Bill C-5 (Historical)

Species at Risk Act

An Act respecting the protection of wildlife species at risk in Canada

Committee Business and Reinstatement of Government Bills

[Garry Breitkreuz, Canadian Alliance, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure to take this opportunity at the beginning of this new session to raise some of the issues that concern us, especially with regard to the topic at hand here.

The whole effect of prorogation is to quash all the business that was on the order paper. The purpose is to start anew with a fresh agenda to inspire and lead Canadians for the rest of the government's mandate.

What have we done at the beginning of this second session instead? Nothing. It is not new, it is not inspiring and that is the essence of the debate that we have here. What we have is an old, tired Prime Minister with a self-serving agenda, leading a caucus of members who are fed up with his leadership. The Liberal leader in waiting, the member for LaSalle--Émard, is not getting any younger himself and everyone over there is becoming impatient. Those are the dynamics the Canadian public might as well know.

Compounding this whole mood of discontent, the Prime Minister is proposing a throne speech made up of worn out promises with a few new promises ready to be broken. To make things even worse, the government has introduced a motion that gives it authority to reinstate bills from the last session. Included in that list of bills is Bill C-5, the species at risk bill, and Bill C-15B, the cruelty to animals bill. If reinstated, both of these bills will bypass the Commons and go straight to the Senate.

Those two bills represent the Liberal government's esteemed legislative and political attack on the lives and livelihoods of rural Canadians and the communities where they live.

The Prime Minister has to learn that he cannot make travel plans for every member and every region of the country by using the map of Toronto. He will get lost just like he did with the gun registry.

I would like to talk a little bit about Bill C-15B and Bill C-5. I would like to start with Bill C-5. This would have a very negative impact on agricultural producers. They were hoping that when this session ended these flawed and misguided bills would be dead. Now, with the debate we are having here this evening and the vote that will take place in probably an hour, they will all be back on the agenda and the nightmare that agriculture producers were undergoing will come back.

With the species at risk bill back, the government has not looked into the social and economic impact of this bill on Canadians. What kind of costs are we going to see from this bill? The minister says that it will cost more than $45 million. Is he sure? Has he taken into account the cost of enforcement and the costs that will be placed on the industry and property users? He has stated in committee that the legislation is open-ended in terms of what it will cost property owners.

I have stated in the House before that compensation must be made available to property owners who lose their land due to the bill. It is imperative that in order to alleviate the social and economic costs of the bill adequate compensation must be made. As the bill currently stands, it preserves the minister's right, his discretionary power, to decide who gets compensation and how much compensation. He decides whether provincial laws are effective or not. It gives him power to impose federal laws on provincial jurisdictions. This power in the hands of one person totally eliminates any transparency in the bill. That is why this omnibus bill should not just point blank reinstate all of this legislation. One of the reasons is Bill C-5.

The other bill that I want to briefly touch on is Bill C-15B, the cruelty to animals bill. It is even more hideous. The bill as it currently stands is much too vague. It is too broad. It shows a hidden agenda put forward by animal rights activists. If we take a close look at the bill, the main thrust of this was to increase penalties to those who abuse and neglect animals. However the bill has become a broad net, going away from its original intent to moving toward a redefinition of “animals” in our Criminal Code. As the bill reads right now is so unclear that animal rights activists will use it as a tool to destroy the livelihood of thousands of agricultural producers.

We must ensure that there are three clear changes to this bill. We must maintain the status of animals as property under the Criminal Code. The ownership of animals is the fundamental principle of Canada's agricultural industry. A farmer's legal right to use animals to produce food comes from his right to own these animals. Moving animals out of the property area would cause farmers to be under an unfair risk of prosecution. I wish the government was listening. These are key concerns and the bill should not be included in this omnibus motion to reinstate all of the bills.

It would be to the great joy of animal rights activists if the bill is passed. They want to test this new law in the courts because a farmer would have to reconcile his own right to own animals with the new status of animals under this code. Farmers are not able to defend themselves against these large multinational animal rights groups. The bill itself infringes on civil liberties, the most important being the ownership and enjoyment of property.

