries—some of them worth six figures, that is, between $100,000 and $200,000—for foreign artists. That money is earmarked for foreign artists, while our own artists struggle with poor working conditions and low incomes. On average, our artists earn $22,000 per year.

What is more, these Canada prizes for the arts and creativity are the brainchild of two Toronto lobbyists who have had a great deal of influence on the government. In fact, the Conservative government's budget contains a complete word for word copy of the Luminato promotion from last summer. It is pretty amazing that the government's budget would be written by lobbyists. This government claims to be transparent, but we can see that it is not. Its first step when first elected in 2006 was to pass Bill C-2 in order to distance itself from lobbyists.

What is more, the Canada prizes project is a sham. It includes a list of so-called partners prepared to support this project and help Luminato to carry it out. Obviously, two lobbyists working down in their garage cannot set up a $25 million project by themselves. The partners, some of them as well known as the Grands Ballets Canadiens and Cirque de Soleil, had never heard of this project, or had heard very little. They were, in fact, not partners at all.

I am asking the minister to explain his logic to us. Before funding foreign artists to come here to Canada, should he not be funding artists from here so that they can go abroad? Now, and there is no denying it, there is a huge hole in this department's funding, so huge that performing artists can no longer tour outside the country.

Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act, 1992

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I find that statement to be a bit absurd. The legislation was on the order paper for a later time. We had considered putting amendments at the report stage. The Conservative government moved the bill ahead very quickly on the order paper. In fact, it delayed the work it was doing on Bill C-2 today in order to push the bill forward so our amendments could not come forward in the proper sequence, which would have been as the bill came forward.

The question of how the bill is in front of us now is an issue. Quite clearly, in the last committee meeting, we had a lot of testimony that was not correct, and the witnesses had to agree. That is in the transcript of the committee meeting.

When it comes to offering up amendments, the hon. member across had the opportunity in the committee meetings to provide amendments to my amendment and the members chose not to even talk about it, partly because the information the government officials were providing to the committee was incorrect. Therefore, we had a problem.

Now it is in front of the House and we have to have this debate, which is fine. Canadians can hear a bit about what we are doing in the House. We are not trying to slow down this legislation.

Perhaps some of these questions would be better dealt with at a Senate committee meeting, where the Senate could ship it back to us once it had amended it.

What we should do is get the work done in a correct fashion, as I pointed out.

Canada-EFTA Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-2, the implementation of the Canada-European free trade agreement. The bill deals with a proposed arrangement between some of the European countries and Canada. The agreement was initiated nine years ago by the Liberal administration under Jean Chrétien. It came at a time when the ideology of free trade and the free market system was at its height. That is not the case today.

In the last 12 months, the world has seen a profound change. It has not yet played out completely around the world. It is a change that will lead us to make different choices in the future. It will lead us to situations where we must, in some cases, protect our industries. In many cases, Canadians will be obligated to take another look at free trade. For the purposes of preserving our economy, we will be obligated to better understand how the world will work.

That is what we are faced with today. We are not faced with the situation of nine years ago. We are not even faced with the situation of two years ago. We are faced with the situation that has come upon us today. If we look at the history of the opening of the liberalization of trade in Canada, for many years, we were under the guidance of a policy that said that good fences made good neighbours. In many cases, we understood that the situation in the world between countries was not open or equal. We were not in a position to allow free trade to take place. We needed to have tariffs and protection for our industries because the world was not the place it was 20 years previous.

When we started on the free trade talks and agreements that came along in the 1980s, we built them on the basis that we would open up the world economy. We were making trade and taking away barriers. We were going to create a level playing field around the world, where the best possible situation could arise for industry and commerce and permit an expansion of the world's economy. By and large, some of that worked and some did not work. Some of it was based on trade and some was based on technological advancement and many other factors.

However, today, we are dealing with where we are going in the future with trade. How do we set the path for our Canadian economy? We have seen that there is not likely to be less regulation, but more regulation. We are likely to pay more careful attention to how our industries work, not less attention.

Our amendment proposes to carve out the very important shipbuilding industry from the agreement. We do not see that this will work for our shipbuilding industry in the future. We do not see that free trade will make the kind of difference to our shipbuilding industry that we might have thought about 20 years ago. It is not the case today. This is why we are very interested in ensuring that our shipbuilding industry is protected and allowed to grow in a reasonable fashion.

