Charlie Penson

[Income Tax Act, February 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to rise on Bill C-246, proposed by my colleague from my part of the world, the hon. member for Prince George--Peace River.

I certainly share his sentiment. He wants a tax policy that would help Canadian families adopt children and which would recognize some of the big expenses incurred.

I come from a family of 12 children. We get together quite often. Every five years we have a huge reunion of several hundred people. It is a great time. My wife and I have four children and nine grandchildren. We have family events which we enjoy. In fact we were skiing last weekend at our little cabin. Something like 30 people were there and it was wonderful.

Some people cannot have a family because they have difficulty conceiving. The extra expenses involved in adopting children should be recognized. We want people to share the same joy in having a family that the rest of us do.

Many people adopt children even if they have their own. People do it for all kinds of reasons, for example, to help a child from a third world country who would not have the opportunity that the child would have here in Canada. I know couples who have gone to Russia and Kazakhstan to do exactly that and have incurred significant expenses.

We have to recognize that we want to share the joy of families with other members of society who are unable to have children. Because of the huge expenses involved in adoption, the bill put forward by my colleague today is an excellent piece of legislation. It recognizes that the family is the cornerstone of society, whether the children have come into the family through adoption or real birth. We need to encourage people to have children and to adopt them if necessary.

Canada's demographics are changing, which is something that no one has talked about yet. With our aging population, 20 years from now there will be a huge problem. There will not be very many people to pay the bills. A lot of people will be retired. People are living longer and the birth rate is continuing to decline. The replacement for a couple right now is 1.2.

If it were not for immigration right now, Canada would be sliding backward. Unfortunately it will only get worse according to the projections for the next 20 years. Immigration will play a bigger part, which we welcome, but we will be competing for immigration. In western Europe the birth rate is even lower than it is in Canada. Countries there will be competing as well.

Why would we want restrictive policies that would discourage people from adopting, especially adopting outside the country where the expenses are the highest? I simply do not see it.

The parliamentary secretary said that we should not discriminate but in fact we discriminate already. The government's policies on taxation for families does exactly that. Single income families have an advantage over dual income families. In many cases one parent would like to stay at home and raise the children but the family may not have that option because both parents need to work. However, if two people are working in the family, they pay higher taxes than a single income earner. That should be corrected. It is a serious error which discourages families.

I am very much in support of my hon. friend's bill. He is suggesting that we recognize this important principle in law and give fair tax treatment to what people can write off for these adoption costs.

I know of one family where the parents have one child of their own and they recently adopted a child in Ukraine. They had to make a couple of trips to Ukraine. They had to stay there for quite a while as things do not work quite the same way that they do in Canada where procedures can be followed very carefully. When they went to Ukraine, they found that a lot of what they thought was in place in terms of rules and regulations were off the rails, so they had to start all over again. They had to incur extra expenses. The expenses can easily be in the $40,000 to $50,000 range. It finally resulted in their getting clearance to bring their daughter home.

Their daughter is a wonderful little child. She has been given an opportunity that she certainly would not have had otherwise. Some of the orphanages in the eastern bloc countries are in a deplorable condition. It has taken this poor little girl quite a while to adjust. I can just imagine what she went through in her life until she was two years old. Whether it will be a proven impact or not, I do not know, but I do know that she has loving parents who want her. They are giving her an opportunity that she probably would not have had otherwise.

My colleague also talked about foster parents and the fact that there are a lot of children that do not get the opportunity to be adopted even here in Canada. I think he talked about 20,000 people or so that go through the foster parent system. I have a serious problem with that in that if there are people who would like to adopt those children but feel that they cannot because of the economics of it, the deduction would really help. Again it would provide a badly needed opportunity to children in the foster care system.

In many cases the children that go through foster parent homes end up in institutions like our jails. It is really sad. They feel unwanted and that becomes part of the reason that they rebel. I suggest there are a lot higher costs involved with that result than there would be with the $7,000 deduction my friend is talking about in order to write off adoption expenses.

Let us adopt a family friendly policy. After all, the family is the cornerstone of our society.

