Gerry Ritz

[Supply, October 25th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I want to make a comment on the member's glowing infomercial on the throne speech.

He talked about the government's commitment to rural communities. Everyone is to have Internet access, technology and all that wonderful stuff. I am wondering how rural families can make use of this technology and all the wonderful things the government is to deliver to them when all these towns end up being ghost towns.

[Canadian Farmers, October 20th, 1999]

The Liberal government has the dubious reputation of throwing taxpayers' money at a problem. What happens if that money misses the target?

The agriculture minister continues to stand in the House and say that farmers are saved by his disastrous AIDA program. What he fails to mention is that fully three-quarters of Saskatchewan farmers, the ones most in need, have not qualified for any money.

In Saskatoon—Rosetown—Biggar the Reform candidate, Jim McAllister, who will soon be joining us here, has raised the issue of escalating farm foreclosures.

The sad reality is that over 1,000 Saskatchewan farmers are faced with losing their land base over the next year. What is the minister's response? His best advice to farmers in peril is to quit and look to the government to retrain them. There is a growing consensus among Saskatchewan farmers that they would best be served by the minister if he followed his own advice and resigned today.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, again we would have to go back to having anything to do with products like MMT based on scientific fact, not on public uproar fueled by all the stakeholders. It has to be a balanced approach. The idea that it can be regulated through CEPA is good. It gives us an avenue we can work through.

As I have indicated, there is a lot we can support in this bill but let us proceed with caution and revisit this as often as we need to in order to make it a better piece of legislation over the years.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it was said earlier, I believe by the member for Churchill River, that this bill is not perfect and we certainly agree with that. As I said in my speech, we will be supporting the bill with caution. We would still like to see some changes. We would like to see further things done. This is an ongoing debate and it will be an ongoing process.

The biggest thing we need to see in any legislation like this is balance. Let us look at what the stakeholders are involved with. We saw that with the economic impact Kyoto had in my part of the country and the uncertainty that it creates for industry and so on. Industry is what creates jobs.

When we talk about environmental impacts we have to look at the economic environment and the impact on that as well. There has to be balance in everything we do. Right now a lot of the chemical companies and so on are almost in limbo waiting to see what is going to happen with this legislation. Certainly they lobbied hard to keep the status quo in some cases.

There are some cases where things need to be changed and others where we need to take a more moderate phase-in approach as the member has said.

All of the actions in the reports must be based on scientific reports, not politics. That is the basis where we are coming from. It has to be a balanced approach.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his clarification. I did say the auto industry was against MMT, not for it, because of the diagnostic problems that would result.

[Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, June 1st, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Surrey Central.

I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak to Bill C-32, an act regarding pollution prevention, protection of the environment and human health in order to contribute to sustainable development in Canada.

Though other concerns have replaced the environment at the top of Canadians' list of issues, I am sure we will all agree that the environment will always be a serious matter across the political spectrum both federally and provincially. Canadians who are unfortunately the most prolific users of water can be called upon to do the right thing to clean up and protect that resource. They look to governments to provide leadership in that area.

Like recycling and conservation efforts in solid waste management, Canadians have shown themselves to be responsible, concerned and enthusiastic. However, I do not think they have much respect for big buck, one size fits all, government imposed solutions that feature the federal government competing against and overriding provincial and local initiatives.

My colleagues in the Reform Party have dispelled the notion that our party does not care about the environment and have made it very clear that successful programs to clean up the environment and keep it that way have to use a balanced approach.

As on so many issues that have a direct impact on the citizens of the country, the idea that one party or philosophy is against and their opposite numbers are for a certain item is simplistic and outdated. There is nobody here in the House or in the country who is for dirty water or dirty air, or somehow in favour of the chemicals in our food and in our soil.

In my corner of the country we struggle daily to grow the best quality food to feed Canadians and the world. We are more than aware that water is a precious resource. We are also aware that many government initiatives meant to clean up or control problems simply end up making things worse or creating new ones. That is why we look at these massive bills and all their amendments very carefully. Quite often it is more important to put the right system in place than to have no system at all.

The title of this bill suggests that all the elements are here to address this issue properly. But titles, like book covers, do not always tell what is inside.

This act is meant to address prevention of pollution and that is a noble effort by all measures. It would make our job so much easier if we had been successful in regulating chemical use in the past. We want to protect the environment and human health which cannot be more important. Then we see a reference to sustainable development which has become a bit of a political football between industry and environmental lobbyists.

