Vic Althouse

[Oceans Act, June 11th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, I hate to interrupt a very interesting speech. I hope the member gets to continue it tomorrow. However, we are now officially adjourned and I wish to raise my point of business in the post-adjournment debate.

I posed a question to the minister of public works concerning the Peace Tower project. She answered a very small part of the broad range of questions I raised. She pointed out that the Ann Raney and Ray Wolf discrimination case had been withdrawn and concentrated her answer on that.

There are a great many things the House should be aware of with regard to the Peace Tower project. As a review, the previous minister of public works said he could not enforce any of the anti-discrimination clauses in the contract for the Peace Tower project because gender discrimination had not been proven. He essentially used the argument that it was before the courts.

That has now been proven and admitted to by the offending parties. The present minister is seeming to say that if there is nothing outstanding with regard to gender discrimination, there is nothing she can say.

Members are aware that there are still two outstanding discrimination claims before the Ontario Human Rights Commission, the case of Marcel and Denis Lamoureux.

Other aspects of this contract become more and more disturbing as we go through it. There seems to be what I can only interpret as mismanagement on the part of Public Works and Government Services Canada and the officials handling the contracts.

The contract is available through the right to know legislation. There is a 30-day arbitration clause built into the contract. This issue began in August 1995 and public works officials did not step in to correct the problem of $165,000 worth of work already done on the project for which Pro-Tech, Ray Wolf's company where Ann Raney worked, has never been paid. The salaries of 25 workers are still outstanding as a result of that. Also, a number of tools were left on site which they have been unable to recover.

Public works did a very poor job of investigating this situation. It did a cursory investigation of people on the site during working hours under the nose of the supervisor who appeared to have been most of the problem. How can honest answers be obtained from workers when their jobs depend on what they say about their supervisor, the person being investigated, when their supervisor is sitting there listening? They will not speak honestly or directly. Public works officials never arranged to meet with them off site or off the job. It did not do a proper investigation. Raney and Wolf were never interviewed by public works officials, yet public works has told the minister that it did an investigation.

Since those investigations and from listening to the CBC radio program "The House", there seems to be clear evidence that the subcontractor required that Ray Wolf as the owner of Pro-Tech pay what amounts to kickbacks in order to maintain himself on the site. Reports were that he paid almost $13,000 in four or five weeks in June and early July.

He had been told by the supervisor that if these payments stopped there would be no work for him and his crew. It is unclear whether the reason for the pressure on Ann Raney was to put further pressure on Ray Wolf and his crew to continue the payments or whether it was simply a straight matter of sexual harassment.

However, the result has been that these workers have not been paid. Mr. Wolf and his company have been put under severe financial stress. He has lost a lot of tools, his truck, his car and perhaps his reputation with this situation. It appears on the surface at least that Mr. Wolf has acted in a relatively straightforward and honest way in this matter.

It really makes me, as a citizen of Canada, upset to think that our officials at public works would permit this kind of operation to go on right under their noses, or above our heads more specifically, in the House of Commons on the Peace Tower project and not do anything to correct the injustice.

I had hoped the minister would address these broader issues to the rather broad question that I had put. All the minister did was say the parties had signed off over the sexual harassment case. I repeat, there continues to be a human rights case before the courts. That is true. However, all these other issues, which I think public works Canada has within its grasp to resolve and look after our interest as taxpayers, should be investigated. I am not sure public works Canada officials are the ones who should be the investigators any more.

[Gas Prices, May 15th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister.

Using their power to boycott certain service stations, consumers have forced government into action on gas pricing. The public wants more than just a report under the Competition Act which says that prices have gone up. They know that already.

Since it is already clear that the industry is not doing the responsible job of self-regulation that the Minister of Industry promised during consultations on amendments to the Competition Act, will the government create an energy pricing commission with power to regulate and roll back unjustified price increases?

[Human Rights, May 10th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister responsible for the status of women and public works to whom I have given notice.

In the continuing saga of the harassment case of Ann Raney, the female engineer on the Peace Tower project and of Ray Wolf and his project workers who followed in sympathy and solidarity, we now see that Mr. Karmash, the offending supervisor, is back on the site. Yesterday Colonial, his employer, refused to sign an arbitration process to resolve matters.

Since the government has failed in all of its efforts to apply ordinary commercial contract law to this situation, when will it apply the full force of the human rights clauses in the contract to resolve this ridiculous situation where Canadian human rights law is ignored by contractors right here on Parliament Hill?

[Taxation, May 10th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the auditor general reports that Revenue Canada agreed to let a family trust ship $2 billion out of the country to avoid taxes.

Canadians now have reports the government has known for two years that Canadian banks and other large corporations are systematically evading taxes by illegally transferring their taxable profits into foreign tax havens.

Canadians are wondering how many hospital beds, how many college classrooms, how many pensions could have been saved if these corporations and trusts had paid their taxes.

Canadians ought to be told whether the government has launched any criminal investigations into tax evasion by Canadian corporations and will contributions from those same corporations acting with flagrant irresponsibility continue to be accepted by the Liberal Party. What responsibility do the higher officials bear who approved this deal?

Small wonder we have trouble making our politicians accountable when our highest officials sell us out.

