Brian Fitzpatrick

[Patent Act, May 10th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I did not intend to become involved in the debate, but I just cannot resist it. In 1945 at the end of the second world war, two Asian countries made choices. India made a choice to throw up barriers and be an island unto itself. Another country had another option and that was to become a global trader. That was Japan. Since the destruction of Japan in 1945, the Japanese have made their economy the second biggest in the world.

The NDP member seems to suggest that there are no advantages to trade or competition. Would anybody seriously say that the auto industry in North America is not better today because of Toyota or Honda and that the products we have in the automotive sector have not been improved because of that type of competition? That really seriously ignores a lot of reality.

Another area that was raised is the issue of intellectual property, which is what I will pose my question on. In regard to drugs, I know of companies that have spent up to $600 million or $700 million on research into new drugs which were never approved. I invested in some of those companies. I know what their stock was worth when it was over.

I am asking the member to explain how in the world we are going to get new breakthrough drugs that provide effective treatment for a lot of diseases if the people who are taking all the risks—

[Marine Liability Act, May 9th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, it gives me pleasure to speak to Bill S-2. The Alliance Party will be supporting the bill because it would be an improvement over the existing policy.

Our sole reason for supporting the bill is that it is better than what we have. However there is a serious omission or flaw in the legislation and I would like to speak to that.

Yesterday in the House, in response to a water crisis situation, we voted almost unanimously in support of a national safe water standard and for the federal government to get involved with quality water. We did not really address the problems, one of which is how communities get the resources in place to put in modern water systems to ensure they have good water. That was completely omitted. I believe North Battleford will spend $20 million to put such a system in place.

We never really gave any thought to what a workable standard is. Somehow we seem to think that we have the wisdom in Ottawa that we would know what it is. We have two judicial inquiries on the subject of water that will take a hard look at the cause of these sorts of problems. I hope they come up with some good recommendations.

In our wisdom, we know what we require for good water standards. We will put it through and forget about the real question, which is how these folks get their resources in place to deliver water.

I am raising that as an issue only because I am going to tie that in with our debate over one defect in the bill. There is no minimum mandatory passenger liability insurance in the bill, this despite the fact that in committee industry representatives from the insurance sector said that type of insurance would be a very minor cost and would not create any great burden for the industry.

We tried to make some common sense amendments to the bill which would allow for minimum passenger liability insurance, but those advocating that were stonewalled by members of the government who thought there were all sorts of problems with it. We could not get a logical explanation as to why it would be a great difficulty, but in their wisdom they blocked it. Last night we had two motions to deal with it, both defeated by the government. I find it strange that on the same day the government is unanimously supporting a water safety act it is turning down minimum passenger liability insurance coverage.

What would minimum passenger liability insurance do? I think it could avoid a major disaster. Insurance companies do not accept unreasonable risks. If the quality of the vessels is not of a satisfactory standard and if the crews are not competent or have a bad safety record, the insurance industry will not accept that risk. Believe me, there are ways of regulating an economy other than government regulations. Insurance would be one good way of achieving the goal of safety in passenger shipping.

Fortunately we have not had a major commercial passenger ship disaster in Canada. I cannot recall one in my time. That is good, but we know it has happened elsewhere. Some day it could happen in this country. I would suggest that the day it happens here we will have a judicial inquiry and there will be a lot of finger pointing. I would suggest that a lot of the finger pointing will be directed at the government that is in power today. It had a choice and it took the path of neglect and indifference. What will it tell the passengers and their families when that happens? Will it tell them that there is no insurance coverage, that the carrier is insolvent, that there are no assets to pay them, that there is no insurance money? What will it say?

I suppose if it happens during an election campaign the Prime Minister might come up with some instant taxpayer dollars to help out those folks. That would be the government's way of doing things, to roam from one crisis to another.

That is what will happen. A lot of people will be pointing fingers at the government when that happens. That is why I am speaking on this matter. The Alliance Party wants to be on the record at this stage of the game to show that our party did due diligence on this matter but the government was very neglectful of it.

To add insult to injury in regard to the NDP motion last night, if the government is not going to put in mandatory insurance coverage there could be a simple notice published on the ship to inform the public that the carrier does not have insurance. The government does not want to do that. Just about anybody in industry who provides a service to the public is required to provide warnings and notices, but the government in its wisdom says it does not want to do that. Why inform the public? Why inform passengers when they are getting on a ship that there is no insurance on the ship? Why inform them that the ship may be insolvent, that if it goes under there is not going to be any protection for anyone?