To have successful legislation, we believe that all these elements must be included and that they must be addressed in a balanced manner. One way to do this is to ensure that what regulators and industry have at their disposal is good science.

We have seen with the health protection branch that when big money interests combine with butt-covering bureaucracy the result is often the political use of science on a selective basis and the undermining of credibility for the whole process. When we are dealing with chemicals used for industrial and agricultural purposes, we have the potential for the same thing.

With billions of dollars at stake, it is vital that players on both sides and the consumers who have to live with the consequences are confident that the process of identifying, regulating and approving substances be open and accountable. As with the tax system, when producers and consumers lose confidence they resort to avoidance and to reactions that might make problems worse rather than better.

It is no better when we have a powerful lobby on one side or the other. The perception that big industry has government in its pocket is contradicted when environmentalists step up to the plate.

I remember a few years ago when there was a panic in the U.S about the chemical alar. This was sprayed on apples and other orchard fruit to keep them on the branch longer. I am sure the developers of the chemical felt they had a good thing. The fruit would be better developed and more nutritious the longer it grew on the tree.

Nobody sets out to invent a chemical to cause human cancer but before long there were scientific tests that suggested that is what that chemical did. Very quickly there was a panic. Millions of mothers stopped buying apples and a year's crop had to be destroyed at a loss of billions of dollars to the producers. Farmers in the American northwest were devastated and it took years to get their customers back.

What was the so-called scientific basis for this panic? Like saccharin just a few years earlier, doses of alar so high that a child would virtually have to eat the stuff by the plateful were fed to rats until they developed tumours.

Because of a clause inserted in the Environmental Protection Act in the 1950s, any chemical that even hinted that it had anything to do with an illness of any sort had to be banned. It did not matter that the chemical had to be ingested by the truckload, it was just enough that one rat in a hundred seemed to get sick as a result. Saccharin by the way is back on the market, although it will never catch up to some of the other products after its fiasco.

Somebody might say “If it was your kid being saved, you might think it was worthwhile to ban certain chemicals before they got going”. Maybe, if anybody could ever pin down exactly what the relationship was between any one chemical and any given illness or combination of those.

We know that there are tens of thousands of chemicals in the environment. This fact is one reason for updating CEPA through Bill C-32. We should also be aware though that there are millions of natural chemicals everywhere we look. Just because they are from nature does not make them benign.

Tobacco for instance does not contain nicotine for human enjoyment. It is in fact a pesticide produced by the plant itself to ward off certain organisms. Try as we might to tell people of the terrible damage that this chemical and the hundreds of others found in tobacco smoke can do to their health, millions still light up daily. From that billions of dollars go to governments and multinational companies which shows what we are really up against here.

Would it be balanced to simply take the so-called right to smoke away from people? There are plenty of non-smokers who might like to go that route. But prohibition usually leads to increased use rather than the intended results, and governments would be forced to pay for an anti-smoking campaign at the same time as they were missing out on all those excise revenues they have come to enjoy. I am not suggesting that tobacco is a good example for Bill C-32; it is just an example of the jumble of health and economic issues that comes with most human activities.

When we consider what to do about thousands of chemicals, we cannot assume that blanket prohibition based on an agenda driven science and backed by the arbitrary powers of ministerial orders in council will be the answer to environmental problems. We need only look at the recent MMT fiasco to see where this leads.

The auto industry did not want MMT. Some lobby groups did not want MMT. But the producer of that chemical claimed to have extensive evidence that MMT was not the bogeyman it was made out to be. Millions of tax dollars later, the member for Hamilton East has another blunder on her record and the public is no closer to knowing whether or not there is anything wrong with this gasoline additive.

I am sure there are other gas additives out there that deserve closer scrutiny as well. There are environmentalists who would approve of banning the use of gasoline altogether. But unless we line up industry, consumers, scientists and regulators into a co-operative open system of examining chemicals and the processes that they are used in, the system will not work. It will break down.

We may think it is good enough to put arbitrary powers in the hands of a minister, but ministers can be influenced by powerful friends. We may think it is enough to hire scientists to do studies, but we have to be clear about what we are asking our scientists to look for and who is funding those results. We may think it is good enough to shut down agriculture or industry because a few are not being responsible, but the suffering throughout the economy would be enormous.

After Bill C-32 we still have disagreements about who is responsible for what. Industry hates uncertainty, and yes, that is important. Empirical studies indicate economic prosperity leads to a cleaner environment. When there is a profit to invest in better processes, there is less pollution, less waste.

