Norman E. Doyle

[Poverty, May 27th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the United Nations calls poverty the planet's greatest threat to political stability, social cohesion and environmental health.

According to the G-8 Global Poverty Report, poverty encompasses economic, social and governance dimensions. Economically, the poor are deprived not only of income and resources but opportunities as well.

The Global Poverty Report at the G-8 summit in Okinawa in July 2000 also said that the lives of poor people are more affected by actions at the national level. This is borne out by our own statistics here in Canada, which reveal that one in eight people live in poverty. Putting it in perspective, 13% of Canadians, almost four million people, are poor.

Impoverished children come from impoverished families. We here in the House of Commons passed a resolution back in 1990 to abolish child poverty by the year 2000. Why have the Liberals not kept that commitment?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

It is cutting departments, as the member for St. John's West indicates, that need the money so very badly. And the long gun registry is one single government program. If only the government would learn how to cut out all this fat, it would be able to deliver more meat in the budget for real tax reform, for real tax relief for Canadians, and for real and significant reinvestment in the Canadian military, for instance.

What is really ironic about the budget is that only $1.6 billion over the next two years will go toward the Canadian military, and $200 million of the reallocated funds that the minister sought from departments actually came from the Canadian military.

Of all the departments to identify for waste, who would have thought that the Liberals would actually target the military? It is a department that is already on the ropes and already fighting to try to maintain a reasonable level of equipment and a reasonable quality of life. The situation with our military would be absolutely hysterical if it were not so sad, pathetic and shameful. Canada, as a direct result of this Liberal government's lack of leadership, cannot even arm a Canadian reconnaissance platoon in Afghanistan. The Speaker is telling me my time is up, but we will get another shot at this later.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

That is a good question, Mr. Speaker. Who was the Minister of Finance? It was the individual who aspires to be prime minister of the country, who is going around now telling people of his great fiscally responsible management program in which he will become involved once he becomes the Prime Minister of Canada. Here we have an individual who sat around the table as the then minister of finance, had it in his own hands for a 10 year period and never did what was fiscally responsible in this country.

As I have said, this vortex sucks up every single bit of taxpayers' money and then spits it out at the other end in meaningless programs. There was probably not one single Liberal backbencher who did not get something in the budget. There was probably not a Liberal caucus hand in the air that did not get something from the Minister of Finance in these days when the Liberals are a whole lot more concerned about the Liberal leadership race and who is going to be the next leader than they are about the future of the economy and the country.

Did the Minister of Finance, who is now aspiring to be the leader of the country, ever think for a moment of the poor in this country? Did he ever think for a moment about a promise that I believe was made back about 15 years ago here in the House, a promise that we would eliminate child poverty by the year 2000? The year 2000 is long gone and the government still fails to recognize that children in poverty come from families in poverty. Most of the programs that the government has implemented over the years have done very little to help people in poverty in this country or to eliminate child poverty. Another area is seniors. We have a government that is so arrogant that it actually does seniors out of their GST money. If they do not actually apply for it, the government will not make them aware that they are entitled to it. The government cares very little about seniors and it cares very little about the poor and child poverty in this country.

The government is proposing to help fund some of these new spending programs by reallocating a total of $1 billion a year from departments' and agencies' budget. That represents an amount equal to the amount that has been wasted so far on the failed long gun registry, $1 billion.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

Like a wood chipper, says the member for St. John's West.

Or it might give money out to Liberal friends for reports that were never produced. We all remember those infamous reports. Friends and associates of the Liberal Party were given huge sums of money for reports that were never produced, or if they were produced, 15 or 20 pages were produced at a cost of $20,000 a page.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

My colleague from St. John's West says it is mismanagement and he is so correct. The Prime Minister's affinity for poor fiscal management is puzzling and astounding. There are so many worthwhile causes and people out there in need of legitimate funds who are suffering because there is so much money being sucked up in the voracious appetite of the Liberal vortex.

Here is the Webster's definition of budget 2003. A big, inanimate Liberal vortex known to have only one source of food: taxpayers' money. Also known to line pockets of supporters with astronomical kickbacks; incompetent, corrupt and arrogant.