Shipbuilding will have a place in Canada. We are a maritime nation. We have the largest coastline of any country in the world. A lot of that coastline is in my riding in the Arctic, among the Arctic islands. There is an enhanced interest in the development of arctic resources and arctic transportation and the use of the Arctic as the ice melts. With climate change, we see the opening up of the Arctic Ocean, the arctic shipping lanes and all of that.

It is imperative that Canada stays on top of Arctic marine shipping development. Right now that is in the hands of the Russians. They are the leaders in this field. Where are we? We are nowhere in it. We will enter into the next century of development in the Arctic, where marine transportation will be of the utmost importance, and we will have a shipbuilding industry that we have not supported and that we have not ensured has the opportunity to take advantage of this new and exciting area to work in, the Arctic.

That one factor should give us all pause. It should make us ask what is good for Canada, not what is good for the world, in our new opportunities in the new economy, which will have a very large Arctic base. Is it good simply to abandon the shipbuilding industry to the vagrancies of the world market to the kind of competition that can come not only from Norway and from that direction, but from the Koreans and the Chinese? Is that what we want to accomplish?

It is not simply about building ships. It is about all the ancillary things that go along with ships. If we are turning over the shipbuilding industry, we are turning over many of the components and technologies that can give Canada the edge in the new economy into which we are moving.

Therefore, what are we doing here? What are we trying to accomplish with this free trade agreement that was started nine years ago by the Chrétien Liberals, when free trade was popular? Are the two major parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, simply caught in their past rhetoric, in their past ideas of free trade and free markets, that they cannot see what the future holds? Can they not say that this is the direction we should go in, that this is where the new economy is, that those are the things we have to protect and that those are the things we have to create.

Is that what their problem is, that their ideology has just bound them down? They used to complain that the NDP was ideologically bound by its protectionism, by its social justice, by its concerns about the environment, so that it could not be open to the development of world trade. Times are changing and we need to respond in a fashion that is acceptable and reasonable.

When the Mulroney government got us into the free trade agreement, the allegations at the time were that the free trade agreement was supported by the Conservatives and would continue to keep our dollar high. At the time, the New Democratic Party was pushing for a lower interest rate, which would help our economy. When the Liberals got in, they actually did that. They lowered the interest rate and let the dollar fall. Under the free trade agreement with the United States, we flourished. However, was it because of the free trade agreement or because of the lower dollar? Both of those factors had to come into play.

What is happening today? We are in the midst of a major global financial crisis, which we have not settled, yet we are talking about putting ourselves into more free trade agreements, when we do not understand yet what the financial situation of the world is going to be.

When it comes to currency, what is going to happen when the price of oil, inevitably in the next 12 months, starts to rise dramatically again, when the U.S. economy recovers and when the U.S. dollar starts to fall?

[Brian Masse, NDP, Windsor West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is important, when we look at the context of trade, that we look at the current deals that have been signed and, as part of our due diligence, to review what is happening here.

With respect to Bill C-2, the hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster has requested the aspects to shipbuilding be carved out, which is a normal process of trade arrangements. In fact, in the history of trade arrangements they have had these elements in a series of different ways. For example, the United States has the Jones act and procurement policies with a number of different defence contracts. It also has policies in manufacturing, for example with the bus industry, where there are provisions that require content assembly in parts manufacturing in the United States. In fact, Canadian companies had to go into the United States and open up assembly plants so they could bid and win contracts for those.

As well, the United States has a buy American clause that is part of its overall procurement policy and always has been. It reached some feverish discussion in recent months but the reality is that it has been in American law for a number of years. The clause has been part of its ordinary procurement policy and has been part of the state and municipal procurement policies.

The request that is being made here is part of negotiation tactics. Unfortunately, we have a history of bad negotiations when we look at the past Liberal government and the Conservative government. This deal here was arranged by David Emerson, a Liberal minister for the Martin administration who crossed the floor after an election and continued with his policies. One of the policies was with regard to European trade and another one was with Colombia. Another deal that has not seen the light of day, thankfully, is with Korea.

If one looks at those policies, the government offered up a significant number of different iconic Canadian industries as bait to bring in trade negotiations and then it caved and gave them away later on.