Governments with successful economies can devote more money to infrastructure, like new water treatment plants and water transmission systems that do not leak water at the rates we see in many jurisdictions.

Agriculture and industry need profits to research and develop new products and technologies that will be more efficient. Anyone who thinks profit is a dirty word should think twice about what they are asking Canadian businesses to do or do without. We all want to clean up the environment and we should all have input into how that is done.

My party and I will be voting in favour of Bill C-32 with some caution. The version of the bill that went to committee we feel was on the right track. We want to see an environmental regime that reflects a multiparty approach to environmental issues. Ask all the stakeholders.

We can leave a cleaner country to our grandchildren than the one we inherited but we cannot ignore other responsibilities as well. We have to leave a record of responsible research, a model of intergovernmental co-operation, an economy that provides the greatest good for the greatest number and a tradition of open participation and involvement of all the stakeholders.

[Taxation, May 14th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the taxaholic Liberal government is sitting on a huge surplus. Half of that surplus has been ripped right out of Canadians earning less than $20,000 a year. That is $6 billion a year.

The Liberal government's heartless tax appetite has become a major cause of poverty, killing productivity and driving down our standard of living.

How can the tax rich Liberal government continue taking $6 billion a year from the Canadian working poor?

[Division No. 425, May 13th, 1999]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for clarifying that.

The member for Waterloo—Wellington talked about some of the amendments which redefine spouse, survivor and so on. He indicated that parliament was merely keeping pace with court actions. That was quite a statement. On this side of the House we would call that judicial activism. The government of the day abrogated its responsibilities on politically correct or sensitive issues to the unelected courts. It is back door democracy.

I will refer to some comments made on Tuesday by the member for Mississauga West. At one point he said the $30 billion pension surplus was generated primarily through good management of the pension fund. That is a real oxymoron when it comes to government generated returns on anything.

I wonder how he would define the $13 billion taxpayers had to put into the fund at one point to make up for shortfalls, or the fact that the surplus was the result of a disastrous economic philosophy in the 1980s to fight inflation with high interest rates and wage freezes.

Does he also think it is good management, especially in light of future possibilities of shortfalls or setbacks in financial markets, for his government not only to arbitrarily seize a $30 billion paper surplus but also to have used accounting tricks to date to drain off $10 billion before now?

He claimed yesterday that his government should identify surpluses in each and every plan, in each and every department, supposedly to pay down the debt. We know it will not go there.

There may be merit in doing that, but what is the government doing instead? I direct the member to the budget figures which show a $4 billion overdraft on the spending projections and a debt frozen at $580 billion into the foreseeable future. If the shuffling contingent of Liberal backbenchers from Ontario had any clout or economic sense, they could convince their future leader to freeze spending and actually reduce the debt rather than let it sit there like a leech sucking the lifeblood out of the Canadian taxpayer. It amounts to $42 billion a year in interest payments and it is not going down.

Bill C-78 deals with a very contentious issue for which governments across the country have never shown much enthusiasm. Who owns any pension surplus? Since employers and employees contribute to the original funds it would seem fair to divide it between the two parties somehow. An alternative could be to reduce the contributions and/or raise the benefits, or perhaps arrange for some kind of one time payout to both side, something that is equitable. The federal government says no. It has its hands on the purse strings and claims the spoils for its own purposes, whatever they might be.

Members opposite have tried to question our integrity on this side for not wanting to back the government on this matter, but let us look at what it is really doing. It froze wages for six years so that anybody still in a particular job classification has not had a raise for a while. That depresses the liability for their ultimate pension level.

In 1996 we recognized a growing surplus sitting on the government books, certainly not sitting in a vault somewhere. There is no cash pool somewhere as some would have us believe. The wizards at finance waved their magic pencils and turned red ink to black. Some $10 billion in liability disappeared without debate or vote, or any consultation with the people involved.

Members opposite will rightly give us credit for being in favour of reducing government liabilities, but the way to do it is not in the backroom, without consultation and, worst of all, in a one shot deal which does not get to the root of what is wrong with government, excessive spending.

We see the finance minister raid the so-called EI fund. We see him lay claim to the public pension surplus. We see him prebook future expenses to hide taxpayer surpluses today. That is not the way to balance the books. That is not fair because he will run out of unguarded accounts to claim. Inevitably there will be dips and bumps in the road that will cause our economic performance to fluctuate in the days ahead.

