Darrel Stinson

[Federal Grants, May 31st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the minister's answer.

I would suggest that the minister grab on the suggestion from the Alberta Chamber of Commerce strongly. Chamber members themselves have stated they want a level playing field and government handouts often distort competition rather than help business. I would like the minister to guarantee that he will look at the suggestion from the Alberta Chamber of Commerce.

[Federal Grants, May 31st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance.

Over the weekend, the Alberta Chamber of Commerce held its annual meeting in Red Deer. One of the proposals put forward at that meeting was that the Alberta and federal governments should refrain from making any new grants or loan guarantees to business. This proposal should really come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the pathetic tales of Gainers or NovoTel, to name just two examples of public money gone bad in Alberta.

Is the minister prepared to accept the Alberta Chamber of Commerce's suggestion to refrain from making any new grants or loan guarantees to business?

[Young Offenders Act, May 12th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, a 44-year old forestry worker and family man lies in critical condition in hospital today because a group of teenagers split his

skull with an axe Saturday night. The wife of the victim said he had hollered at the teenagers for running a stop sign the previous day.

The government suggests that poverty and unemployment are to blame for youth crime. If poverty and unemployment were to blame, why was there no noticeable increase in crime during the dirty thirties? Why does Newfoundland, with Canada's highest rate of unemployment, nevertheless have the lowest rate of crime?

This assault took place in the beautiful orchard growing community of Oyama, B.C., with a population of less than 1,000, no inner city, no slums, no gangs. The students at George Elliott High School are organizing a car wash to raise cash for the victim's family. This demonstrates that they are responsible young adults.

When will the government shoulder its responsibility by reforming the Young Offenders Act?

[Supply, May 12th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure whether the hon. member is trying to defend the Young Offenders Act or not judging from his speech.

I would like to ask the hon. member a few questions here. First, does the hon. member know or could he tell this House what the sentence is right now for a young offender, say age 16, committing rape or murder? He says that they may consider longer sentences. I certainly hope they would do more than just consider it.

The vast majority of youth are very respectful, hard working and are trying to get ahead. I wonder if the member realizes that the majority of children going to school today and trying to learn are going there in fear of the minority creating these problems. I would hope they would also take into account and listen to some of the youth today about the problem that the minority is creating before they make any decisions.

[Supply, May 5th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, we have always stated that there have to be cuts in military spending, but we have also stated that the studies should be done before and not after the cuts. It is rather foolish to make the cuts and then say they have to put them back in place again. The studies should be done before the cuts are made. That is what we are saying on that level.

As far as subsidizing an industry that was subsidized coming in is concerned, remember this industry was subsidized coming in and now government wants to subsidize it going out.

If the government is looking at subsidization levels what becomes more important here? Private enterprise tries to compete. It pays taxes but those tax dollars are being used in many cases to form a company that it has to compete against. It is pretty tough when a company is not being subsidized to compete against a subsidized company. They do not have the same worries, many times not even the same responsibilities.

I would like to raise another fact when talking about subsidization. We have to have priorities. Can anyone in this House answer this question: Why are we subsidizing companies in direct competition with companies in private enterprise when we are shutting down hospitals? This absolutely makes no sense to me, nor to anybody else in the House, but I am willing to listen.

[Supply, May 5th, 1994]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to oppose the motion put forward by the Bloc. However I want to say at the start that I am personally concerned for the jobs of some 137,915 persons who the 1986 census showed were employed by the defence services sector. Their employment is threatened by the Liberal strategy of slashing defence spending before it has completed a full study of Canada's defence needs.

The Reform Party caucus believes that announced cuts of $7 billion to the Department of National Defence over the next five years prejudged and pre-empted the outcome of the defence review and should not have been made until Parliament, together with the Canadian people, had determined the mission of the Canadian Armed Forces for the 21st century.