The bill, along with Bill C-5, should not be included in all the bills that are being reinstated. Bill C-15B is the single largest threat to agriculture producers and to their way of life.

I would like to point out that the definition of an animal in Bill C-15B is much too broad. A vertebrate other than a human that can feel pain would subject farmers to long legal litigation, causing a judge of the Canadian courts to deem whether an animal can feel pain or not. This definition does not further the original intent of the legislation to increase penalties for those who abuse or neglect animals. We supported that basic aim but the bill has gone way beyond that and is not acceptable in its present form. No one is more concerned about the welfare of animals than those who work with them every day. I will leave those two bills at this time and I hope the government will seriously concern itself with what farmers are worried about.

With respect to reinstating any unfinished business from the last session, I would like the government to reconsider its resistance to implementing one of its own policies, the policy to appoint an independent ethics counsellor who reports directly to Parliament.

Members will recall that in the last session of Parliament the Canadian Alliance introduced a motion that lifted that promise word for word from the Liberal red book. The government voted against it. Believe it or not, the government voted against it and took away the opportunity to carry through on that promise in the first session.

One Liberal member who must have been uncomfortable voting that motion down was the former finance minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard. He was one of the principal authors of Liberal red book one, introduced in 1993. That red book contained that promise. What must be even more embarrassing for him is to have that on his record at a time he is promoting parliamentary reform. That member has quite a parliamentary reform record. He is not a young man and perhaps his memory is becoming faulty.

I do not know if members recall the program Dallas , when Pam Ewing woke up beside Bobby Ewing and everything from the last season, including Bobby's death, turned out to be only a dream.

Our former finance minister is hoping for the same second season. Instead of Pam Ewing waking up, the member for LaSalle—Émard wakes up, it is the 1990s, he is nine years younger and there is no government record to taint his reputation. All of the corruption and internal strife attributed to too much pizza before bedtime.

Mulroney is still the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party has not yet broken its promise to scrap the much hated GST. As he rubs the sleep from his eyes he slowly realizes that his record has been expunged. The unpleasantness is trapped in a moment of rapid eye movement. There is no record of him voting against a motion to appoint an independent ethics counsellor who reports directly to Parliament.

He is pleased to discover that it was only a dream that he supported a record 78 closure motions, many of which were used to prematurely close off debate on finance bills when he was finance minister. He sighs a sigh of relief to discover that the rat pack is still jumping over tables and screaming at former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney with righteous indignation.

While this is truly a nightmare, it is no dream. The member for LaSalle—Émard cannot wipe out his parliamentary record and that of his government. He cannot pretend that the first session of the 37th Parliament and the sessions of the 36th and 35th Parliaments were only a dream. As much as he would like, he cannot rewrite the script like it was done on Dallas .

Let us turn to some business from the last session that I would be happy to reinstate. There is the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs which I worked on intensively, proposing that all private members' business be made votable. This is not a government initiative but a battle fought and won by private members.

The proposal to provide for all private members' business to be votable was part of our reform initiative at the beginning of the 35th Parliament, the 36th Parliament and from the first session of this Parliament. In the first session, the Canadian Alliance introduced “Building Trust: A plan to make Parliament more responsive to Canadians”. As we face the second session, we have offered an updated version of “Building Trust”, “Building Trust II--Making Parliament More Responsive to Canadians”, which represents our ongoing commitment to make Parliament more responsive to Canadians.

The purpose of “Building Trust” was to propose modest parliamentary reforms that the government might accept with the aim to restore some of the procedural ground that private members have lost over the years to the executive branch of government.

The government's powers are sweeping and if members are to provide the necessary checks and balances they must be accorded certain rights. While we convinced the government to accept a number of proposals from “Building Trust”, we ran out of time to convince it to implement the remainder. “Building Trust II” carries over a number of proposals from “Building Trust” and introduces new initiatives that we trust can realistically be accomplished in the 37th Parliament.

The motion the government has put forward establishing a procedure for government bills to be reinstated should be defeated. What we would like to see reinstated is a commitment to reform private members' business. Canadians would be much better off if a lot of these bills from the last session remained but a memory. Generally the government would want to forget everything that happened in the first session and not try to relive that nightmare.