My sister and her husband adopted a child many years ago and that child now has children of his own. They celebrate together. They are all one family. I know the rewards that they have reaped. My sister and her husband had three children afterward, but I have seen the rewards that they have reaped from having adopted their child.

The children are all the same. In fact, my children went to the same high school as my sister's and her husband's children, but they had not gone to the same school before that. We were in a parent-teacher interview one day when our oldest child was in high school and one of the teachers said, “Can I ever see that your daughter is Stephen's cousin. They are exactly the same”. This was the adopted son of my sister.

Maybe it does work out that we become what our families are in mannerisms and many other ways, but that is the kind of fit we see in families with adopted children. In many cases they fit in perfectly and are wanted. This makes perfect sense.

The government and the parliamentary secretary talk about the need to make sure that we do not discriminate. We could start, as my colleague from Prince George—Peace River said, with this family friendly policy and see where it leads from there. I suggest that it also needs to pertain to the dual income family versus the single income family. That would be a big help as well. There are policies that are needed. Let us start with this one and see where it goes.

I am in full support of Bill C-246 and I hope it comes to fruition.

[Points of Order, February 18th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, now that you have dealt with a matter raised by the President of the Treasury Board, I would ask that you request the President of the Treasury Board to table the document that he read in the House today. He scurried out of the House so he did not have to present it this afternoon.

I think the rule should apply in the same way to the President of the Treasury Board who read from a document and then did not present it to the House. Here is an opportunity for him to do that. I would suggest that he be called to account to present the document.

[Softwood Lumber, February 10th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak to Motion No. 397 sponsored by the member for Etobicoke North. I know that he has done a lot of work in this area and has some background. It is a well-intentioned motion, but it is basically just tinkering at the edges and I will make the case why I believe that.

The member gave a pretty good analysis of the longstanding problem of softwood lumber disputes with the United States. He talked about the subsidy game and the need for the net subsidy analysis. It reminded me that we are not so innocent in Canada either.

The Liberal government has been involved in subsidies right up to its eyeballs. The current Prime Minister and the debate that has been going on over the last little while is partly because of that. His own private company, Canada Steamship Lines, has been getting money from Industry Canada. Companies like General Electric, Pratt & Whitney, and Bombardier receive hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies every year from the government. I do not believe that is right.

The motions seeks to direct government to negotiate with the United States a net subsidy regime to replace the current American countervailing duty process. In addition, the motion calls on the government to seek an agreement with the U.S. to eliminate cross-border tax competition.

I know it is well intended, but it bothers me when a Liberal gets up and talks about seeking to eliminate tax competition. It worries me because it seems to me that what the government is trying to do is to get other countries to raise their taxes to the levels of ours so that we can have the same kind of basis. The pressure should be to lower taxes because competition is a good thing.

The preamble to the motion makes it clear that these are industry specific recommendations, namely to help a struggling Canadian softwood lumber industry. Currently, when Canada responds to a U.S. countervail action and the imposing duties to offset the so-called unfair subsidies at NAFTA and the WTO, American subsidies to American-like industries are not taken into account. The aim of this motion is to ensure that the whole picture would be considered by allowing Canada to balance our subsidies with those supplied by the country launching the trade action.

Theoretically, if both sets of subsidies were found to be roughly the same in value, there would be no countervailing duty imposed at the end of the investigation. That is what I believe my colleague intends. It should be noted that Canada has attempted to establish this net subsidy method for calculating potential countervailing duties before within the dispute settlement regimes at both the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement and Uruguay round. However, it failed. Canada is currently pursuing that at the World Trade Organization and suggested it at the Doha round.

On the surface the net subsidy approach seems to make sense and seems like a good idea. But if, as in the case of softwood lumber, the U.S. is taking Canadian provincial government policies into account, American subsidies, even at the municipal and state level of government, could also be calculated and put into context.

On the surface Motion No. 397 appears to be a positive step on the road to dismantling U.S. trade laws which I would argue is the only way to end the harassment of Canadian industries by U.S. competitors. I would suggest as well that the American trade law has been one long process of engaging us and costing us a considerable amount of money.

