Howard Hilstrom

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, being a Manitoba member of Parliament I am quite familiar with the politics of the member for Churchill. I will make one observation. When the Government of Canada owned Canadian National Railway, it became the most inefficient railway. It had the highest costs. It was bankrupting the country. In fact, it dragged the private company CP Rail down with it. It was privatized and CN Rail became the most dynamic railway in all of North America.

My question is in regard to the politics of this. The NDP seems to say that the Canadian Alliance is in a big battle with it, and we are, but let us look at the NDP as if it were in government. In fact, the NDP is the government of Manitoba.

This member is quite familiar with the Winnipeg Beach area, where there is a rail line that runs from Winnipeg to Gimli. Farmers use it for producer cars. The distillery uses it for hauling grain, corn and liquor. Tourists also use it.

That rail line is being abandoned. A private company is willing to take it over and run it but cannot because the NDP has legislation that makes it uneconomical for that private company to take it over.

The member for Churchill might ask what that legislation is. It is successors' rights legislation, which the NDP government refuses to give an exemption for. I would like the member to explain again how great an NDP government would be for private rail service when in fact the NDP government is showing by its actions that it will ruin the rail line in my area.

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 19th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for the member. He referred to $1 billion in his speech and wondered what the government did with it. I think it all went into the firearm act and kind of got wasted.

There is the transportation legislation and bill. There is an agreement with the Canadian Wheat Board and the Liberal government over the fact that it is supposed to contract 50% of the grain that is to be hauled in the next year. The Canadian Wheat Board is trying to renege on that. Our Wheat Board minister is doing absolutely nothing to ensure that the Wheat Board lives up to that agreement. I think he is just saying that it must be run by the farmers.

Should the Wheat Board live up to its agreements? Does he want to comment on the Wheat Board minister still dragging farmers through the courts for exporting their wheat across the border?

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 19th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, concerning the rail line abandonment process, in my riding of Selkirk--Interlake there is the Winnipeg Beach line that runs from Winnipeg up to the town of Gimli and that line was slated for abandonment. It was to have been transferred to Cando Contracting Ltd. in Brandon which is a short line operator of which Gordon Peters is the owner. The company is quite willing and happy to take it over from Canadian Pacific Railway but that is not happening.

The problem is that the provincial government has successor right labour legislation that it is insisting must go along with the transfer and sale of the line. However, the private company, which is mostly run by the owners and the operators themselves, will be as uneconomical as CP Rail is if they have to have that same labour legislation applied when it takes it over as a short line operator.

My riding cannot do without that railway. I heard the parliamentary secretary talk about having to revisit and look again at the rail lines that have been pulled out. There have been hundreds and hundreds of miles pulled out of my riding and the roadbed has even been torn up. Therefore I do not think any government is going to put those rail lines back in to haul freight and so on.

I would like to know if the federal government is contacting the provincial government to influence the provincial government to ensure that our rail line is not abandoned. It services farmers, the distillery bringing corn in and liquor out, and there is a major tourism effort in that area. That rail line is important to us and I am concerned that it is going to go.

Is the parliamentary secretary and the government able to influence in any way the retention of that rail line?

[Transportation Amendment Act, March 19th, 2003]

Madam Speaker, my question is with respect to the railway operation in this country. The federal government spent millions of dollars on a study regarding rail transportation as it pertains to the grain industry, particularly in western Canada. I am sure the parliamentary secretary is aware of the Estey and Kroeger reports.

In the request from industry and in the best interests of the grain industry of western Canada the issue of getting rates for grain transportation as low as possible was the purpose of those studies. There was a strong recommendation that the grain transportation industry in western Canada should be based on commercial contract based systems.

There are two points I would ask the parliamentary secretary to comment on. First, the legislation does not seem to advance that in any way. In fact, it probably goes the other way in causing more regulation instead of less. Second, I would like to know what the parliamentary secretary has to say about the fact that the Canadian Wheat Board is supposed to be contracting 50% of its grain movement now. I would ask her to address those two points.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, as a member of Parliament I will do everything in my power, both as a member of Parliament and as a citizen of this country, to change laws that are wrong and that waste our national resources. If members do not think this has been done around the world, and I certainly do not put myself in this category, but people have opposed oppressive regimes all through history; Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, all these people, when they identify a big wrong, they go against it. I am saying that Canadians should be against this waste of priorities.