In a lot of ways the government's response to these amendments is shameful. The day a disaster happens and this thing crops up, the folks on the other side of the House will have to hang their heads in shame and try to justify why they ignored this very simple amendment to the legislation.

When our constituents voted for us to come to the House of Commons, one of the skills they asked us to have is foresight. We develop public policy in the House. We pass laws. The folks who sent us here expect us to have foresight. I think we have anticipated a serious problem here. We have tried to use foresight. The opposition parties have tried to used foresight. The government has ignored very real legitimate concerns.

That is typical of a Liberal government. A Liberal government, as has been said before, likes to drive in the middle of the road. However, when we drive in the middle of the road we run into a lot of yellow stripes and skunks. The Liberal government likes driving in the middle of the road. It likes that neighbourhood. I guess it is called compromise. The Liberals will put some things in the Shipping Act, but not others. As one of my colleagues said, it is like Liberals making porridge. If one mixes some sand in the porridge, it may look like porridge, it might even smell like porridge and it might taste like porridge, but it will be hard to swallow and it will be hard on the digestive system.

Folks on the government side have the power to do things the right way. Why do they not do it? Why do they always insist on going only halfway? In this case they could have gone the full way and addressed some really key areas the opposition raised. It was not just the Alliance people who raised this issue. The Progressive Conservative member brought it to the attention of the government, as did the Bloc member and the NDP member. We all tried to work on constructive ways of solving this, but the Liberals just would not listen. We gave the Liberals two opportunities last night to address this problem in a certain way and they would not do it. Why? Is it a sign of arrogance or what? They were two very constructive proposals.

I will summarize the Alliance position. The bill is an improvement over the existing policy, but I wish the government had gone the full nine yards on this thing and addressed some serious concerns.

Last night we went through the motions and got platitudes for the sake of public image. If a disaster happens in the country, everybody comes to the House. If the people want safe water, bang, the government will pass something in the House: magically in this land from coast to coast our water will be safe because we passed that bill last night. We know how unreal that is and how unrealistic. We cannot manage by dictating results. It takes work.

Last night we proposed to the government ways of managing something to get the results we want, which is safer vessels and good protection for the travelling public, and the government chose to ignore us. Some day when there is a disaster in our country in commercial passenger travel, government members will be held to account for it. They have an obligation and a duty in the House to pass good laws, not incomplete laws. They have failed to do that.

[Eldorado Nuclear Limited Reorganization And Divestiture Act, April 25th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I was not intending to speak on this matter, but there has been such good debate and provocative ideas presented that I could not resist it.

I picked up some of my Liberal friend's comments which I found very interesting. I give him credit for standing up and not just taking the party line. He gave a fairly damning indictment about competition law in the country saying that it was ineffective, that it was geared against the consumer and that we really did not have competition. He alluded to the U.S. and how good things were there, how much better the consumer was served, how much better the prices were and that it had good competition.

I would invite the government to look across the border at the U.S. competition law and policies and then bring forth legislation in the House that would create a more competitive economy in the country to better serve our consumers. I thank him for pointing this matter out. This has to be heard by other people on the other side of the House, and I give him credit for raising this point.

For people my age in Saskatchewan and Alberta, who I believe are thinking people and can remember things, if they are depressed today, the word Petro-Canada is not like Prozac. It does not have good vibes in my part of the country. It brings back bad memories about a thing called the national energy plan.

My New Democrat friends do something that I have seen very few people do in my lifetime. They are good at forecasting the future, or they think they are. Lenin and Marx predicted the future, and there were a whole slew of socialist thinkers after that time who projected the future of civilization. I would like to know which one has actually predicted the future accurately. I think just about every one of them totally struck out.

Back in the 1970s when we brought in Petro-Canada, the prime minister was worried about the $100 per barrel oil price. The energy minister at that time talked about the same thing, that the invisible hand of the market would bring prices up that high and Canadians had to be protected. The NDP members at that time were the government's cheerleaders. They said the government was right, that they could see the future. We have not seen $80 per barrel oil prices and we have not seen $100 per barrel oil prices.

Something else concerns me. There is an aspect of the bill with which I have a good deal of difficulty. There are a lot of restrictions on the shares and the ownership of these shares. I do not buy fuel from Petro-Canada. It is a matter of principle with me because I am one of those people who remembers the experience from the 1970s. However I drive by every once in a while to check Petro-Canada's prices. Believe me it is the same price as Shell, Imperial Oil, the Co-op and other competitors in the marketplace. If I and my learned friends over there were somehow going to get a benefit ownership, I have not seen it.