Did I inform you, Mr. Speaker, that I will be splitting my time?

[Rahim Jaffer, Canadian Alliance, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand in this place today to speak on the motions we are dealing with on reinstating bills, but I would like to start by addressing some of the points that were made by the hon. Secretary of State for Amateur Sport. I noticed how passionate he was when he spoke about Bill C-54, one of his bills. I know that he is a great fan of sports so I hope he will, and I encourage him to, come out and join us when, as he may know, our MPs' soccer team will be playing Wednesday night against the EU All-Stars. We are called the Commoners. Knowing how passionate he is about sport, I know he will be there ready to kick some balls, if you know what I mean, Mr. Speaker. I am sure he will join us on Wednesday and I encourage him to do so.

Now I want to make a point that he seemed to miss in his speech. When he talked about the opposition being against reinstating the bills we are talking about, he seemed to miss the point. On this side we encourage the work done in the previous session. We do not want to stop it or thwart it unnecessarily. We want to get back to business right away. What the hon. minister forgot to mention was that the two bills we do have problems with are Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B. The other bills that we want to reinstate right away and get right into the business of debating are, obviously, Bills C-53, C-55, C-54, C-56, C-60 and C-61. We would like to see all these bills from the previous session of Parliament reinstated. We would like to get back to business but the Secretary of State for Amateur Sport failed to mention that and focused specifically on Bill C-54, the bill in which he is so interested.

Today in debating Motions 2A and 2B, we are suggesting that we in the opposition have a serious problem when it comes to Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B of the previous session of Parliament. It is clear from what we have heard from a number of members why we have a problem with those two particular bills and why we introduced this amendment so that those bills would be left out of mix. That is because of the way those two bills evolved in this place and specifically because of the way the government dealt with talking to stakeholders in trying to build consensus. The government just refused to bring stakeholders together. It refused to listen to the people who would be most affected by these two particular bills.

I will focus on Bill C-5. The stakeholders, especially the agriculturalists, the ranchers, the farmers and all these particular groups, had huge concerns with Bill C-5. In fact, the government failed to listen to them properly and equally and give them representation leading into Bill C-5 and in passing the bill as we were reaching the final stages of it.

Some of my colleagues, in discussing the problems we had with Bill C-5, focused particularly on the issue of compensation. The Secretary of State for Amateur Sport said he did not see a problem between the ideas of compensation and fair market value or with the fact that compensation would be given at the discretion of the government any way it sees fit. There would not be a real equation or plan put together. It would be left to the government to decide what is fair compensation is, while it is not actually willing to commit to fair market compensation.

I was surprised. He said he was a lawyer and that he advised his clients. I am glad I never went to him for advice, because the biggest problem with Bill C-5 is the idea that many of the people involved, their livelihoods, their farms, their ranches or whatever it might be, are afraid to commit. As much as they are environmentalists and stewards of land and take on voluntary efforts to protect their land and inhabitants of the land, they want to make sure that they are compensated fairly if the government decides to expropriate their land, for whatever reason, whether it is for protecting habitat, protecting endangered species, whatever the case that is made to take the land away from people who rely on it.

Is that too much to ask? I think that in a free and democratic society it is only a fair demand to have free and fair compensation based on market value. I am still astounded to this day as to why the government is so afraid to make that sort of commitment to the people who in the end are going to do the most good in protecting the environment. This is just something that is beyond me, but let us face it, the government has done a lot of things that are beyond me and beyond Canadians many times over, so it is no real surprise.

My colleague who just spoke talked about the government's attitude in dealing with bills like Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B. We saw it most recently with its attitude on Kyoto. The government does not want to bring stakeholders together. It does not want to try to build a consensus. It has an attitude of divide and conquer, as I believe my colleague mentioned.

What are we doing in this country if that is the way we are going to approach Canadians and build consensus? Are we going to divide and conquer? That seems like we would be pushing people in different parts of the country further apart instead of trying to bring them together.

The government had an opportunity to show some leadership on Bill C-15B and Bill C-5 by trying to bring together all of those stakeholders I mentioned earlier, the people who live off and work the land, the environmentalists, the ranchers, and the people who have long-term leases doing natural resource work for their businesses. All of these groups could have been brought together if the idea of compensation had been addressed properly.

