Roger Simmons

[Supply, February 21st, 1994]

The old anti-smoking stance on the Hill right now, my colleague, the Minister of Transport, reminds us is the direct result of a private members' bill, just by way of example. There are many others we could mention.

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If petitions bring to the public eye an issue which is sufficiently important and if the petitioners have a sufficiently energetic and informed member of Parliament, that issue will find its way to the floor of this House in a way that will be productive. That is my first point.

I have already stated my second point a couple of times. Let us not rush to have government by mail. If we think this through, there is no need to come here at all. We just need little buttons in 27 million homes-if you are for this, push that button; if you are against that, push that button. That is not what government is about. That is not what this House is about. This is a forum for debate. I have had members of all parties say to me since they have come here in one form or another that they did not quite realize how it was, the implications of this.

I have had to say to myself and to others many times that is why I am here. I have not come here with a closed mind. I have not been sent here as a proxy by the people of Burin-St. George's. Twenty-five thousand people put their x after my name last fall, October 25. Many of them had done it on occasions before. They have had nine occasions to cast their votes for or against me, as the case may be. There is a method of recall. If that is the concern, then I have difficulty.

I have written down what the member for Calgary North said: "Representation has been a minuscule element here". I have to say to her that she might want to look at those words because she might have said them in the heat of debate.

What an insult.

[Supply, February 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, in another life I used to be a superintendent of education. I remember well-and I will document it chapter and verse-the town was Springdale on the northeast coast of Newfoundland and the issue was whether to amalgamate the school services.

As members will realize, under the Constitution, Newfoundland has a denominational system of education. At the moment in 1994 it has in effect three systems: a Roman Catholic system, a Pentecostal system and an integrated system, that being the integration of several of the religious denominations which formerly had their separate services. I am talking now about a point in time just before that integration. We had in a given community a number of individual school systems.

The proposal was that they be integrated, so somebody had a petition. On the petition in that community of 3,000, fully 85 per cent of the petitioners-I do not have the numbers but it represented the overwhelming adult population of that particular community-wanted what we called amalgamation, a bringing together of the separate services, an integration. However, within two weeks somebody else produced a petition with the overwhelming adult population having signed it in which about 58 per cent did not want the amalgamation. Clearly many of the

1636

same names showed up on both petitions within a period of 10 or 12 days.

My point is that petitions serve a very worthwhile purpose but they can be abused. One of the reasons they can be abused is that it is difficult when a neighbour comes to the door to say no to him when all he is looking for is a signature.

Members of the House will acknowledge that very often petitions get signed without due thought. They ought not to be taken as gospel. They ought to be taken as an indicator though. If someone comes to me with a petition on a subject that states 85 per cent of the community is of this particular mind, I take that to be a very strong message.

Do members know what is even better than petitions? A ballot box because there they cannot vote both ways. There they vote one way or the other and they are obliged to stick with it.

Let us understand where I am coming from on petitions. Petitions are a very important instrument, a very important mechanism. That is why we as legislators or parliamentarians have always given petitions-and by we I mean the many people who have gone before us in this Parliament and the British Parliament-petitions a place of pre-eminence in the Chamber.

It is the grievance of the people. It is the people saying collectively that they are for something or they are against something or are concerned about a particular issue. Members of Parliament who make light of that instrument are making light of a lot of people. They are making light of an instrument that has served Parliament and the people of the country very well for a long time.

Having said that, the danger is that we make the illogical transition from petitions as a means of sending a signal, petitions as a means of recording a grievance, to government by petition.

I believe I illustrated the problem with government by petition with my example. Had we followed both petitions back then in the community of Springdale several years ago we would have had two schools. We would have had the amalgamated one because that is what 85 per cent of the people wanted. We also would have had all the separate schools because that is what 58 per cent of the people wanted within the same 10 or 12 day period.

That is the difficulty.

That is the conundrum with petitions. Very often they would have you do things which are mutually exclusive. I put it to any member of this House that if they go out and get a petition on any issue, in the same week I will get a petition with as many names on the other side of that issue. The beauty of petitions is that they send a signal. The weakness of petitions is that they send mixed signals.