Once the mission is determined we can make careful and well planned decisions on the military's main functions and organizational structure and on Canada's long term needs for hardware, bases and personnel.

The cuts announced by the government are already having impact on the defence industry. As I have said I strongly object to the government's action of cutting defence first and asking questions later.

I strongly oppose any suggestion that the government should fund the changeover of defence companies to civilian production. I oppose using Canadian tax dollars for this purpose for several reasons, not least of which is that half these firms are foreign owned.

I would also oppose using Canadian tax dollars for this purpose because as a Reformer I do not think on general principle we achieve anything good by providing grants to private industry. On the contrary, it goes against the grain that taxpayers should on the one hand be trying to operate their own companies while on the other hand competing with a company their own tax dollars may be propping up.

For instance, over recent years it has been a tactic of the old line political parties to spend some $160 million per year through the defence industry productivity program, which is almost like a regional development program, to dole out tax dollars to the military industry concentrated mainly in southern Ontario and southern Quebec. Such grants should be quickly phased out.

To understand this particular motion we must first define what we are talking about when we discuss Canada's defence industry. I note that figures being quoted in the House today have varied greatly so it is hard to know whose figures are correct.

Despite the discrepancy in figures we need to try to get to a general understanding of what the defence industry produces and how it compares on the world scale. In analysing world-wide arms production, nations are generally divided into three tiers or levels of production. The first includes nations like the U.S., which basically produces and sells anything it or its allies need. The first tier accounts for some 60 per cent of the arms transferred in the past decade.

Canada is in tier two with such countries as France, Italy and Spain, which together account for some 25 per cent of annual global arms exports. These countries do not have a big enough home market to benefit from economies of scale and must depend on exports to be competitive. Canada exports in large measure to the United States with which we jointly produce many weapons.

There is a third tier of wild card arms producers like China, India and Israel that can produce large amounts of less sophisticated, functional but cheap weapons on short notice. Among global arms producers Canada ranks about eighth, producing some $3 billion worth of military goods per year or about one per cent of the world total. Regarding more conventional weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and for the period 1986 to 1990, Canada was the 14th largest exporter of major conventional weapons in the world.

Concentrated in southern Ontario and Quebec, the Canadian defence industry involves about 1,000 companies with special experience in what is called the new knowledge based industry, specifically aerospace electronics and communications.

Robert Gillespie, former assistant deputy minister in the Department of National Defence, gave the following description of the defence industry:

Our industry is composed of only a few large companies with sales in excess of $100 million per year. The vast majority of firms are in fact quite small and very few of those produce purely military products. The industry is over 50 per cent foreign owned with U.S. companies dominating the group and is very heavily dependent on the export market.

There has been great fluctuation in Canadian military exports over the period 1959 to 1991. For example, 1974 and 1975 were low years, each at $280 million. In 1985 the industry hit its recent peak at $1.9 billion in exports, with a similar amount in 1991 during the gulf war build-up and actual combat.

Research was based on three factors: first, public domain listings of unclassified prime military contracts awarded by the Department of National Defence; second, military export contracts arranged by the Canadian Commercial Corporation on behalf of foreign governments, primarily the United States; third, Pentagon contracts placed directly with Canadian companies, together totalling about 80 per cent of all Canadian military production.

According to research covering those three factors the top six Canadian military prime contractors are: SNC Industrial Technologies Incorporated and Bombardier, both of Montreal; Computing Devices Company of Ottawa; Standard Aero Limited of Winnipeg; Allied Signal Aerospace of Rexdale, Ontario; and Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg. All six companies had total value reported prime contracts during fiscal year 1990-91 in excess of $100 million. For three of the six, their estimated or reported military sales were less than half of total sales.

Of the top 20 Canadian military prime contractors, accounting for some 60 per cent of reported military prime contracts in Canada, according to the same three factors which I listed earlier, 11 companies of the top 20 had estimated or reported military sales of less than half of total sales. Incidentally eight of those top 20 companies are located in Quebec. I believe we can see the source of the Bloc's concern with this issue.