This same pattern the government shows is being unveiled in its whole plan for Kyoto. There is only one way to describe it: either we are for the environment or we are against it. There is no in-between. This boggles my mind. Clearly we have the opportunity under Kyoto, at least if we look at it properly, to look away from what has been done under Kyoto and to try to bring all stakeholders together for the environment. If cleaner air is what we are actually trying to achieve, then we have to do it by bringing people together. I am speaking of those people who are involved in the natural resource industries, oil and gas and all types of industry that deal with the production of fossil fuels whatever they might be. We need to bring them together through technological advances to be able to solve the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and try to clean up the environment. We should not cut them out or restrict production. We do not need the types of solutions the government has by not bringing people together. It seems that we actually are going to go backwards if we try to go down the road of Kyoto.

That is why I am saying here today that we have seen this constant pattern. One would think the government would have learned in the past session of Parliament with the type of opposition it had, especially under Bill C-5, from all the different groups that put a lot of work into that bill to try to convince the government that compensation was a big part of something the government is missing and a big part of why people would oppose that legislation. Yet the government refuses to acknowledge that. If the government goes down the road of Kyoto it is going to suffer the same fate. We are going to be dividing people. They are not going to be working in the best interests of the environment. They are going to be looking out for themselves, because the government refuses to take in other socio-economic factors when it makes a decision. It is a real shame that the government has that sort of attitude.

I know I have digressed a bit because Kyoto is a big concern for a lot of Canadians as we lead into this Parliament, but to go back to Bill C-5, there are a few different provisions that we had addressed in Bill C-5 when the bill was going through the House. One of the things I talked about was compensation. Clearly this is something that the government can still amend and improve before the bill comes back to the House if that is what the government decides to do.

Particularly in dealing with Bill C-5, the idea of criminal liability was another issue that many farmers were afraid of, especially ranchers and farmers who deal with the land. If unfortunately by accident a habitat or an endangered species were destroyed unintentionally, under the bill these people could be penalized under the highest type of criminal penalties that sometimes do not take into consideration harm incurred by accident. This was a big fear among many farmers and ranchers. Those accidents may occur. Are we going to penalize those individuals to the highest levels and actually prosecute them criminally? That seems to be a bit outrageous.

Overall the other thing we missed out on with Bill C-5, which the government has continuously failed to deal with and continues to fail to do as we head down the road of Kyoto and other issues like health care, is trying to work with the provinces to develop a sense of cooperation. Let us face it. For a lot of the things we do and decide here, the provinces are given the responsibility to administer them. Unless we are bringing them on board with some of these bigger issues, we are not going to have the success rates that we would like to see. I wish the government would start to take into consideration provincial responsibilities and work in a more cooperative spirit with the provinces, but let us face it: The divide and conquer attitude of the government is something we are going to see continuously and it is going to fail Canadians over and over again.

We wish we could see more leadership but that will not be coming from that side. I will not hold my breath because I would probably expire if I waited for those things.

[David Anderson, Canadian Alliance, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Edmonton--Strathcona. We are back again and it reminded me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I have a quick response to a couple of things that the previous member had to say. I found it interesting that he would be concerned about the expense that it would cost to bring a bill back to the House. We have heard regularly that the government has no qualms about spending a lot of money on its friends, contracts for friends and neighbours.

It spent $100 million on jets out of the blue that it was told it did not need. The bureaucrats told it that it should not be buying them. It went ahead and bought them anyway. The member talks about the expense of bringing one bill back to the House and how it is such a tremendous concern to him. I hope he takes that concern with him to the caucus meetings on Wednesday and mentions to members of his caucus that it is an important thing that they manage their money well.

If the government could do business competently and in a proper way, we would not be here today discussing this issue. If these bills were important, they would have been passed in the last session. We would not have had the prorogation to get the attention of the media back to the Prime Minister and his legacy.

There are two bills today that I want to talk about that we find particularly onerous. They are Bill C-15 and Bill C-5.

The first one is Bill C-5, the species at risk bill. We have talked a lot about the bill in the House before. It is going to be a complete and total failure. I want to talk about a couple of the reasons why the bill should be allowed to die.