One of the reasons I have been opposed to the South Korea trade deal, which some bureaucrats will admit, is that something had to be offered up. In this agreement, the government has offered up the automotive industry. It is a terrible position to start with because one knows right away where one's negotiating strength is. Unfortunately, the government comes back with deals that really sell out certain segments of Canada's industrialized capacity.

It is important to note, for example, that the United States has its own defence procurement policy and we do not begrudge it that. We know the United States has certain aspects it wants to continue to have in its country as part of its overall strategic way to deal with civil society, as well as international affairs, which is why it has the capacity to ensure it can respond to certain things.

Sadly, Canada has done the exact opposite. We have basically abandoned any type of sectorial strategy approach and only through a budgetary process year by year scrambles around to try to find some programs or aids that come and go for the aerospace, automotive or shipbuilding industries. The government does not really create concrete plans of action.

We are looking at Norway for particular reasons in this debate because it spent over a dozen years building a shipbuilding industry through heavy subsidization and a national policy. It had over a generation of public policy geared to design and build ships. not only for its domestic industry but also international industry. When Canada enters into an agreement like this with no terms and conditions to protect Canadian industry, it is at a natural disadvantage.

I have had a chance to see some of the work that has been done with shipbuilding. I have been at the Irving yards in Halifax and have spoken with the workers. Interestingly enough, the government's position has always been the issue over labour mobility. It says that if workers cannot build ships because there is no work, then they need to go out to Alberta or somewhere else to find a job.

The first thing one may say to that, even I as a young parent, is that people will do what they need to do, there is no doubt about it. However, when we have thriving communities that will continue to be there, it is important for families to be held together, which is the creation of a bond the community requires to deal with everything, including social programs, crime, education and innovation.

It is not just about workers going away for a couple of months and returning. Canadians will do those things if they need to, as they have done in my riding, but the preference would be to have a job in their own community, especially communities that historically have been around and will be around for the foreseeable future. We should be looking at building that capacity. It is about those communities with a high industrialized component for shipbuilding, for example, as we are talking about today specifically, to be part of a program and plan to create stability. We are going to win from that.

Other organizations or other countries will not be complaining about Canada being protectionist because this is done in other countries, and that is why it is important to have this component carved out and move forward with the rest of the trade agreement that would be more balanced. It would be progressive in the sense that shipbuilding would be removed, but it is not, which, unfortunately, is why we are back here today.

I will again talk about the Navistar truck plant in Chatham, Ontario, where a $200 million defence procurement offer went out to International Truck, which is located in Chatham and in Texas, and it decided to put all the work into Texas. That is not acceptable because a number of years ago International Truck was having problems and it was given a $35 million loan guarantee and for the last several years it has been producing trucks and doing quite well. In fact, when it tried to move production to Mexico, the trucks had to come back to Chatham to be audited and repaired because the quality was not up to what the client needed.

As a Canadian politician, I do not get upset when the United States buys its trucks from Texas for its military. I understand that it has a plant with people working there. If it were going to buy trucks, it would be a good idea if it were to buy them here in Canada. We are always hopeful to gain that type of business. However, I can understand that it wants to have certain segments of its military protected to be able to do procurement there because it actually gets it. It also understands that having development capacity gives it control over who gets those at what time. It actually has that in it its contracting, which means that the United States can cut the line whenever it wants, which would reduce our capability to have our own sovereignty addressed.

It is interesting to note that the plant can produce that truck for around $800,000. With the layoff of workers about to take place, we are looking at about $17 million to $19 million in unemployment insurance benefits. This makes no sense whatsoever on an economic scale. If we were actually going to have that investment, the retooling would be done by Canadians, the equipment allotted would be Canadian and the people doing the work would be Canadians. We would have the next future base of taxation policy from those who are making money in that area contributing back to the coffers of Canada. We would have a net win. Why we would send our truck development to Texas and basically backhand Chatham, Ontario, which is struggling right now, does not make any sense.

It goes to a deeper issue that ties with the essence of shipbuilding and the history we have with the water. Canadians know we have been a maritime nation serving ourselves quite capably during the first and second world wars where we had one of the largest merchant marines and navies by the conclusion of the war. We has a real sense of pride and dignity when we were able to procure much of our own development and had the capacity to do it.