There was much lamenting about how the oil industry gouged the economy with excessive pricing. I would suggest to most folks in the House that if we got rid of the wellhead price, the royalty structure, the excise tax on fuel and so on we would probably see an instant 50% plus reduction in the price. If there are any benefactors out of increased energy prices in this economy, it is the provincial and federal governments.

I would suggest to the members from Saskatchewan who spoke earlier that if oil and energy prices were not at the levels they are today their NDP government in Saskatchewan would have an enormous problem trying to balance the books. It is about the only thing in that province these days that pays the bills.

I am amazed that the member for Palliser would say that we should go back to a two price, made in Canada price. Was he actually saying that we should price 15% to 20% of Saskatchewan's oil and energy for Ontario, Quebec and other regions of the country at a dramatically lower rate than what we would for an export price to the U.S.? I would find it very surprising if people in Saskatchewan would accept that as good logic.

I want to raise a few comments about the share structure. I am trying to figure out why they would have a restriction that nobody could own shares in excess of 15% or 20% or whatever the amount is. I have a lot of problems with that. In my view Petro-Canada is no different than Shell or any other oil company. They are in the marketplace and are privately held companies. Why does the government want this restriction in the bill?

The auditor general commented that a lot of our crown corporations and government owned operations were vehicles to appoint unqualified people to important positions. Many of them are not doing a very good job. I would say the government does not want to lose control of Petro-Canada because it wants to retain the ability to appoint people to the board of directors. It is one of those plums that it still has and it does not want to give it up. That is one explanation why it would be that way.

It was mentioned that the share price of Petro-Canada is $36 a share. If my math is right, if those shares were sold at $36 a share that would be $1.8 billion. If that was paid on our national debt that would mean we would save about $136 million every year on interest charges. That would go right to the bottom line of this national federal government.

This money could be used to build highways or buy MRI machines for Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan does not really have many MRIs. It could be used to help children. As my learned friend with the Liberals mentioned, maybe we could do what Mike Harris did in Ontario and pay that money back to the taxpayer in the form of a dividend.

I am glad some of the Liberal members are starting to learn that some of the things Mike Harris is doing in Ontario are all right. There is one over there that is not in agreement with the proposal of her fellow colleague but he was quite bullish on that. I want to point that matter out.

If these restrictions were removed from the shares and these shares could be freely traded, maybe we would be talking about $45 a share. Then we could be looking at $2.5 billion or $3 billion on these things. These restrictions diminish the value of those shares.

What about the head office being in Ottawa? I think that even lawyers who graduated from law school with a D average could find a way to get around that loophole. They could hire one secretary, put a telephone in that office, put up a sign saying head office and that would qualify. I really do not know where this sort of thing comes from. If anyone thinks about this seriously, this could be a way of maintaining some sort of Canadian control. We have too much of this. We have the same sort of problem with Air Canada with that sort of thing in legislation. It is another restriction on ownership. It is about politics and not good business.

I have a few more comments about the province of Saskatchewan. Much was said about our crown corporations. I want to bring up one matter which is Wascana Energy, a crown corporation owned by the New Democratic government. Some Canadian owned companies in Calgary tried to purchase that company. The premier and his cabinet did not want to give up ownership of the company and opposed it. A year or so later, lo and behold they sold it to Occidental Petroleum, an American corporation out of California. Guess who sits on the board of directors of Occidental Petroleum? Allan Blakeney. He lost his socialist past and is part of that corporate agenda.

A couple of other crown corporation ownerships in Saskatchewan were used to balance the budget in that province. Believe it or not the NDP government sold its shares in Cameco and applied it to the public debt. That is amazing.

The Saskatchewan government owned shares in the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan and sold those. It owned a big stake in the heavy oil operator at Lloydminster. Guess what the NDP government did with its shares? It did what Mike Harris or Ralph Klein might have done and sold them. Then its government members went around Canada and said they were good fiscal conservatives. I am not going to disagree with them. That is good fiscal conservatism.

However I find all these comments about the Saskatchewan family of crown corporations rather strange. I also find it strange that a member from Saskatchewan would talk about returning us to the national energy program where Saskatchewan would sell its oil to other Canadians at well below market prices. I wonder how the premier of that province would balance his books? He would probably come to Ottawa, ask the Prime Minister to give the province more money because it had a shortfall in its budget and needed more financial assistance. I find a lot of those comments hard to defend from a Saskatchewan perspective.