First, there is no faith in the bill at all. How many times has this legislation come back to the House? Three or four times. Why not let the bill die? We can do it one more time and this time we will do it right. If the government would take the opposition's amendments seriously, we could create a bill that would be good for landowners, for the environment and the environmentalists. The only one that it might not be good for would be the minister because he would have to admit that he has made a tremendous mistake in his presentation of Bill C-5.

This bill was brought to committee. It had 127-odd witnesses. The committee made 300 amendments to the bill and sent it back to the minister. He gutted it and sent it back to the House. Basically all the time and effort that the committee had put into the bill was irrelevant. Who can treat it seriously other than the minister in charge of the bill?

Second, the bill has no fundamentals that would make it work. It assumes that government knows best. There are a lot of us who believe that government is more part of the problem than it is part of the solution to the environmental problems that we have. It assumes, and I really take offence to this, is that rural people are a negative, evil influence in the environment. That is an insult and hard to comprehend. It bothers those of us who have a rural background or come from rural areas.

Finally, it assumes that local people, unless they are aboriginal, should not have a say in environmental legislation that touches their part of the world. This puzzled me the most when I read the legislation. What is it that the government is afraid of that local people could bring to the bill that it does not want in it? The cost to local people has not been considered.

The basis of all legislation is that we are trying to make a change in a particular area. One of the things we need to look at is how it would affect the people in that area and how it would affect the places that it impacts. Is it not reasonable to expect that a bill would address the socioeconomic impact before it is made law? This legislation does not do that.

We tried to bring in some amendments that would address that. The government refused to pass them. Why was that? Why did the government refuse to pass those amendments? I have one answer to that. It is because it did not have a clue how much the bill would cost Canadians. I have some evidence to back that up. The minister had an information supplement put out about a year ago. He wrote:

Environment Canada is aware that compensation for restrictions on the use of land is a complex issue that requires careful consideration and innovative thinking. We will need several years of practical experience in implementing the stewardship and recovery provisions of the Species at Risk Act (SARA) before we can be precise in prescribing eligibility and thresholds for compensation.

In other words, we will experiment on Canadians and Canadian business, but we do not have a clue as to what it would cost. The minister admitted that in October of last year when he said:

We then got deeper and deeper into this and it became more and more of the proverbial swamp, more and more difficult to do partly because, of course, governments should not pass legislation which is open-ended in terms of funding. We have fiscal responsibilities which, as you can well imagine, are fairly strict on us. Forty-five million a year is what we've been given to run the process and that's what we can expect and that's it.

The minister was admitting that he does not know the cost, that he does not know the implications. He is pretty sure it will be more than $45 million a year, but how much more? We have no way of knowing. He has produced no studies. He has not given us idea of what that cost would be. The minister will not pay for it, but he has no problems with other people absorbing the cost.

An even a bigger concern than this is a letter that was sent from Minister of Fisheries and Oceans which really is unbelievable. It was sent to the member for Wascana, who at the time was the chair of the Cabinet Committee for the Economic Union. The fisheries minister stated in his letter:

On the issue of compensation, I join others who may be concerned about both the precedent-setting nature of the legislation, and the potential costs of providing it. Removing compensation from C-5 altogether would be the ideal case from my point of view--

We begin to see that the government has no interest in providing compensation to people. He continued:

--but this is unlikely given the expectations of resource users. The proposed approach that would see compensation provided on a case by case basis, without a detailed policy or regulatory regime, restricts application of compensation provisions to the minimum and is acceptable to me--

That sounds almost like one could give one's friends more money than one's enemies, does it not? There is really nothing in there to give any consistency to the application of the legislation.

I would like to address one of the other issues that the last government member spoke about. That is the fact that there is no compensation in this legislation. He left the impression, as other government members have, that there is compensation in the bill. Actually all the bill does is require the government to set up regulations about compensation. The bill does not require the government to provide it in any way.

We heard many times from members on the government side that they had concerns with this. The chair of the rural caucus, for example, the member for Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, said that he had problems with this, but when it came time to vote he was only too happy to vote along with his colleagues, the other rural Liberal MPs, and support the government. The government promised compensation. The members were saying that it was going to supply it, but it failed to provide it and we have not heard anything from them since.