[Canadian Human Rights Act, May 8th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, on May 1, I rose in the House to pose a question to the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, asking him to extend the May 24 deadline and to commit to begin serious discussions with representatives of the affected communities who had already chosen the people to negotiate on their behalf and had sent a group to Ottawa.

This group had some difficulty in having complete meetings with the minister. He responded in a manner that left the May 24 deadline still in place. He did say, however, that he would be going to the west coast the next day to meet with groups there.

I was concerned, as were others, that the minister would avoid meeting the group that had been sent here by the communities at great expense. Instead of meeting with them, he opted to go to the west coast while they were still here in Ottawa seeking meetings with him.

The next day the minister did met with a few groups that told him he was doing a good job. At the strong insistence of the fishermen's union, which still had representatives on the west coast, he did meet with some of them. A day later he spent 45 minutes with the Pacific Salmon Alliance, which is the group that was in Ottawa and had gone back in an attempt to have a meeting with him. The community representatives that had been in Ottawa did get to meet with him for a mere 45 minutes.

I find it amazing that among Liberal ministers they can spend half a day flying halfway across the country to get away from a group of legitimate representatives, in this case representing fishing communities, commercial, aboriginal and sports fisher people, environmentalists like the Suzuki group, the Georgia Strait group, and the Save Our Wild Salmon group. Instead of having serious meetings with them here in Ottawa to negotiate a workable plan, the minister chose to go off to the west coast and grandstand there rather than actually getting down to business.

Since that time as well we know some licences have changed hands. The last report I have is that there are about 400 which have changed hands under the aegis of the new program. I am told that some owners have purchased up to 11 different licences. The cost of these would amount to many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This means we are leaning toward a new high investment type of fishery, probably an urban based and not a community based fishery. We have not really addressed with this policy the questions of commitment to the resource. An urban based fishery which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in licences alone is to care more about recovering its hundreds of thousands of dollars for an annual licence than it is to looking after future stocks.

A community based fishery based on families doing the fishing from communities will make certain the fishery has a much longer life.

If the minister is truly honest in his promise he made in the House when he responded to my first question to bridge some of the gaps, address uncertainties and fine tune the program, he would suspend the May 24 deadline, which I asked him to do, so true and meaningful discussions can take place with no guns held to the heads of the communities involved in the form of this deadline.

Tomorrow Peter Pearse and Don Cruikshank will be in Ottawa in front of the committee, experts the minister could well afford to heed. I hope he will would drop the deadline and work out a policy that will leave the west coast with communities as well as with salmon enhancement capabilities. People, after all, are a necessary and important part of the west coast environment as well.

[Railways, May 3rd, 1996]

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

In the government's original offer for the sale of grain hopper cars it said it would consider all proposals put forward for the acquisition of the cars and that the government would take into account the interests of producers, shippers and railways.

Since then the committee was told yesterday that the transport department has already protected the interests of the railways in an agreement signed between the federal government and the railways in 1993, which is said to give the railways not only the right of first refusal in terms of any sale but also a virtual veto over who can get the cars if the railways decide not to exercise that first right.

Can the minister tell the House and the bidders from farmer groups why their bids must be subject to that previously secret arrangement? Will he table the federal government railways operating agreement so everyone can know what the rules really are?

[The Prime Minister, May 3rd, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is blaming the current public awareness of his incompetence on acts of God. I disagree.

It was not an act of God that produced his government's acceptance of NAFTA nor the subsequent problems over the tariffication of supply managed products. It was bad advice and bad decision making.

It was not God that tried to cover up facts in the Somali affair, it was trusted officials. Nor did God start the multimillion dollar lawsuit against a former Prime Minister over Airbus. It was government officials.

God did not tell Public Works to push Anne Rainey off the Peace Tower project because she was a woman, nor did God cause the discrimination against Chander Grover at the NRC. Government officials did and they gave financial backing to the perpetrators of this inequality.

God did not kill the Crow rate, nor the GST promise, nor the day care promise. The government did.

In our system of parliamentary government, the Prime Minister is god. His acts are indeed the problem.

[Fisheries, May 1st, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans regarding his department's massive changes to licensing and the fishing zones of the west coast.

B.C. communities have elected their representatives, raised the money to support them and sent them to Ottawa to get the minister to halt the plan so that improvements can be made to it.

Will he now commit to suspending the May 24 deadline and commit to beginning a serious discussion with representatives of the affected communities who have already been chosen to negotiate effective ways to achieve fish stock enhancement that will also maintain west coast communities?

[Somalia Inquiry, April 16th, 1996]

What about honesty?

[Trade, March 26th, 1996]

Mr. Speaker, my question is for either the minister of trade or the minister of agriculture.

The U.S. has claimed in arguments before the special trade panel now sitting that Canada was fully aware that its conversion of import quotas on supply managed products to tariffs violates the NAFTA, even though tariffication is permitted under the GATT and the World Trade Organization. Canadian officials say there is no evidence of intergovernmental memos on this issue.

Can the minister give his word to the House that there is no documentation of any kind to prove the U.S. assertions, neither from a minister of the crown, past or present, nor from departmental officials, past or present, nor a statement issuing from any department which may jeopardize Canada's position vis-à-vis the U.S. in this dispute?