As long as the U.S. has the ability to use the U.S. trade law tools, which are currently available to it, a sustained period of peace is highly improbable. However, it seems to me that Motion No. 397 will not dismantle U.S. trade law but only make it more complicated. It seems to me that it would be better to dismantle trade law within the economic free trade zone of Canada, United States and Mexico.

We should focus on getting rid of the countervail trade law and the anti-dumping trade law altogether. I do not think there is a place for it. It does not happen within provincial governments and the federal government. It does not happen across Canada. It does not happen internally within the United States. It does not even happen within the European Union that has 15 member countries, soon to expand to 25. The reason it does not happen is that it is antiquated. It is used as harassment.

The devil, however, in the approach that my colleague has taken us, is in the details. For example, if the U.S. department of commerce investigative panel were required to measure like products to calculate and measure subsidies, the determinations regarding definitions, scope, inclusions and exclusions would all become critical. It would be a very complicated process. It would become more convoluted and time consuming than the one we already have.

The only way to achieve fundamental concessions from our southern neighbours would be to reopen NAFTA. However, we have to offer something as well. We cannot only go with our own shopping list and say this is what we want, and that we are not prepared to offer anything. We must offer up some major concessions as well.

Pursuing a net subsidy method at the World Trade Organization or at NAFTA may not fare any better than past attempts. It is fair to say that we have a better chance in our litigation process and I think it should run its course.

The Liberal government and the trade minister have been making comments suggesting that we should negotiate another big process similar to the supply managed products on milk and butter, a supply managed deal on trade. We had it once before and it did not work. He is suggesting we go back to it.

I say stay the course on litigation. The NAFTA panel will report here in March and I think it will be favourable to Canada. I do not understand at all why the member or the government would want to shortcut that process and bypass it.

I want to deal with one comment that my colleague made in his speech. He said that the markets cannot be trusted. That really bothers me. We have built economies in North America and in Europe based on a market approach. It says a lot about the Liberal approach to governing, which is to control and interfere with the free market.

I suggest that the markets can be trusted. Certainly, we have obligations to be the steward for our people in Canada and put rules around them. I think they should be minimal. I think Adam Smith would be rolling over in his grave today to hear the member for Etobicoke North talk about markets not being trusted.

I suggest that it is the artificial barriers that have been put in the way of the markets that have allowed the kind of harassment to happen by the U.S. lumber interests. Trade laws were introduced by Canada 100 years ago. They have not always been in our own interest. I would suggest that in an economic free trade zone, such as we have and would like to develop further between Canada, the United States and Mexico, that we should be putting away these tools from the past. We should let the market operate.

I believe, as does the member, that our softwood lumber industry can compete on the basis of production and kick their butt down there. I believe the same thing in agriculture. We must get away from the subsidy game and negotiate these trade rules at the World Trade Organization, but the market needs to be allowed to operate. If the market were free of subsidies and free of these kind of policies that are used for harassment, I believe that Canada would win hands down.

In respect to the dispute over softwood lumber, the Canadian government should stick to its guns, stay the course of NAFTA and stay the course at the World Trade Organization. I think it is working for us. Negotiating a deal or tinkering with the process before the binding NAFTA panel has had its final say would be irresponsible and be a great disservice to the Canadian industry.

While I appreciate the member's good intentions in this, I do not believe that that is the route we should go to try to resolve these problems. We should enter into a process where we try to negotiate away this redundant policy on trade law.

Let us examine the anti-dumping portion of it for a moment. I know we only basically talked about countervail. Anti-dumping means selling below the cost of production. What is wrong with that?

Let me use the cattle industry as an example. A feedlot operator buys cattle at about 1,000 pounds, or he does not buy them these days because things are not working, but traditionally he buys them at about 1,000 pounds. Say he paid $1.25 per pound. He then puts those animals in the feedlot and puts on about 200 or 300 pounds weight gain. If the market moves against that individual and he sells them for $1 a pound, that is the chance that he takes.