What if the interest rates rise as they seem poised to do in the States? The burden represented by that festering debt will grow in leaps and bounds just when the North American economy slows down, as it surely will. At that point will the Liberals be prepared to give up their support for porno films and kite flying projects?

Even with Bill C-78 on the order paper the finance department projections leave the $580 billion debt untouched. In other words, it has not committed to subtracting this $30 billion windfall. Left as it is, interest payments drain over $40 billion from the government's books every year before it has paid for a single mile of road or another hospital bed that is so badly needed. That is not prudent or responsible. The fundamentals are not right.

Members opposite will claim that the pension surplus will be devoted to debt reduction but we have no assurance of that. We suspect the $30 billion will be used to finance pre-election goodies and canoe museums. The Liberals have to admit their track record would suggest that this is a more likely outcome than debt reduction or that much cried about tax relief.

The opposition parties have put forward over 50 amendments to bring accountability and openness to the process of reforming the public service pension system. Let us be clear on this. The pension system was out of date and the unions and the pensioner associations agreed that something needed to be done. I am sure they can see that it was time public service employees accepted their share in CPP premium increases and re-balanced that proportion between the public pension and the government pension premiums. I understand that the employee representatives also agreed on the mandate for the new pension investment board.

The question before us is not is it good or bad to have a new investment regime for public service pensions or is it good or bad that it should be done by an arm's length investment board. The question before us is simple. Has the government been open and up front about how it has managed the previous system? I do not think so. Has it developed the best possible new system and is it entitled to walk away with $30 billion to squander on programs that it likes? I do not think so and the majority of Canadians agree.

The Reform Party, particularly through the strenuous efforts of the member for St. Albert, has tried to wrestle this massive bill into some sort of responsible direction. Our amendments would bring accountability to the process.

For example, we recommend that the board of directors of the new investment board maintain contact with the actuaries of each fund under their management. It sounds like a simple business procedure. We want appointments to the board as well as those to the investment committees to be tabled in the House. We want to delete the clauses which allow the government to make off with the surplus in the first place. We also want a separate act to set the contribution rate for the RCMP superannuation fund, not have it determined behind closed doors.

We also have a problem with the vague and unnecessary interference with personal relationships. A number of amendments in Group No. 2 refer to the problems that will arise as this government fumbles its way toward accommodating special interest lobbies.

The Liberals have attempted to socially engineer the public service pension system by introducing the vacuous term, survivor, 249 times in this bill. They also introduced the qualification, relationship of a conjugal nature, to modestly describe same sex partnerships. Who will keep score? How will we stay on top of that? Or at least that is what we are left to assume. The terminology is vague and will no doubt open up a whole new can of worms when some other groups decide they have been left out.

It has been estimated that the cost of recognizing same sex partners in Bill C-78 will be quite small, but this is not the issue. If the government wants back into the bedrooms of the nation that it supposedly vacated 20 years ago under Prime Minister Trudeau, then it should bring the issue to the floor of this House, not the courts. It should offer genuine and open debate and create legislation that addresses what needs addressing, not drop confusing hints and ambiguous references in this omnibus legislation.

The Reform Party recommends the surplus be left where it is to smooth the transition to a new and better administered pension system than we presently have. We are in favour of reduced government liabilities and better returns for our Canadian pensioners, but we cannot support slippery, open-ended and underhanded methods of financing re-election campaigns that we see in this bill.

As my colleague from Medicine Hat has said in the past on the EI grab, why does the finance minister not just leave the money where it is, put his hands where we can see them and back away slowly?

[Division No. 425, May 13th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to reiterate some of the points my colleague from Sackville—Musquodoboit Valley—Eastern Shore made so well in the last few minutes.

I thank the Liberals for giving me the opportunity to say a few words today about Bill C-78. Without their dedication to limiting democracy we might even have a few more words to say. This is about 50-plus times we have seen closure in the House. It makes us wonder about the capitulated democracy which was talked about earlier.

This morning we saw a bit of tinkering with some very good amendments that needed to come forward. We heard quotes from the member for Waterloo—Wellington and his quote was—

[Taxation, May 11th, 1999]

Mr. Speaker, the finance minister has record surpluses because 2.5 million taxpayers have been pushed into higher tax brackets and 840,000 low income families have been dragged onto the tax roles with bracket creep.

Is this the finance minister's answer to brain drain; tax until they cannot afford to leave?