The weakness is what happens at that door, as I mentioned a moment ago. It is difficult unless you have a very well thought out position on an issue. If you are publicly known to be, for example, against abortion it is easy to say to the individual who comes to the door: "You know my position on that and I cannot sign your petition which is for abortion". However, with the exception of three or four conscience issues such as abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia, people have to live together in small communities and when a neighbour comes to the door with that petition, often it is easier. I am not saying it is right. I am not justifying it. I am characterizing what happens thousands of times with petitions. Thousands of times people sign a petition and are known in many cases to have signed petitions on opposite sides of the issue.

That is why I started with an example, not a generalization, a specific example in which I was involved in a situation in which people within eight or ten or twelve days had signed opposite sides of two mutually exclusive petitions.

That is why it is dangerous. It is ill advised to make the jump from petitions as a form of grievance, petitions as a way of testing the water, petitions as a way of knowing what people think on an issue, to government by petitions.

Let us look at the essence of this particular motion. It says in effect that petitions are an important vehicle. It says in effect that petitions ought to have more of a role in this Chamber.

I say to my friend from Edmonton Southwest, if that is his real motivation here, and I would suspect that it is, there are ways to do that. His colleague from Calgary North dismisses the idea of private members' bills. A lot of private members bills go down the drain, a lot because they should. However, a lot of others have gone down the drain because the member did not do his or her homework. Very often if a member is seized with an issue, seized with the importance of an issue, that member can stick handle his or her way through the maze here and get a private members' bill passed in this House. I have seen it happen many times.

Before people start denigrating the private members' bill, they ought to check the record in this House and they will find that many private members' bills have made it past the post in this particular Chamber.

[Fisheries, February 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, do not forget the oceans. They are kind of short of fish but they are still there.

[Fisheries, February 21st, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I have a question for my friend and compatriot who has freshly arrived from his success in Brussels with the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, for which I congratulate him and the government.

The point is that there were three abstentions, the European Union, Norway and Denmark. I wonder if the minister would take a moment to tell us what is going to happen. What are he and the government going to do to see that those three comply? Failing that, what is plan B? What happens if they do not comply?

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements And Federal Post-Secondary Education And Health Contributions Act, February 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Calgary West. I would not characterize it that way. That is not the tradeoff at all.

The point I was wanting to make at the beginning of my few remarks was with regard to those who talk condescendingly about transfer payments, as though somehow we are helping those poor people down there who are trying to keep body and soul together. I do not subscribe to that notion. I am saying that part of the tradeoff that we entered into in 1949 was the one that I described. In the interest of time I will not repeat that.

I want to come to the second part of the member's question about what opportunities I see. One does not need to be a nuclear specialist to realize a couple of things. By the way in 1949 when we agreed to take on Canada as part of a larger nation, we were in the black in Newfoundland, don't forget.

I did not hear the heckle so I do not what was said. Enjoy it anyway.

We came in with a balance in 1949. That is not quite the case right now. There were a couple of reasons. We had a very thriving post-war economy based largely on the military. When I say "the military" I mean the very large presence of American forces in St. John's, many thousands in my riding of Stephenville and many thousands in Argentia and so on. That was a part of it. The strategic realities of the last few years have changed, hence the need for deployment of forces in Newfoundland. American forces have drastically altered over the last few years.

We had a thriving fishing economy as well. I do not need to take the House through what has happened to that, particularly in the last two or three years. When I came to the House for the first time federally in 1979 I used to brag that my riding had the same unemployment rate as the province of Alberta at that particular time which was 3.8 per cent or 4 per cent. That was the unemployment rate in the riding of Burin-St. George's. The south coast of Newfoundland is essentially ice-free year round

so people work there eleven to eleven and a half months a year. They do what all smart Newfoundlanders do: they take two weeks off at Christmas and have a party and then go right back at it in January. That was the unemployment rate.