People having the type of work where they actually produce something of net value and that they can relate to is such a value added component to our society. It is an extra added benefit to those who are part of the actual experience. In terms of shipbuilding, there is that element. Similar to that, in Chatham, Ontario, it is what the Conservative government has said, which is that they will not be producing ships for our men and women serving in the military, that it will be done by someone else.

Canadians miss out on that relationship of getting up every day, going to work, getting a paycheque and contributing to the Canadian development experience. It is important for people to have a job because it gives them a meaningful sense of worth. However, the Conservatives have told them that they are not good enough, that the work will be done somewhere else.

What is so important about this debate in terms of the economics behind the shipbuilding industry and how it connects to ourselves as a people is when we see the outsourcing that is going on, which becomes very frustrating. Workers and others are starting to feel the anguish. I worry about the elements that will come next. Being from the auto sector, many of the workers are frustrated that the government is not there for them and that they are having to do things on their own.

In one of the more recent cases that we have had is the issue over Aradco. I want to congratulate Gerry Farnham, president of CAW195, and his workers who fought an American company that pulled out of Canada and left 80 families out of jobs with no severance package. The workers took it upon themselves to occupy the plant and ensure they received a better severance package, which they negotiated by themselves with no help from the government. Those people are working class heroes. They are men and women, some of whom are in single parent families, who took this action to protect themselves and their families livelihoods.

The message the government should take about what happened in that one plant at this particular time is that it must be more responsible when it has the tools and the resources behind it to make a difference in this country.

Those are the reasons we should be carving out this element and protecting our shipbuilding industry and the workers who have the skills and the training, which is important. When we look at the Aradco workers, they were some of the most productive workers but, through no fault of their own, they were usurped. It is the same for the shipbuilding industry, which has some of the best trained and most experienced workers. We will abandon them in some type of an experiment that does not make any sense.

We need to turn this around. People are looking to us and at the examples that we are setting. They are asking what can we do with their taxpaying dollars that will benefit not only just in terms of the immediacy of the tax expenditure that we are doing right now but later on in terms of public policy. That is what a national strategy for shipbuilding and an auto strategy would be and all those other things where there is value and traceable elements of where the money goes to. That is what could be done in this particular element.

Workers will continue to feel frustration as they have done everything right and then they do not have the government behind them.

It is disappointing that we are here by ourselves as New Democrats on this issue. I think we will be looking back later, not only in terms of what we have lost, but in terms of a missed opportunity to reinforce at a time when there is that motivation that should be even bigger to restart an industry and ensure it will thrive. The connection to that is critical, especially when we can look at the incredible opportunities.

We can look at the Great Lakes, not only as a treasure environmentally but also a trade corridor that is significant. The Great Lake freighters will soon need to be replaced but those will all be built in China, Norway or somewhere else when they could be built here.

Sadly, we let the shipbuilding facility at Collingwood go, but we could plan this out to ensure that Halifax, Montreal and other shipbuilding areas where we still have that capacity are preserved. For those who are not aware of it, Collingwood has now become a resort. It is a very beautiful location with a lot of positive things there but we did not plan another deep water capacity port. What we have lost now is the opportunity to have a thriving industry return.

Therefore, we need to think about that in the context of what is happening right now and, with what is going on right now, this is the perfect opportunity.

It is important to look at what the message would be for Canada if we were to carve this out. It would tell the other countries that we are interested in doing this and I do not think we would have a hostile reaction. I do not think any country would challenge us.

When we look at some of the European policies for defence and other procurement, it is quite similar. When we look at the United States, it is very clear that it has decided that it is going to have this at its capacity, and we are very much integrated with the United States.

Ironically, even as we have had some of these elements, the United States has gone to the extreme where, under the Patriot Act and other types of legislation, many Canadian workers are not eligible to work on some contracts in the United States that are defence procurement.

The United States has even challenged the workers who are part of companies that are integrated. This is going to become a bigger issue because we have a number of different procurements that are going to take place over the next few months. We will hear about some of them, including search and rescue planes that need to be replaced. There are concerns already being expressed that the government is going to skew the bidding process basically to give an Italian company the contract. It is sad, because we actually have a number of different consortiums here in Canada, with up to 50% Canadian ownership, that could do that type of work. They should be part of that process.

