Cliff Breitkreuz

[Petitions, June 2nd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, according to Standing Order 36, I rise to present two petitions. The first petition is signed by almost 1,000 people, the majority coming from Yellowhead.

The petitioners call on Parliament to support legislation that would repeal and modify existing gun control laws, which have not improved public safety, have proven not to be cost effective, or have proven to be overly complex so as to be ineffective and/or unenforceable.

[Firearms Legislation, May 3rd, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, hundreds of law-abiding citizens in Yellowhead are attending firearms legislation meetings across the riding.

The message they are trying to get through to this ivory tower, out of touch government is this: They do not see how gun control will prevent criminals from committing crimes; they do not like the fact that this legislation will give the federal cabinet

unprecedented search and seizure powers; and they do not like the fact that their right to bequeath or inherit property is being trampled on by Bill C-68.

Already over 800 people have attended four gun control meetings in my riding with more meetings to come. Not one person has spoken in favour of Bill C-68. The majority of the people of Yellowhead want the standing committee on justice to make changes to the gun control bill so it seeks to punish the criminal instead of making criminals out of law-abiding gun owners.

My constituents want the justice system to work for them, not against them. Common sense must prevail.

[Petitions, April 26th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I rise to present five petitions bearing hundreds of signatures of Yellowhead constituents.

These petitions are due largely to the efforts of Edson Reynolds of Evansburg. The petitioners ask Parliament to introduce legislation by which the criminal misuse of firearms would be severely punished and the right of law-abiding citizens to own and use firearms would be protected.

I concur with the petitioners.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1995, April 6th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak in the House on behalf of my constituents about the federal budget.

My constituents tell me time and time again that they are sick and tired of paying for federal government programs that they do not want, they did not ask for and they certainly do not want to pay for. My constituents stop me and ask about Canada's official languages policy. Why do we have this program? Why do we have to pay for it? Today I will confine my budget remarks to bring forward the concerns of my constituents about official languages.

I will start by asking the government on behalf of the people of Yellowhead: Why do we have a Department of Canadian Heritage? Of all the departments in government, the Department of Canadian Heritage is one of the most controversial and

disruptive to the people of Canada. It is in this department that we find huge public funding for highly contentious areas, including the CBC, multiculturalism and of course, official bilingualism. I will be direct. The people of Yellowhead have no use for the Department of Canadian Heritage and its destructive, divisive programs.

They do not know what possible good can result from the funding of the bilingual bonus which cost them and their fellow taxpayers $50 million last year. They do not know what good can result from funding the language police, the Commissioner of Official languages, $11.1 million. They do not know what good can come from funding the Edmonton region of the Alberta Francophone Association to the tune of $103,000 annually plus a grant of $12 million to be spent in a riding containing 945 francophones.

The people of Yellowhead are not sure why they are helping to pay for official languages support, which is projected to cost $253 million this year, a cool quarter of a billion dollars.

It is not my intention to fan the flames of resentment, only to question a policy which has done much to tear the social and linguistic fabric of our nation.

Official bilingualism in Canada is not about promoting the equality of the French and English languages. It is about the promotion of minority language rights to the majority of the population. In fact the Official Languages Act, which entrenched the notion of coast to coast bilingualism in 1969, has been abused by federal governments which operated behind the smoke-screen of keeping Canada together.

The OLA was about appeasement right from the beginning. There are questions as to how this forced language program was to be funded, to be paid for. English Canada protested this imposition and of course it is paying for it.

Pierre Trudeau knew the mathematics involved. He needed to retain power. He needed to retain his stranglehold on Quebec. After all, he had no support from the west. Therefore, the OLA was imposed on all of Canada. Ever since, the Official Languages Act has been used to put out anti-nationalistic fires in Quebec but to no avail. The effects of this firefighting have been severe.

I draw attention to how the Official Languages Act was used in 1976, at a time when great dissension in the province of Quebec was reaching its apex, to put out a fire that threatened national unity. On the eve of the Quebec election, 30,000 federal employees in Quebec threatened to refuse to serve people in English unless they received their bonuses for being bilingual, just like the bonuses bilingual secretaries, stenographers and typists received.

To pacify the civil servants and keep the separatist Parti Quebecois from claiming unfair treatment of francophones, Trudeau caved in and passed the order to pay the bilingual bonus. To top things off and to add insult to injury, the PQ won the election.