It has changed considerably since then. There is a factor that the downturn in the fishery has caused problems for us. The opportunity, to respond to his question, is to crank the fishery back up.

In closing, I am sure I will rile my friends from Quebec but this is not the intention. If we were were getting the economic value for hydro power we would not be one of those seven provinces today. We would be in the other column. We would not be getting any equalization payments, thank you very much, at all. If we were getting the economic value for our resource, Churchill Falls Power, we would not be needing one cent of equalization from the federal government.

The opportunities are somewhat constrained by some of the political realities at the moment.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements And Federal Post-Secondary Education And Health Contributions Act, February 8th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I too have a few words to say on Bill C-3. I am rather pleased with the provisions of the bill. It does introduce a bit more certainty into the process of federal-provincial fiscal relations and avoids the excessive tax backs that have become not only an aggravation but such a big problem in real terms for several provincial governments, including the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador

I share at least what my friend from Calgary West was saying in so far as that issue is concerned. There are other things I do not particularly share, but he is not in sight at the moment so at another time I am sure we will have an opportunity to pursue that

debate, not to give the impression that he and I are poles apart on this, but there are one or two points that need some discussion.

The issue of transfer payments generally gets characterized in several ways as handouts, as assistance of some sort and I suppose in the general broad term it is assistance. I completely reject the notion of the handout context that some people want to talk about from time to time.

The best way to illustrate my point is to go back in history just a bit to what Newfoundlanders and Labradorians call Confederation. To most in this Chamber and in this country Confederation conjures up the period of 1867. But for Newfoundlanders, when we talk about Confederation we refer to the great Confederation debates of 1946 to 1948, the two referenda of 1948 and the actual becoming part of Canada or, as we like to say, when the two dominions became one, because that is in effect what happened and what technically happened on March 31, 1949. Therefore when we talk of Confederation we mean that particular period.

At that time we entered into a partnership. We did not apply to go on a welfare role. We entered into a partnership. In the process we gave up certain things.

We stood by and had our small but rather vital and vibrant manufacturing base destroyed. We had a heavy trade going with what we called the Boston states, the New England states. We had a particularly lively trade going in fish and fish products, for example. It was a trade that was essentially wiped out by the coming of Confederation in 1949. We had some other manufactured commodities which had to take second place to the new central Canadian reality, the Ontario and Quebec reality, in terms of manufacturing prerequisites.

Therefore we have always seen transfer payments not in the context of some kind of handout but rather as part of a partnership that was entered into in 1949. As Newfoundlanders we have never made any apologies for the fact that we have a system of established programs financing and equalization payments.

I see my friend from Calgary West has taken his seat again. We have to choose our words well around here. We are not allowed to draw attention to the absence of a member, but we can draw attention to his presence.

This is the theme on which I was speaking last week. I understand the member for Calgary West speaks from a somewhat different perspective and so he should. We only have to look at the average family incomes of the ridings that he and I respectively represent.

I represent a riding where the average family income is $24,900 and my friend from Hillsborough who spoke a moment ago represents a riding where the average family income is $24,220. Of course the gentleman from Calgary West represents a riding where the average family income is of the order of $41,000.

If one looks to his colleague, who was there a moment ago and who has now joined us at least temporarily, the gentleman from Capilano-Howe Sound, he represents a riding where the average family income is $52,500. That is quite a difference. He is sitting with the gentleman from Scarborough East where the average family income is $44,800. I can see why they are talking; they have a fair amount in common. I say to my friend from Scarborough East that I hope he will persuade the gentleman from Capilano-Howe Sound to stay on. We could use his talent on this side of the House.

We represent very different perspectives. The gentleman from Lethbridge and I have a fair amount in common because the kind of average family income in that riding would be of the order of $35,000 which is a bit higher than in my riding.

It is not a bad indicator. If one looks at average family incomes in various parts of this country, one will very often understand why the delegates, the MPs from those areas, are saying very different things.