There is one last comment I would like to make. If atomic energy ever takes off, we will be the Saudi Arabia of the world in terms of atomic energy. There are a lot of interesting things on the go in atomic energy. South Africa has a interesting project with a 100 megawatt nuclear reactor, not a 1000 megawatt reactor, and it uses modern ISO standards of construction. If this ever catches on and is a safe way of delivering energy, Saskatchewan will be the place sitting on the energy in North America, not Alberta or Texas.

Saskatchewan is sitting on a great opportunity if it can find the technology to deliver atomic energy safely to consumers in North America. I do not think our governments should close the door to that.

We know coal and hydro are problems. We certainly know with some of the treaties of the problems with hydrocarbons and petroleum. Atomic energy is starting to look like it has some possibilities, especially with modern technology. Most of the nuclear industries we know use 1950 or 1960 technology in developing their plants. We have an opportunity to use much more advanced technology to develop high quality nuclear reactors today that could deliver clean energy to consumers in North America. We should be looking at that as an opportunity in the future.

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 2000, April 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. All I wanted to do was to pay tribute to a Canadian who won the Nobel Peace Prize, Robert Mundell, who would not agree with anything that my learned friend—

[Income Tax Amendments Act, 2000, April 5th, 2001]

Madam Speaker, I should like to make a comment on something that was said before I get to my question. In the 1980s U.S. tax policy was to lower taxes, simplify them and flatten them in a major way. It is called efficient market theory. Today the U.S. produces 35% to 40% of the world's GDP with 5% of the world's population. Whether we are talking about autos, softwood lumber or whatever, Canada is very dependent on the robust healthy economy of the U.S. I would like to see Canada get that economic growth participation and the population base to go with it.

We only have 30 million people. The U.S. has 300 million. Very often we forget that point. Our population is not growing and we do not have a very large market. We have to find a way of getting a market in this country.

My colleague raised something that I do not know a whole lot about. I would ask him to enlighten the House on it.

In Saskatchewan, the Bill Gates Foundation contributed something like $20 million. The money was invested in remote communities in rural Saskatchewan, which include a lot of first nations communities, to provide computers and get individuals on the Internet. It is something the government talks a lot about, but we do not have a lot of evidence of it. However Mr. Gates and his foundation made that a reality in Saskatchewan.

I am very interested in the whole idea of foundations. Rather than bureaucrats and government dictating and determining where investments go, we could get those people who have shown they can create wealth and produce goods and services to get the economy going. To have people like Mr. Gates, Mr. Buffett, or someone along those lines with a foundation making those sorts of decisions in our economy could spawn some things. I was very interested in the hon. member's comments in that regard. Maybe he would enlighten us on how the bill would encourage that sort of development in our nation.

[Canada Elections Act, April 5th, 2001]

Yes, it is. We are giving government members a check up. We are educating them. We are seeing if their listening skills are working.

It is also implied that we do not elect senators. Alberta elected one very good senator, Mr. Waters, an outstanding person. The people of Alberta voted for that person to be their Senate representative. The prime minister at the time had the courage to respect the democratic will of the people of Alberta.

It is too bad the Prime Minister who followed him ignores that procedure. We have elected senators-in-waiting in Alberta, whom the people want to be their voice in the Senate, being denied representation. There are people in Alberta who have worked hard for the party opposite, have collected money and have done good things for it. They are the people who have been elected and should be in the Senate.

If the country wants to go into the next century with a proper system of government and a proper system of checks and balances, it needs a powerful, elected and independent Senate, whether it wants to admit it or not. If we do not bring in that necessary reform we will one day regret not having seized the opportunity to do so.

[Canada Elections Act, April 5th, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, it is a real pleasure to address this topic. I certainly concur with my Bloc colleagues that there is a very distasteful feature to having the Senate in its current form have a hand in deciding our electoral system.

Some members have said that the Senate has had nothing to do with our electoral process. I think they are wrong. Many of the people who are in our Senate today are there because they had a very direct hand in our electoral process.

They were excellent at raising and collecting money for parties. They ran very effective election campaigns for key people who would have had trouble winning without their assistance. There was a payoff from the electoral system for good work done for the party.

It was also suggested in the House that the Senate is the only appointed place that has anything to do with our electoral system. I remind members opposite that the current Supreme Court of Canada, armed with a new philosophy of judicial activism, has made major decisions about electoral law that have outraged the public. Ninety-five per cent of the public was totally outraged that a prisoner serving a life sentence would have the right to vote in an election. Perhaps prisoners would be able to run for election if we carried it far enough.