The members over on the Liberal side laugh about deaths from heart attacks that could have been prevented with simple surgery. They laugh about child pornography. That member happens to be a female member from the Liberal side of the House. I do not know if she has any children or not, but the fact is that we have a duty and a responsibility to protect our children and using the money for firearm registry of law-abiding citizens instead of protecting children is wrong, wrong, wrong.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the current justice minister. The current justice minister on the other side of the House is not even willing to prosecute cases for non-registration of firearms. He has said that very clearly.

I would like to remind the Liberal member that the people of Nunavut do not have to register their firearms. They have a court injunction saying that they do not have to register. The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations will not register. The Métis of Manitoba will not register.

She is trying to apply this kind of legislation on some kind of grand social engineering scheme to try to get rid of firearms from every law-abiding citizen, while the criminals will continue to have firearms and shoot and cause mayhem in downtown Toronto. This registration will do nothing to stop crime.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, today we return to debate the federal budget. This is the Prime Minister's swan song budget, which is the best way I could describe it. It is not the budget that is needed for Canada because the priorities are all wrong, and as a result, I do not support it. As I said earlier to the member from Prince Edward Island, many farmers across the country do not support it.

I only have a limited time of 10 minutes for my speech, so I will touch on the main topics of agriculture, health care and, of course, the firearms registry.

Priority spending by the government is the problem and the Firearms Act is the best representation of the mammoth waste of money. A billion dollars has been spent so far with more being spent every day and this budget will continue to support that.

City people and non gun owners should be opposed to the registration of all the rifles and shotguns in the country because it is such a mammoth waste of time. There are so many priorities that need to be dealt with in the cities, that even they need to be against this waste of money. It is the duty of every Canadian, and in particular every firearm owner, to oppose this firearms policy and this bill that was formerly known as Bill C-68 and the continued funding for it. We heard points of order in the House this morning about how the government allegedly continues to deceive not only the House but also Canadians in general.

I do not know if the justice minister is listening to my speech this morning. I hope that he has some staff members listening to it.

In the farming and ranching communities we use firearms, rifles and shotguns on a regular basis. Farmers also have a hard time making a net profit and here we have the government imposing all these additional costs on them with no benefit to them.

The government calls it user fees, but in fact firearm owners are not the users. The government thinks it is going to control crime, which it will not of course, but that is who the real user is, supposedly the Canadian general public.

Therefore, I have to stand here and tell the justice minister that along with tens of thousands of Canadians across the country who are firearms owners, I will never register a rifle or shotgun. We need them in our ranching operations, but this mammoth waste of money and the infringement on individual rights in the country has to stop someplace. This is the time for all of us in Canada to take a stand and see the end of the firearms registry. The mismanagement and waste continues to grow. The government continues to fund it out of this budget.

In the town of Beausejour, in my area, there are not enough police resources to fight crime. What the town of Beausejour had to do was take its bylaw enforcement officers off their regular duties of enforcing bylaws during the day and put them on night shifts to do the work of police officers who were not available. That is real crime control, not registering the rifles and shotguns of duck hunters, farmers and ranchers like myself.

There is very limited money to combat child pornography in Toronto and Montreal. Can members imagine how many children a billion dollars would save?

What about lives? I mentioned I was going to talk a little about health care. In Manitoba last year we had three heart patients waiting for surgery. There were just not enough doctors, nurses or facilities available. They had their surgery rescheduled and rescheduled, and those people died waiting for surgery. That is a terrible shame of mammoth wealth being misused and prioritized in the wrong way.

We have spousal abuse cases. This too is a very sad commentary.