That is why I have special compassion for my friend from Lethbridge. I wonder how he is managing in that caucus where all the high priced discussion is going on when he does not represent a very high priced riding, not in dollar terms at least. However I wish him the best. I know he is equal to the task. He has been in politics long enough not to need very much advice from me on the subject.

Let us come back very briefly to Bill C-3, the equalization bill. It does two or three things I am rather happy about. Transfer payments generally help ensure that a province will have the means to provide a certain basic level of service. Surely that is the whole principle of equalization. That is what it is all about. What the Minister of Finance is doing here today is ensuring by building a little more certainty into the program that we can continue to discharge that mandate which is the principle under equalization.

The whole business of transfer payments does something else. It provides for the mobility of people across the country. Those who have been here before have heard me talk about how people from my province literally have gone to the four corners of the earth, but particularly to the four corners of Canada to work.

There are of the order of 10,000 or so in Fort McMurray in the riding of Athabasca. There are many thousands and tens of thousands in southern Ontario and all over the country working on the CP rail lines, including in Saskatchewan and in British Columbia. We in Canada are contributing to the economic stability of the country by having that mobility of people. If we have labour skills then they are accessible not only in terms of the province of origin but right across the country. That is a good thing. It flies in the face of all the myths we hear about people from Newfoundland and from Atlantic Canada generally being too lazy to get up and go where the jobs are. That is a theme you

will hear me talk on very often because it is one that needs to be rejected at every possible opportunity.

As I think I said in this House on Thursday, there are more native born people from my province living outside the province today than living inside. That is the best indication I can give that they are there where the labour activity and economic activity is.

Transfer payments do something else, have traditionally done so, and continue to do so. They help to stabilize the economic situation in the seven provinces which are recipients of equalization. Surely it is the goal in the Canadian national interest to ensure that each of the provinces no matter how poor-poor in the context of fiscal yardsticks, certainly not poor in terms of human resources but poor in the first context-each province in the confederation, each of the 10 provinces and territories, is in an economically stable situation.

It is easy to support Bill C-3. I invite members of the House on all sides not to confuse this debate with some other axes they want to grind later. This is a good bill. It brings them certainly to the old issue of transfer payments and it introduces a rate of growth of around 5 per cent. That is legitimate in the context of the demands of those particular provinces.

I would hope that in this debate we would put our other axes which we have to grind aside and focus on the merit which is contained in the bill and give it the support of the entire House if possible.

[Social Security System, February 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, my friend from North Vancouver makes two excellent points.

The best way I can respond to the first point is to tell the hon. member about the three people who were facing execution by the guillotine. The rule was that if there were something wrong with the guillotine you went scot free. The first person put his head down, the blade jammed half way down and he was let go. The second person, the same thing. The third person was watching this and always wanting to be helpful he said to the executioner, "I think I know how to fix that".

If efficiency is the only objective, I can make the system very efficient for the hon. member for North Vancouver. Efficiency is not an end in itself. It must never become an end in itself in government. It must become one of the vehicles by which we get there.

If the only objective is efficiency I can tell him how to make unemployment efficient. Do not send out any cheques. All right? Just give people food stamps maybe. I can tell him how to make CPP efficient. Let us call it off. That would be the ultimate in efficiency, would it not?

Let us go to his second point of whether the examples he cites need fixing? I say to him gently we are having a debate. It was moved by the Minister of Human Resources Development, seconded by the Minister of Finance and the debate is calling on us to look at the social programs and see if they can be improved. That is to say, that debate itself, the fact that the gentleman rose in his place and moved a motion, is an acknowledgement that there is a lot wrong with the system. The hon. member for North Vancouver has given us two examples. If I had a week I could give him 10,000 others.

[Social Security System, February 3rd, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I too want to say a few words on this important motion put forth by my friend and colleague, the Minister of Human Resources Development.

I want to say to my friend from Medicine Hat that he should take a good look; he is looking at somebody who does not have all the answers and does not pretend to have them. I do have some concerns about this resolution and I shall express them.