The government of the day decided it would not use a safeguard that is in our constitution, the notwithstanding clause. To say that appointed people have nothing to do with this is a little off base.

Much of the debate in the House since I have been here has centred on one issue: the concentration of power into one person's hands or one office. Everyone has heard Lord Acton's famous statement about corruption and how it can corrupt. I have heard some good speeches in the House in the last while. It is too bad they had to be misinterpreted for political purposes. People have pointed out historical experiences where Lord Acton's dictum could be shown to be true.

People in Canada assume those sorts of things cannot happen here. I do not want them to happen here either but we would be off base to ignore the lessons of history. We should be implementing safeguards to make sure we do not have that sort of concentration of power.

An individual for whom I have a lot of respect, Gordon Robertson, served under four prime ministers and was Clerk of the Privy Council. I think members opposite would be quite familiar with Mr. Robertson. He is a highly respected person. Mr. Robertson is very concerned about what has happened to parliament and about the concentration of power in the Prime Minister's office. He has stated that we have an elected dictatorship and that the cabinet has become nothing but a focus group for the Prime Minister's office.

Given those statements, I find strange some of the comments my NDP colleagues have made about the Senate. Their comments are out of sync with this place. If I understand my NDP colleagues, and they have supporters on the Liberal side, they want to abolish the Senate. They say that an elected Senate with regional representation would be good for the country but that Ontario and Quebec would not accept it. They say that it would take a constitutional amendment to change the Senate.

Did it ever occur to them that it would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the Senate? If we must go through the exercise we should do the right thing and not the wrong thing. Abolishing the Senate in its present form would only give the Prime Minister one more power card. It would complete the picture.

There are two very good reasons we should have an elected, independent and powerful Senate. First, it could deal with the issue we are confronted with in the House: the concentration of power into one person's hands. Concentration of power leads to abuse of power. There are no checks or balances in our system to effectively deal with it. That is the dilemma. Everyone is looking at the issue and asking what mechanisms we have to deal with wrongdoing, and there are none.

What a powerful, elected and independent Senate would do first and foremost is put in the system a badly needed check and balance, a counterbalance to the concentration of power.

I am surprised my colleague in the NDP does not recognize that an elected Senate that fairly represents the regions would go a long way toward alleviating the regionalism, alienation and fragmentation in the country. It would make people in all regions feel they had a powerful and effective voice in the federal government. Many of the folks in various regions of the country, believe it or not, do not believe they have any say or input into the system. They do not have connections to the Prime Minister's Office and they are left out of the equation.

I will address certain other matters that were said in the House. Somebody mentioned that the Charlottetown accord had a provision for an elected Senate and implied that the public had rejected the Charlottetown accord because of that provision. I think that is wrong. The Charlottetown accord, had it been any longer, would have been competing with War and Peace for length.

Under the accord one province, and I am surprised the province did not support the referendum, could have vetoed anything that affected culture. Culture to me is a mile wide and a mile deep. It probably deals with everything we do as parliamentarians. That proposal would have given one province a loaded gun. Some 58 things were open for further negotiation and discussion.

[Financial Consumer Agency Of Canada Act, March 30th, 2001]

Golf courses are more important than farmers.

[Financial Consumer Agency Of Canada Act, March 30th, 2001]

A master-servant relationship.

[Judges Act, March 22nd, 2001]

Mr. Speaker, I find my hon. colleague's comments very refreshing. I know he is very well respected in the community he comes from. He was the principal of a high school. I know how high school principals are selected where I come from and where he comes from. People from the community sit on committees. There is a hiring procedure. We spend a lot of time making sure we get the right people as our principals. They must be leaders in our schools and must convey the right kinds of values and beliefs.

Yesterday we talked about reforming and modernizing our system of government. In my view most of the power cards are held by somebody sitting in the front row over there. Even backbenchers do not have any power cards. When they are told to march, they march. When they are told to stand up they stand up.

If we really wanted to modernize this institution we could do it in one symbolic step. We could turn over the selection of supreme court judges to an all party committee. We could then sit down and review these individuals and pick people who we think have high standards of integrity and high levels of competency. As everyone has pointed out, there is no shortage of qualified applicants for these jobs.

However the way it is now all the power cards are in one person's hands and that person makes those decisions behind closed doors and without any consultation with any of us.

I would like to put a question to my colleague from Wild Rose on the possibility of having an all party committee look at the appointment of judges to our Supreme Court of Canada. Would he be of the view that this committee would be beneficial to this institution and change the public's attitude toward the way this House operates?