Ever since, the bilingual bonus has stuck and has even been extended to bilingual RCMP officers under this Liberal government. I have little doubt this decision was made to cool disparaging attacks from the Bloc.

This policy is discriminatory against unilingual anglophones and francophones. It has created division instead of unity. It is the opposite of what the OLA intended for Canada. The disruption of the merit system has a negative impact on morale.

That was not the only time the master social engineer used the contentious issue of Canada's official languages as an instrument of appeasement at the expense of the majority of Canadians. Trudeau implemented affirmative action in the hiring of public servants.

I draw my colleagues' attention to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. It recommended dividing the public service into French language units in which all work would be performed in French, and English language units in which all work would be performed in English. Under this system almost all jobs would be open to unilingual speakers.

It is true that at first there might be a swell of unilingual English jobs, but as anglophone employees retired and francophones joined the public service French language units would expand to eventually include a proportion of jobs equivalent to the French speaking share of the Canadian population. In essence, there would be equitable representation without resorting to affirmative action and without claims of discrimination against either anglophones or francophones. I think all members would agree that such a scenario seems reasonable and fair.

Trudeau, because of political considerations, did not adopt this fair solution. He apparently felt the French language unit would take too long to implement while the separatist threat was an immediate problem. As Trudeau said: "We cannot tell Quebec: Cool it, fellows, in 40 years we will be able to talk to you. We might save some money but we would not save the country". Well we sure have saved the country.

Today it is the unity of the country which is threatened, something that should not be happening if the sacred cow known as official bilingualism had worked, but of course it could not work. This policy has cost billions of dollars to enforce since its inception. We see what Canadian taxpayers are getting in return: among other things, a separatist party as the Official Opposition in the House of Commons.

If policies of the past do not work, perhaps it is time that we stopped them and developed a new framework with which we can all work toward a unified Canada. Canadians resent official bilingualism as it stands now.

I will close by relating an instance which occurred last October. The Commissioner of Official Languages, the language police, visited Jasper National Park to award park officials for their outstanding promotion of French language in the park. A closer examination of the demographics shows just how wasteful the commissioner's junket was. It is illogical to have bilingual services available in Jasper National Park or any other place where there is not sufficient demand.

Last year over 2.4 million people visited the park. The visitors to the campgrounds came from the following regions: Alberta, 35 per cent; British Columbia, 15 per cent; California, Ontario, Washington, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The origin of people visiting by country was: Canada, 60 per cent; United States, 20 per cent; Germany, 5 per cent; and then England and Switzerland.

Curiously enough, signs in the campgrounds are in French and English and most of the campground staff are required to be bilingual in both official languages. If anything, services should be offered in English and German according to the statistics. Of course that would be ludicrous because the majority of Germans visiting Canada speak English.

Common sense must dictate all government policies. It is time to end tired, old divisive and expensive policies which not only add to our debt but which create problems instead of solving them. The time to end those is now.

[Questions On The Order Paper, April 6th, 1995]

For each federal riding, what has been the total amount of financial assistance provided by the Federal Office of Regional Development-Quebec from October 25, 1993, to date?

[Multiculturalism, April 5th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise in the House to speak in favour of my colleague's motion, private member's motion No. 364. The motion provides for the transfer of the control of multiculturalism away from the federal government to individuals. Essentially, the motion put forward by my colleague from Calgary Southeast calls for the withdrawal of federal funding to multicultural groups.

I concur with that objective. However, just because I think the state should not be funding various cultural groups does not mean that I dislike these groups. Just because I disagree with government imposed multicultural policies it should not be construed to suggest that I dislike other linguistic or ethnic groups. I am arguing against government policy, not against cultural groups.

After all my roots are different from the roots of many other people. Together those generations of various ancestral heritage came to this country to settle and build what became by far the best country in the world. This country was opened up, settled and built without a multicultural policy. In fact I doubt if the term multiculturalism was even coined when my parents came to this country back in the twenties.

My roots are a mixture, a real hodge-podge so to speak. My linguistic heritage is Prussian German but my ancestral affiliation and connection include not only central European heritage but east European heritage, Slavic heritage, including Ukrainian, Polish and Russian. My parents understood and spoke these languages, plus what they called Yiddish. I am led to believe that Yiddish is a kind of Germanic way of speaking Hebrew. If that makes any linguistic sense I really do not know. In a land, in a country, that encompasses much of the earth's land mass with over 150 cultural groups, who am I to question what makes sense in that part of the world. Come to think of it, perhaps there are lessons to be learned given the turmoil that existed for centuries in tsarist imperial Russia, then in the former Soviet Union and presently in the newly created state of Russia.