We are going to continue to see this type of debate emerge. This is not a one-off issue. We are going to see the return of discussion of the South Korean trade deal. That is another one that I mentioned, where the automotive aspect of it is being offered up as an element that basically could be seen as the carrot to bring us in, and then later on we suffer the consequences of that.

It is important to note also that it is not just the New Democrats here on their own who are bringing this issue forward. It is interesting, because we have not only the labour aspect, which is traditionally part of our party and our relations and so forth, but we also have the associations, as well as companies such as the Irvings.

There are some interesting quotes that have come out of this debate that really reinforce the fact that it is going to be costing us as a country a lot of jobs.

One quote is from Mary Keith, a spokeswoman for Irving Shipbuilding Inc. The company has actually put this in a release, so it is not something that was just said off the cuff or thrown out in a media comment. This is an actual release that was put out, so they thought very carefully about what they were going to say.

Ms. Keith said:

The government of Canada is continuing its 12-year history of sacrificing Canadian shipbuilding and ship operators in the establishment of free trade agreements with other nations.

International trade minister David Emerson said at the time that a free trade agreement in principle had been reached with the countries of Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

They were looking at it through a 12-year lens when she made that comment. I think that is significant because a number of different operators or companies out there are seeing this as systemic. When we see something as systemic, we defeat the option of other people who are interested in actually investing or moving into that field.

The people making those comments are indicating that this is not just one-off bad policy from the Conservative government or the Liberals before it. What they are saying is that if people want to get into this business, they'd better buckle up, because the ones who are in it right now are completely dissatisfied with the relationship they have with the government. They feel that not only is it not neutral, it is actually against the flow.

I want to point that out because what we have happening here is a continued pattern of behaviour, the assumption that we can just reduce trade barriers or regulations, whether it be in regard to food or other types of industries such as the airline industry, and we will see natural improvements to the consumer and to civil society. That is not the case. That has not always happened.

What we need is a carrot-and-stick approach. The carrot is good public policy, and the stick is to make sure that the jobs are going to be created here, especially when taxpayers' money is involved.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-2, the Canada-EFTA free trade agreement implementation act.

If passed, this bill would seriously impact my riding of Halifax and could have devastating consequences for Canada's domestic shipbuilding industry. Earlier, my colleague, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore, was asked by the hon. member for Kelowna—Lake Country what free trade agreement the NDP would support.

I would like to point out that the NDP believes that member nations of the EFTA have strong social-democratic traditions and they are actually ideal trading partners for Canada. They have great human rights records. They have great environmental records. The Canada-EFTA free trade agreement implementation act as a whole is a good piece of legislation. We welcome this kind of trading relationship with these countries. The only issue here is that of shipbuilding.

The trade agreement on which we will be asked to vote contains provisions that would remove one of the only tools remaining that protects our shipbuilding industry from being ravaged by unfair competition from foreign builders. Those same European industries were very generously subsidized until recently.

If this bill passes, in just three short years we would see import tariffs begin to be lowered, allowing an influx of foreign-built ships to enter our market. This change would sound the death knell for shipbuilding and it would significantly damage the economy of Nova Scotia. In the interest of standing up for our Canadian shipbuilding industry and the local shipyard workers whom I represent, I must voice my opposition to this bill without an amendment to protect our shipbuilding industry.

As any Atlantic Canadian will tell us, shipbuilding is not just another industry; it is tied to our nation's history. From the earliest days of Confederation, our wealth of forests and hardy labour created hundreds of wooden ships that helped bring much prosperity to Atlantic Canada. It is well known that in those days people could look out at the harbour and see nothing but a sea of white sails moving goods from the great port of Halifax.

During the first and second world wars, Canada stepped up to build hundreds of new ships, punching above its weight when the need was greatest. Between the wars and after, the industry was fuelled by domestic procurement policies to expand our fleets, and by government investment. Those investments created a robust industry and they made a lot of sense, given our enviable coastlines.

Unfortunately, the importance of the industry has not been as clear to recent governments in Canada. Add to that a series of bad trade agreements and we can see how the industry went from being a top producer to the critical situation in which it finds itself now. For years shipbuilders have been calling for a comprehensive strategy to return the industry to competitive standards. Our shipyards simply cannot compete with the heavily subsidized industries in places like South Korea and Norway.