Technically he is selling below the cost of production. What is wrong with that? That is all part of the market. I think that this policy with anti-dumping and countervail is very redundant. Tinkering at the edges will not do it. We need to scrap it all together.

However, in order to do that I want to conclude by saying that it means that willing partners must negotiate this. Canada must come to the table and offer up some things that we have had as sacred cows for a long time that we should be willing to accept as a result of trade negotiations.

[Lumber Industry, February 10th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, since 1960 the Canadian Lumber Standards Accreditation Board has enforced the lumber grading system in Canada. The board is made up of representatives of the lumber industry, consumer organizations, the federal and provincial governments. The board supervises 98% of Canadian lumber production, including that destined for export.

However, unlike its American counterpart, the Canadian board is not recognized by the government to supervise heat-treated lumber standards. Instead, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has recently set up a costly separate process that is forcing the Canadian industry to conduct separate inventory controls.

It boggles the mind that the government would choose to burden the Canadian lumber industry with another level of bureaucracy during this tough time for the industry.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my colleague, who has just given a very good rundown of the situation in regard to the reintroduction of motions and bills and why it would seem inappropriate. Does it not seem unusual that the current Prime Minister, after 10 years of undermining the former prime minister, would not have a schedule or a platform of his own to introduce rather than basically falling back on a position of regurgitating and reintroducing all the old legislation that the former prime minister had brought forward?

It would seem unusual to me that somebody who has worked that long to become Prime Minister, and who finally got there, would not have anything of his own. It is not a new show at all. It is just a continuation of the former prime minister's agenda. It really seems odd that the promise of all this renewal has really come down to nothing.

Where is the new legislation? Basically what we are dealing with is Mr. Chrétien's agenda. Does it not seem a bit unusual to the member for the Prime Minister, who has aspired to be Prime Minister for 10 years or more, to not have any new ideas on legislation or bring anything new forward?

[Radiocommunication Act, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, my colleague has said not according to the Supreme Court. I and many of my constituents see it differently.

The reason I see it differently is this product is not available in Canada. People bought their dishes a long time ago to receive a product and they continue to be serviced.

There are two companies that have licences and property rights in Canada to service the Canadian market through a product they have developed and paid good money for with regard to programming. Those two companies are Bell ExpressVu and Shaw Star Choice. I have one of them in my home.

I have quite a few neighbours who have other satellite dishes that do not receive and do not pirate product from Shaw Star Choice or Bell ExpressVu. They only receive the product that comes to them from the United States and which they currently cannot get in Canada. They made huge investments some 20 years ago. I see that as being different. I see it somewhat like a radio signal.

Bill C-2 would amend the Radiocommunication Act. We have always had radio waves coming through the air and often we listen to international programming from different parts of the world. In fact, Canada does that itself; Radio Canada International broadcasts to other countries in eastern Europe and to the United States. I often hear listeners from the United States phoning in during CBC radio programs.

That is the way we should develop this industry. Instead of trying to build borders around Canada as the Liberal government has done in several areas, we should be looking for openings and opportunities to service the whole big world out there. We do it with radio. Where do the people who develop radio programs get their money? They get it from advertisers who are looking for a market. They are not concerned if somebody in the United States listens to a Canadian radio station and vice versa. We should treat television in the same way.

I would look for some kind of international agreement between us and the United States that would open up that market to us. There are almost 300 million people living in the United States. We have a product to sell and we need to sell it on the basis of quality. We should not build protective walls and borders around our country, which is difficult to do anyway.

The member who spoke before me talked about people trying to develop ways to hack into the system and technology companies having to figure out ways to block them. It would be far better for us to receive those signals and let the United States receive signals from Canada based on a reciprocity agreement.

As the critic for international trade, I see this as a growth area, not something we should be trying to build barriers against and looking for restrictive markets as the government has done in areas like supply management for example. There is a whole broad world out there that we need to service. Canada has good programming and it will get even better with better actors and better people to service that industry as a result of that big market.

That is where I see the difference between our party and the Liberal Party. We look at this as an opportunity and not as a big problem as the Liberals would have us believe.