If we look at the resolution, the guts of it say that the committee would make recommendations regarding the modernization and restructuring of Canada's social security system. Since I have only 10 minutes I will not take any time to talk about how proud I am to be in a country with such a good social security system that has served the country very well for many years. I wish I had time to do that but I do not. I do have the time to say that I acknowledge any system however good needs regular scrutiny, regular reviewing, to see what is good about it, and we will hold to that. Whatever is not so good or has become obsolete we will jettison; we will do away with. That is why our system in Canada is a dynamic, unfolding, growing system.

There are a couple of buzzwords. I hate buzzwords; I just hate them. I know I use them but I hate them because often buzzwords wind up inadvertently skating over issues. The word modernization and the word restructuring, maybe they were just a bit of shorthand. Maybe they are buzzwords to mass a whole set of intentions. That I want to know the answer to. Let me ask people who hear the word rationalization: "Have you ever heard of a company that was going to rationalize the workforce that wound up doubling the work force?" Not quite. Rationalizing has always come to connote wipe out, destroy, reduce to nothing.

My good friend from North Vancouver injects the term improve. Yes, I suppose there is a context in which by rationalizing we can improve. I am not arguing that point. I am saying to him that the term rationalization has so often come to mean everything but improve. That is my point.

I come to the two buzzwords in this resolution: modernization and restructuring. We have to be careful what exercise it is we enable the committee to do. We must see to it that it has a full mandate to scrutinize the present system and see ways in which, in the words of my good friend from North Vancouver, the system can be improved. I say to him improved, not gutted. To gut the system is not to improve it. That is my whole point and he helps me make it.

In the haste to modernize I have never had any excitement about if it is modern it is therefore good. I happen to know some good old fashioned things that are very good too. Modernization does not get me too excited if in the process we jettison something that was worth while. Restructuring for its own sake does not get me very excited if, in the process, we restructure some of the goodness, some of the inherent value of the particular program.

I come from a province with a very proud and very long history. By 1997 it will be 500 years since the Brits discovered us, except those who were here before us were discovered a long time before that. The Vikings discovered us around the year 900. When they came here they found people in Newfoundland already. The Dorset people were there about 2,500 years ago.

There has been settlement on the island of Newfoundland and Labrador for thousands of years. The Caucasian settlement is much more recent but it has been there for 500 years plus. When the Brits arrived in 1497 they found the Portuguese already there fishing quite regularly.

You know, Mr. Speaker, because you have heard me say many times in the House that the reason people came to Newfoundland was the same reason in effect that people went to the prairies of western Canada. They came because there was a resource there that they could earn a living from. In the one case, fish, and the other case, land. That is why they came.

I introduce that in the context of this debate because there is still a bit of stereotyping around. I had a professor in Boston University many years ago, a very wise man. I will use his words. They might not be politically correct these days but I have to use his wording. He said: "All Indians walk in single file, at least the one I saw did". There is always the danger of generalizing from too few examples.

I have heard it. I am a proud Newfoundlander. I was born and bred there. I spent all my life there and I hear about the lazy Newfoundlander. I hear it all the time. We got used to the Newfie jokes. They are intended for stunned mainlanders anyway so we do not mind that. However we are stereotyped that we are all down there trying to find a way to skin by, so we can get 10

stamps, so we can sit home and drink beer for the other 42 weeks. That is somehow contradicted by the reality.

Here is some of the reality. Today there are 580,000 Newfoundlanders living in Newfoundland. The reality is that there are three-quarters of a million native born Newfoundlanders living outside Newfoundland. Maybe some of them went to Fort McMurray, to Cambridge, to Toronto-there is a quarter of a million of them in southern Ontario alone-to Los Angeles where there are 85,000, to what we call the Boston states, the New England states where there are 75,000 native born Newfoundlanders. Did they go because they found a way to beat the system there and get 10 stamps?

No, they went to get a work opportunity. They have done it for 500 years. If the work is in the boat they stay there. If it is on the rail tracks of Saskatchewan with CP that is where they go. If it is cutting logs in Nova Scotia that is where they are today. If it is working on the Great Lakes that is where they are today. Several hundred of my constituents, even as I speak, are working the Great Lakes.