In 2001 the national partnership project, consisting of members of the Shipbuilding Association of Canada and the shipyard workers, presented a breakthrough report called, “Breaking Through: Canadian Shipbuilding Industry”, after they held a series of consultations across the country. This report is notable because all stakeholders were in agreement about what needs to be done.

In the section, “Issues and Recommendations, Subsidies and Unfair Trade Practices”, the following recommendation was made:

That the Government of Canada: ... resist any requests from other countries to change provisions of the Canadian shipbuilding policy until such time as the Canadian industry has been able to overcome the long-term effects of the subsidy and unfair pricing policies of other countries--

We must remember that this document was produced by shipbuilders and manufacturers, the Shipbuilding Association of Canada and the workers.

This change in provisions is exactly what the CEFTA is asking us to do. Norway has invested heavily in shipbuilding, making it one of the strongest in the world despite its relatively modest share of the world market. Those subsidies increased in the early part of this decade, and although they have been reduced now, they resulted in a strong industry capable of filling a variety of orders and competing on the international stage.

Here in Canada there has been a lack of meaningful investment, resulting in an industry that can only be described as being on life support. This is despite the incredible work of the men and women I represent who work at the Halifax shipyards, and that rich maritime history that I just spoke about. Bill C-2 would effectively “pull the plug” on a struggling industry by removing the only protection that exists for it.

New Democrats have called for two things: first, that shipbuilding be carved out of the CEFTA; and, second, that the government take up the challenge and bring this industry back to full health through a comprehensive and meaningful plan.

I want to thank the member for Burnaby—New Westminster for the hard work he has done to see that this trade agreement is fair. He made every effort in committee to see that the shipbuilding section was removed from the bill. I also want to recognize the work of the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore, my neighbour, who continues his tireless campaign on behalf of Canada's shipbuilding industry.

Having failed to secure a carve out in committee, it is now up to the House to do what is right and take shipbuilding off the chopping block.

To turn once again to the impact of this trade agreement, I would like to reinforce the fact that good jobs are what fuel our economy. As I have said before in this honoured place, one shipbuilding job creates four spinoff jobs. A collapse of this industry, ushered in by this trade agreement, would throw hundreds out of work in Halifax alone, and with the loss of those jobs, there go four supporting positions.

We are seeing unprecedented numbers of people becoming unemployed because of this recession. We need to do whatever it takes to prevent the remaining jobs from being lost. Passing this bill would only accelerate that process.

My party has repeatedly asked government to look ahead, look to the future, and make decisions that will foster the development of a global economy, one that is sustainable economically and environmentally, and where Canada can actually play a lead role. Shipbuilding can be a part of that new economy, first by rejecting just this part of the CEFTA and then through the implementation of a national strategy on the industry that will prepare it to compete with subsidized foreign industries on a level playing field.

Just a few short months ago, the member for Sackville—Eastern Shore and I joined shipyard workers. We joined them along with Independent and Liberal MPs to show support for the shipbuilding industry and call for attention and investment from the government. It was a cold day in Halifax harbour but we all gathered, despite party lines, to say this was an industry that was important to us.

As we debate Bill C-2, workers are actively calling on us to take the support that was voiced in January and turn it into action by carving out shipbuilding from this agreement. As one of the hundreds of letters from shipyard workers makes clear, “All stakeholders in the industry, including owners, operators and unions from coast to coast have emphasized the need for support during the many committee meetings that were held on the use of free trade talks”.

These letters call on Liberal members of the House to withhold their support for this bill until this section is removed. I share their concern and hope that all members will fight for their jobs and for a truly Canadian industry.

In closing, I would like to share another fact about Halifax and its tradition of shipbuilding. It is a fundamental connection to the sea that we have. After the 1917 Halifax explosion decimated much of the city and its industrial sector, one of the first things to be rebuilt was the smokestack at the Halifax shipyard. Everyone could see at the bottom of it stamped “1917”. This underscores the importance of the yards to my community and the central role that community has played in our history.

Recently, that powerful symbol was torn down. At this time in our nation's history, when we are witnessing the ongoing collapse of our manufacturing and forestry industries, let us not add shipbuilding to that list by signing a bad deal. Let us not allow the tearing down of that smokestack in Halifax be a symbol for the future of the industry itself.