If people are stealing the encryption, that is a problem, but a lot of people are not doing that. What they are doing instead is they are listening to and watching a product that they currently cannot get in Canada.

What does the bill essentially do about it? The penalties have been raised pretty high, doubling the amount of jail time up to a year. I heard the minister say earlier in debate that the government is not going after the little guy, just the companies. How soon will it be until the next move will be to go after the little guy?

Our police forces will not be out there just trying to enforce gun regulation which is completely out of sync with what people are talking about. They will be out there going door to door, checking to see if people have large satellite dishes and trying to shut them down. That is the next step. I think this is a total overreaction.

The solution is not police enforcement, not a lot of people dedicated to driving around spying to see if people have satellite dishes. The solution is to open up the market and have a larger vision of where Canada needs to go in the future. Yes, 30 million people is a nice market, but think of the 300 million people next door that we could service with a quality product, if we had that opportunity.

How would we do that, because the United States has restrictions as well. We have to take advantage of opportunities with the United States to talk about issues that are important to us. We have an industry on the telecommunications side that is saying we should open it up so that we can get investment from the United States and other places. I was the industry critic for some time. The government says that no, we have to restrict investment in those industries. The industries themselves are asking for it to be opened up because they see a wider market available to them. They see the opportunity.

Where the government sees a problem, the Conservative Party sees an opportunity. Let us exploit that opportunity to our benefit. Let us not go around trying to plug the dam with a finger every time there is a leak. Let us tap into the energy that is the technology that is going to enable us to enhance our market share and provide opportunities for our people to develop quality product and programming that people will buy no matter where they live. That opportunity is there if we would just let Canadians respond to the innovation. I know they are capable of it.

[Radiocommunication Act, February 9th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to participate in the debate on Bill C-2, formerly Bill C-52 which was introduced in the House a while ago.

I believe that Bill C-2 is an overreaction to a problem that is quite a bit smaller than the government would have us believe.

Many of my constituents have large satellite dishes. They receive programming from the United States that they currently cannot get in Canada without their satellite dishes. I see a huge difference between the grey market and the black market.

[Points of Order, February 6th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, that seems to me to be a very illogical argument because the member has not heard the terms of the motion itself. All he has heard is his name. Members have no idea what the motion refers to until the member is able to put the motion before the House.

Therefore it seems to me that the House leader is out of order here.

[Points of Order, February 6th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it seems to me as a member of the House that I would like to hear whether my name is on that list and what the substance of that point of order is before I can make a decision on whether I want to give consent to the motion.

I want to hear if my name is on it. I want to hear the substance of the motion, what it is in regard to, before I decide whether I want to give consent.

[Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, February 4th, 2004]

Madam Chair, my colleague from Prince George—Peace River and I do share a boundary on our constituencies and we know the seriousness of this problem.

Quite frankly, it is a $30 billion industry in Canada. When we talk about losing a $4 billion export market, that is serious enough, but I am worried that there will be a collapse of the industry entirely.

Farmers are holding a lot of animals on their farms. They do not have a cash flow. They are hoping the border will be reopened. Normally the farmers put up so much hay and so much grain silage and so on to handle the situation. They probably have a 20% increase in animals that they are holding hoping that something will happen. In fact, there is no market for them. This is a very serious problem.

My colleague asked me what I would suggest. I noticed that there was a ruling today out of the United States which suggested that there would be some problems with the U.S. in the way they handled this. We will go back into a notice period where the USDA will post a notice of anyone who has any complaints about the process. We were almost home free the last time, before the second mad cow was found in Washington state.

I am hoping the Minister of Agriculture will talk to his counterpart in the United States, Ann Veneman, and get the minimal posting time here. We do not need two months. We have been through this once before. It could be as short as two weeks. I would ask the minister today to take notice that he needs to talk to his counterpart and have the minimal posting possible.

I do believe we will also have to harmonize our standards with those of the United States. There needs to be discussion. There are feed products that are not allowed in the United States which are still allowed in Canada. These will not meet the criteria. Consumer confidence is ultimately the thing that governs all of this, including the U.S. government's reactions. I think we have to gain that back.