My parents left their homelands, along with hundreds of thousands of other people from that area, having lived in those lands for almost 200 years. They left to escape the tyranny that was to enslave the people for over 70 years. They came to Canada, where everything was new and very unfamiliar. They had nothing when they came halfway around the world.

However they had freedom. They had liberty. They had liberty and freedom that the people back in the land from whence my parents came could not even imagine or dream about. My parents embraced their newly adopted country with energy and a zeal that was typical of newcomers during that time. Like those who came from places other than Britain, they soon learned English like everyone else. Some youngsters did not learn English until they started school.

For years, for generations, like thousands of families not only from eastern Europe but from all over the world they held on to some aspects of the culture that they had lived with before they came to this country.

Mr. Speaker, do you want to know something? These people all came usually with little or no money and they received not one thin dime from government. Not only did they not ask for money, they did not expect any government money. They came to this country for freedom and for the tremendous opportunities

that this great and beautiful land afforded them. They settled and built communities that helped to build this country.

I suggest to the multicultural minister that what transpired during those pioneering decades was real, genuine, unvarnished multiculturalism. All these people, these families from varied backgrounds, from different parts of the world worked together and co-operated to build churches, schools and communities. Together they worked to build the country.

That was multiculturalism at its finest with no government dollars. They were all proud of the fact that they had become and were Canadian.

Since government funding for all types of programs began, many communities have divided. Friction and animosity has developed. Dependency on the state, on government handouts has been created. Apparently the multicultural minister thinks so too because she has recently mused that Canada has no culture.

I would suggest the minister leave the confines of Montreal and Ottawa and visit rural Canada, the west and Atlantic Canada. She might be pleasantly surprised, if she stays for awhile, of the flourishing culture that she might not only see but also feel. I suspect culture in this country would flourish even more and probably bring Canadians closer together from all parts of the country if the state would only get its nasty little nose out of culture, along with its close sister multiculturalism.

[Members Of Parliament Pensions, March 29th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberals just do not understand. Their promise to reform the big bucks for life club, euphemistically known as the MP pension plan, has gone by the wayside. Despite the token changes to the plan, MPs' pensions still have unlimited protection against inflation and will grow in value at a rate twice the legal maximum in the private sector.

If the Deputy Prime Minister retires in three years, she will stand to collect a cool $2.7 million until age 75. She fought to maintain her cushy pension plan, which comes courtesy of hard working Canadians.

Perhaps she fought so hard for her pension because she thought she would be forced to keep her promise and resign. We all remember when the Deputy Prime Minister said she would quit if the GST was not scrapped by her government. Lucky for her, she has an understanding boss who will let her keep her job, despite the millions of Canadian taxpayers who despise both the GST and the outrageous MP pension plan.

[Petitions, March 2nd, 1995]

Madam Speaker, I rise to present a petition on behalf of almost 2,500 Alberta residents, the majority of whom are from Yellowhead.

The petitioners request that Parliament amend the Young Offenders Act so that it is tough enough to provide real justice to deter young people from committing crimes.

This petition is one of several from Alberta totalling approximately 64,000 names.

[Petitions, February 16th, 1995]

Madam Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 36, I am pleased to present three petitions on the whole business of firearms legislation. Two petitions are from towns in Yellowhead and one is from Ontario.

Among other things the petitioners request that Parliament support laws which will severely punish all violent criminals who use weapons in the commission of a crime. I concur with that request.

[Western Economic Diversification, February 15th, 1995]

Mr. Speaker, over the years western economic diversification has sunk taxpayers' money into all kinds of projects: the Custom Gourmet Coffee Shop, Dave's Pizza, Imperial Oil. Even Novatel had the pleasure of receiving taxpayers' dollars courtesy of WED.

Today taxpayers can take delight in knowing their hard earned dollars are going to yet another worthy project, the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia. WED is loaning $160,000 to this group so it can buy a ship from DND. It wants to use government money to buy a government ship so it can be towed out to sea and sunk.

What an investment. To top it off this group claims it will pay WED off by selling salvaged boat parts. We hear old boat parts are selling like hotcakes. WED will be repaid its $160,000 in no time flat at the used boat flea market.