What kinds of things do these companies produce? Although Canada does rank 14th in world-wide production of conventional weapons, the Library of Parliament has provided me with a list of some 180 companies engaged in producing defence electronics and avionics. These folks produce a whole lot of things that most people cannot even pronounce, let alone manufacture. Many of them are part of the new knowledge based economy, their employers being well educated, not to say out and out brilliant.

Because of the brilliance of these people and the highly specialized nature of what they produce, I seriously doubt that a notoriously inefficient federal government could do anything really helpful for these industries and would only end up throwing tax dollars at them, an approach which I strongly oppose.

Moreover, as I have shown, a large number of defence industry companies have less than 50 per cent of their production going into military purposes. Hopefully they can convert a greater percentage of their operations to non-military purposes. Because of the talents of the employees of these particular high tech companies, it would be a great loss to Canada if the employers were to shut down and the employees moved to the United States. Remember, we are talking about an industry that is already half foreign owned.

However, I am certain the sales and marketing offices of the bigger companies and probably the presidents of the smaller companies have long since smelled the coffee in so far as the end of the cold war is concerned. Certainly they have been hard at work tracing and developing new markets which could increase their non-military sales.

Even the average man or woman on the street is well aware of the remarkable growth in the knowledge based industry for such things as fax machines, personal computers and the transportation industry. Given the great land mass of Canada, we truly have become a world leader in communications, a technology needed all over the world for everything from moving information, people and goods to distributing TV signals or predicting the weather. I have great faith that Canada's technological leadership in this sector of the world economy cannot only be maintained but will grow steadily.

In conclusion it is high time for the government to smarten up its own overall defence planning. I also believe one of the worst things any of us could do to a given industry would be to encourage the government to increase its involvement and further upset the functioning of a free market economy.

[Supply, May 3rd, 1994]

Then why do you make them push?

[Supply, May 3rd, 1994]

What happens to the people?

[Supply, May 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I listened to the hon. member's speech. He touched on a few areas. One was the underground economy. There are a few questions that I would like to ask the hon. member.

He talked of a new tax to take the place of the GST. People are a little bit apprehensive about this. Everyone wants to see the GST cleaned up, me especially, but people are starting to worry that maybe this new tax might include all consumption of food and so forth. They worry about the startup costs on this. Are we looking at another startup cost along the lines of the GST?

There is another thing I would like to ask the hon. member. When I started to work I enjoyed working two shifts. It paid me to work two shifts. Today workers sit down and they figure out right to the hour when it no longer pays them to work because taxes now take over. I see this as a lost revenue because the jobs do not get done. In many cases they get put over to be done the next year. Small outfits that hire people in the bush and so forth make up to a certain amount of capital and then when the tax bite becomes too big they lay the people off to go on unemployment insurance. I wonder if the minister has looked into this area at all.

[Sahtu Dene And Metis Land Claimsettlement Act, May 2nd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, unfortunately the answer is that probably a significant part of the cash payment going to these natives supposedly for their good will be used to hire white lawyers and social workers and negotiators and other greedy hangers-on of the so-called Indian industry to deal with this agreement's miles of red tape.

Finally, in regard to future self-government for these people, this agreement provides a framework of sorts in appendix B. But it also says that in case of disputes this agreement takes precedence over future self-government agreements.

Also, according to the Indian affairs minister, it takes precedence over other federal, territorial and municipal laws as stated in Hansard on April 25. I believe it is wrong to set a precedent whereby any native land claim agreement should be allowed to trample all existing federal, territorial or provincial laws and municipal laws in the land claim area.

In conclusion, I wish to extend my personal best wishes to the Sahtu Dene and Metis people in their efforts to obtain a prompt, just settlement of their land claims. I can see that many people have spent many hours and much effort on this agreement, but I strongly object to some of its basic principles.