This vortex sucks up every single last bit of taxpayers' money like a vacuum cleaner and then it spits it out on meaningless programs at the other end.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

Yes, there was the firearms registry money pit, as well as the GST fraud. It does not stop there. How about the wasteful Sea King saga? As I said a moment ago, the list goes on and on. There is more. It is shameful and pitiful.

[Budget Implementation Act, 2003, May 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is with pleasure that I rise today to speak on Bill C-28, the budget implementation act. Mind you, it is not with pleasure that I review the substance of the bill, because the budget is a return to the 1970s Liberal free-spending habits that have imperilled Canada's economic prosperity.

Instead of having a vision for the future, the government is wandering aimlessly with no vision whatsoever. The last time Canada witnessed program spending growth like we have today in this budget, the current Prime Minister was the minister of finance. This budget, and by extension the budget implementation act, can be characterized by one phrase: an irresponsible increase and commensurate growth in program spending.

The fact is that since 1998 we have seen growth in program spending that did not always reflect the priorities of Canadians, but this is the first year in which we have seen such a dramatic increase in program spending.

That said, some increases are badly required and desperately needed. Nobody disagrees with the notion that we want to see a greater level of investment in health care and in the military. Nobody would disagree with that. Health care and the military clearly represent the priorities of Canadians, but if we look at the budget implementation act and take the health care reinvestment portion and the military reinvestment portion out of the increase in spending, the fact is that there is a 7.3% increase in government program spending in the budget net of health care and the military.

The Prime Minister should have warned the Minister of Finance not to make the same mistakes he made when he was finance minister back in the 1970s: to simply say no to this kind of Liberal waste. But then again, we have to ask why the Prime Minister would worry about leaving the cupboard bare, because he is leaving soon so he does not really care all that much about it.

Why would the Prime Minister worry about being fiscally responsible when his government has been party to so many financial mismanagement scandals and deliberate cover-ups in this country? Let us look at them for a moment: Shawinigate, the sponsorship boondoggle and the HRDC fiasco, and they go on and on.

[Health, May 12th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to say a few words on Motion No. 83. It calls upon the Standing Committee on Health to study and report to Parliament on the medical necessity of abortion for purposes of maintaining the health of a woman and preventing injury or disease as well as to study the medical risk of women undergoing abortions compared to women carrying a child to full term.

I want to congratulate the hon. member on raising this issue. It is a very important motion and one to which we should give very serious consideration. I support the motion because any serious debate on this issue is better than no debate at all.

Before 1969, as we are all very much aware, abortion was illegal in Canada. In 1969 the federal law changed to give legal status to abortions that were approved by a hospital's therapeutic abortion committee. Now if the committee decided that an abortion was necessary for the health of the mother, then the procedure was legal. Health was not specifically defined in law. As a result of that, committees had wide latitude in approving abortions.

However in 1998 the Supreme Court ruled that under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms laws regarding abortion were a violation of a pregnant woman's rights. What we essentially have today is abortion on demand, subject only to the usual restraints of hospital budgets and so on, or the availability of a local abortion clinic to carry out the procedure.

We all have different reasons in this place for supporting or rejecting this motion. It is no secret that I oppose abortion on moral grounds. I believe that life begins and is sacred from conception. However abortion is much more than a health issue. It is a moral issue as well but we are not being asked today to rule on the morality of the issue. We are being asked to look at forming a committee to report to Parliament on the medical necessary of abortion for the purposes of maintaining the health of a woman and to further look at the medical risks to women of undergoing abortions compared to carrying a child to full term.

As I mentioned, in 1998 the Supreme Court ruled, under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that laws regarding abortion were a violation of the pregnant woman's rights, and what we have today is abortion on demand.

I am under no illusions, as I am sure no one in the House is, that this debate today will result in restraint or prohibition being placed on the practice of abortion in our country. However those of us who believe that something should be done would support having the committee look at assessing the risk and asking that committee to report back to Parliament on the risk involved to the woman. The request of the hon. member is very reasonable.

Abortion was made a health issue by the federal government a number of years ago so that abortions could be regularized under the supervision of the medical profession. It was the Liberal large l , small l thing to do at that time. However once the new charter gave individuals more and more freedoms and more and more rights, it was only a matter of time before abortion became merely a matter of choice. It was no longer necessary to maintain a fiction of medical necessity around this whole procedure.