In the province of Manitoba, of course, the NDP government is unwilling to properly fund our crown attorneys. It is unwilling to do anything innovative about health care. As a result, the NDP government in Manitoba says that it will not be innovative, but that it will send heart patients down to the States, out to B.C. or wherever people are innovative, to get their treatment and it will pay for it, but that there is no chance that it will change the health care system. The NDP government in Manitoba only deserves a little bit of blame for that. The federal government deserves a lot of blame for insisting that provinces cannot innovate with the mammoth amount of health care money that is going in there.

It is St. Patrick's Day and I might look like I am mad about the budget that has come down but the truth of the matter is that I am bloody mad about the waste of money by the government. We are on the verge of trying to remove a dictator out of a country, a dictator who is tremendously sadistic and kills his own people. Of course I am talking about Saddam Hussein. The world has always had to stand up to cold-blooded killers and people who attack the innocent, the unarmed and the people who cannot defend themselves. That is what Saddam Hussein is doing to his own people, whereas our budget on military matters is very limited. The budget throws in a little bit more money to it but it is so limited that it will just keep the armed forced going in their current situation with no real improvements.

Here again, priority of spending, back to the firearms registry. This is how the firearms registry is working. This is a letter from a constituent:

I would like to take this time to let you know what my experience with the firearm registration has been like. I had seven firearms to register. I was going to be ahead of the game when registering my firearms so I sent in ALL my information for my firearms via mail using the old application forms. In April 2002 I received my registration cards. I took a quick look at the registration cards and placed them in my desk and did not look at them till just the other day, February 23, 2003. Well to my surprise there were only five firearms accounted for!

I then proceeded to re-submit the information for the firearms that were missing via the website. As I took a closer look at the registration cards I noticed that one of the guns registered on my licence was not even one of my firearms! So now FOUR of my firearms are not registered. I sent in the information for these firearms through the website and sent an e-mail explaining what happened.

Today at work I started to think about this and wondered if my firearms were registered to someone else. Well I guess time will only tell.

I'm the type of guy who will usually not voice his concern. This takes the cake. We trust that competent people are in charge of this whole gun registry. My application is proof positive that this is not the case.

I was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for 30 years. I am telling the government and Canadians that the firearms registry of rifles and shotguns will not work. It will not reduce crime and it will continue to waste money forever and ever if the government continues to support it.

I am really disappointed in the Canadian Police Association executive, not the policemen on the street, but the Canadian Police Association executive. It will be coming to Ottawa in the next few days to tell us all how the government should continue to spend billions of dollars on the firearms registry when in fact it knows that in the big cities of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary, police are trying to fight child pornography and child prostitution on our streets. That is the kind of crime that needs to be fought, not the registration of rifles and shotguns by farmers, ranchers and average Canadians.

My final comments on this to the justice minister and to the whole budget process is that I will not register my rifles and shotguns under this system.

[The Budget, March 17th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, my question for the Liberal member from Prince Edward Island is pretty straightforward. Why is the member against his own farmers of Prince Edward Island?

The APF, agricultural policy framework, which is part of the budget, is not popular with the PEI industry. According to Doug LeClair, Executive Director of the PEI Federation of Agriculture, the island agriculture leadership wants nothing to do with it. That is why he says that this should remain unsigned. Still the member stands here and supports a budget that will hurt farmers in his own riding.

[Firearms Registry, February 18th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister's attempt to force every Canadian to register their rifles and shotguns has been a dismal billion dollar failure.

Canadians living in Nunavut have a court order saying that they do not have to register their firearms. First nations people have said they will not register as it is against their treaty rights. Hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Canadians have not registered as of January 1 and have sworn that they never will.

My question is for the Prime Minister. Instead of forcing firearms registration on some Canadians and not on others, why does he not treat everyone equally and repeal the gun registration law?

[Supply, February 13th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the member referred to a survey. I misunderstood whether it was 7% or 70% support from the Canadian public for a national ID card. I question that very many Canadians would support it.

On behalf of all Canadians my concern with the government is the same one I had with the firearms registry. When the government trotted out statistics in court cases in the lead-up to establishing the registry, it misused and overstated statistics to further its argument. Those statistics were repudiated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and have since been shown by the Auditor General to be totally wrong.

For my benefit and the benefit of the House, I would ask the member to go over what the survey he was referring to actually said.