I want to demolish one more time the myth that somehow there are a bunch of lazy kooks down there who are waiting for a government to come up with some more programs that they can milk and stay home and drink beer. That is not what this exercise is all about.

I am proud that I live in a country that says some people out there, through no fault of their own, cannot look after themselves and so we have a welfare system. I live in a country where there is the reality that some people cannot get employment for 12 months of the year and so we have an unemployment insurance system. Does that mean we ought to foster abuse of the unemployment insurance system? No, it does not. It means something else. It means that in our haste to modernize and to restructure we not throw out the baby with the bath water.

The basic system is good and has served us well. If there are some abuses, let us find them. Let us not get so caught up in the idea that now we have to reinvent the wheel. We have to find some new things because it is 1994. Let us find some new ones if they are better than the old ones but let us have a good look at the old ones too. They have served us very well.

All this is a matter of perspective. I heard the exchange between my good friend from Winnipeg-St. James and my friend from Medicine Hat. It is not that one has all the answers. Some of us state our views more vociferously than others. Some of us do not believe them more deeply but maybe articulate them more strongly at times.

We come from different perspectives. We come from different solitudes. It is one thing if one is the leader of the Reform Party and one's riding of Calgary Southwest has an average family income of $49,000 or the newly independent gentleman from Markham-Whitchurch-Stouffville who comes from a riding that has the highest family income in Canada, $58,800.

One would have a different perspective if one represents those ridings or if one represents my riding in which the average family income is $24,800. The gentleman from Annapolis Valley-Hants represents a riding in which the average family income is $30,000.

It is a matter of what the reality and background are and who sent us here. I have to say to my colleagues in this Chamber that the people who sent me here are every bit as Canadian as the people who live in my good friend's riding of Gaspé or my other friend's riding of Rimouski-Témiscouata. They are every bit as Canadian but with very different perspectives than somebody who lives on the prairies of Canada or elsewhere in this country.

That is what this debate is all about. We do not run a government here. We do not sit here and look at the gorgeous stained windows, as nice as they are. We debate here. This is a forum in which we bring the ideas of Canadians in two territories and ten provinces together. There is going to be a debate of different ideas. We are going to have differences of opinion. However, at the end of the day we are worth our salt, our salary.

We justify our being here only if we take what we had in the past in terms of social security systems and not destroy them or with euphemisms of restructuring throw them out. We should rebuild them. We should craft a better vehicle for the 1990s. That is the challenge that my people in Burin-St. George's want me to address. I believe it is the one that all people across this country want us to address here.

[Speech From The Throne, January 24th, 1994]

Food. My friend from York South-Weston is here. Anything can happen now.

The member for Medicine Hat talked about the unemployment insurance program. Certainly I would be the first to agree that there is a need for change. I want to scrutinize some of the suggestions he made. One that caught my attention I will come back to in a moment. But let me make a basic point about the unemployment insurance system.

It is not a bogy. It is a system that has served this country very well. Let us not, to use a cliché, throw out the baby with the bath water. This is a system that has served this country very well.

The issue I want to come back to is the one of the variable entrance requirements. I say to the member kindly that if we were to extrapolate and take to its logical conclusion his point that one ought not to have a different entrance requirement depending on where one lives in this country, he is also espousing that all automobile insurance plans ought to be identical and that there ought not to be any variability in the type of coverage that is needed by different individuals.

Of course he does not believe that. I ask him to examine a little more closely his thesis that where one lives in the country makes no difference.

I submit that it makes a whole lot of difference. For example, it makes a difference in the ability of one to work in construction activity. I would suggest that it would have been much more difficult three days ago to do construction activity when it was -30 degrees in Ottawa than in Newfoundland where it was 12 degrees above that day.

[Speech From The Throne, January 24th, 1994]

Mr. Speaker, I want to congratulate my friend from Medicine Hat for his first speech in the House. I just got the last part of it because I was so busy stuffing my face.