As members will remember, the former PC government tried to pass a bill back in 1989 that again would have put the medical profession back into the abortion approval process but it was defeated in the Senate. Had it passed, I fear the law may have very well been struck down by the courts anyway.

Surely the risk to a mother and to the unborn child must have some rights under law and under the Constitution of our country. The fact that the unborn seem to have no rights is at the core of the problem, but it is not really what the hon. member is asking when he requests that a committee look at the medical necessity of it.

I would certainly be in favour of striking a committee to look at the medical necessity of the whole procedure and allowing that committee to assess the risk. It is a very reasonable request by the hon. member.

Some faint-hearted people do not even want to assess the risk to the mother. We have to ask why. The whole issue of abortion has caused great division among people. Since 1968, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced the abortion reform bill, abortion rights people and pro-life people have worked very hard to advance their causes.

I would imagine that people who would vote against this motion would be afraid that the rights of the individual to have an abortion would somehow go into reverse. Some would say as well that we are a more secular nation today and as a result should have greater freedoms. Others would say that because we have greater freedoms we are headed down a path that embraces the culture of death and that we are embracing the freedoms but we are failing somehow to exercise the responsibility. They feel that voting for the motion would somehow cause them to lose ground on the abortion issue generally.

The health minister claims that abortion is medically necessary. However what we should remember is that Health Canada has no studies to justify that kind of claim. If abortion is not medically necessary, I guess we would have to ask why taxpayer dollars are used to fund it.

Informal and professional provincial pollings in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and New Brunswick have shown majority support for de-funding at least some abortion procedures. Not that the comparison is valid anyway but childbirth is safer than abortion. I think any medical individual would have to agree with that, especially when we consider the growing body of research on the physical and psychological effects of abortion on many women, for example, infertility, breast cancer, a greater risk of suicide, higher rates of substance abuse, depression, social dysfunction and so on.

Calling upon the Standing Committee on Health to fully examine, study and report to Parliament on whether abortions are medically necessary for the purpose of maintaining health seems to me to be a very reasonable request by the hon. member, and I support him in that.

[Supply, May 8th, 2003]

Or it won't pass the country.

[International Transfer of Offenders Act, May 7th, 2003]

Taiwan. The media release states, “Foreign nationals from such jurisdictions convicted in Canada would be able to serve their sentences in their home countries”.

The wording of clause 30 is also very interesting. Subclause 30(1) states:

A Canadian offender shall benefit from any compassionate measures--including a cancellation of their conviction or shortening of their sentence--taken by a foreign entity after the transfer.

On the surface, this portion of the act would seem to suggest that if an offender found guilty of murder in another country was transferred and then that country reviewed the case and found the offender not guilty, he or she would be notified and released. However, closer examination of the wording reveals that this clause under “Compassionate Measures” really allows the Canadian government to take action on compassionate grounds after the prisoner has been returned, the key phrase in this subclause being “any compassionate measures”.

Without a clear definition of the clause the interpretation is left open to those who would determine the sentence duration of the criminal. If the intent of this portion of the bill was to make sure an offender transferred to his or her home country was kept abreast of any reduction of their sentence in the place where the crime occurred, the clause would have read: A Canadian offender shall benefit from any foreign compassionate measures. It is a subtle difference in wording, but one which clearly defines the purpose of the clause.

When dealing with foreign entities I believe we need to be clear and this portion of the bill needs to be re-examined. If what we are saying is that we are going to determine who should or should not be punished or if we are going to be determining the duration of a sentence, regardless of what the country in which the crime was committed has determined, then we need to be up front. We should also define clearly what “compassionate measures” means. Do we include the wishes of the family? Do we consider the circumstances in which the prisoner has served his or her time?

Once again I believe it is important to have measures in place to allow us to deal with this situation, namely, the transfer of prisoners from one country to another, but I also believe we need to act in the best interests of Canadians. While we support the legislation in principle, we need to be cognizant of the fact that regardless of what the government passes this type of legislation only works if we have reciprocal agreements.