Hopefully this will be one last chance. Maybe they will take up the issue and put compensation in the bill where it should be. I doubt that will happen but we challenge them to do that. This legislation could have had a very positive impact. The government has not considered that at all.

The biggest concern I have about the legislation in Bill C-15B is that it continues this government's way of fracturing our country and our people. The government's ongoing attempts to fracture the country are shown in a number of areas. It has gone on for many years. We have seen it over the multiculturalism policies that it has pursued. We have seen it in the bilingualism issue. The government pursued that and now has revived it. It is determined to make that an issue again within the country after so many of us had thought that we had reached a resolution on it and a solution that people were satisfied with.

The government has been notorious for trying to divide and conquer. It has happened in many different areas, in things like subsidizing favoured industries and not others. Bill C-68 was mentioned earlier. It has been an extremely divisive bill, a piece of legislation that the government will not revoke. The species at risk act is another one of those examples. Kyoto is going to be another example that will divide the country in half. I challenge the government. I would like to know: Has it done any studies on the impact of Kyoto and agriculture? We do not believe it has. We would like to see it do that before it steps forward and ratifies this protocol.

The agricultural policy framework is another agricultural-rural initiative that has been developed basically in secret. It left farmers, particularly western farmers, out in the cold. The Canadian Wheat Board is another issue. We have some farmers who are actually going to jail in less than three weeks because they dared to take one bushel of wheat across the border and donate it to a 4-H club. The government is going to lock them up for from 25 to 125 days. It is ridiculous. It is happening in this country. It is the fault of the government. It can fix this. It can change this but it is not willing to.

The government has deliberately pitted rural Canada against the rest of the country. The legislation that we heard about, Bill C-15B in particular but also Bill C-5, only benefits a certain number of people: special interest groups, consultants and lawyers, not people who are primarily involved with rural issues and/or with animal rights. This is coercive legislation that has been forced on Canadians. I am challenging the rural caucus members in the Liberal government to stand up and show a little bit of backbone this time around. They have one last chance to stop the legislation, to make it into decent legislation. I would encourage and challenge them to do that. I guess my expectations are not very high but hopefully they will take up that challenge and do the right thing.

[Paul Devillers, Liberal, Secretary of State (Amateur Sport) and Deputy Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, it is indeed a pleasure for me to take part in the debate to reinstate some of the bills the House of Commons had been working on through its committees, et cetera, prior to prorogation and the start of the new session of Parliament.

We have had the Speech from the Throne. There were many new initiatives outlined in the throne speech. There was also a lot of work that had been done in the previous session on many important bills. The government thinks it is very important that the work not be lost.

In times when Canadian taxpayers are being asked to be prudent, certainly it is an opportunity for Parliament to behave that way. It is somewhat disappointing but not surprising that we were not able to obtain consent from all parties in the House to reintroduce and reinstate certain bills at the stage they were at at the time of prorogation.

In particular, we have been hearing comments today from members of the Canadian Alliance dealing with Bill C-5, the species at risk bill. I believe from their comments today it is the one that has caused them to withhold their consent. They want changes to that bill.

From what I have heard of the debate, there seems to be an issue around the definition of compensation that would be paid to landowners who would lose land or would have restrictions placed on their land in consequence of the bill. The dispute is over whether that is described as reasonable compensation or whether it is called fair market value.

Prior to entering politics, I practised law for 22 years. I did quite a bit of real estate and real property law. The argument being put forward by the Canadian Alliance is that fair market value is a much more precise term than is the reasonable compensation that is in the bill.

Frankly, from my experience, fair market value can vary significantly from appraiser to appraiser. When I was trying to be flippant with my clients, my definition of fair market value was what some sucker was willing to pay. A person could have many qualified appraisers with all the initials behind their names say that a piece of property was worth a certain amount of money, but if there was not a willing purchaser at the time when the vendor wanted to sell, the vendor would not fetch that price.

I have to admit I am a little confused over the reluctance of the members but perhaps there are other agendas at play. I know in this place it is considered bad form to impute motive to hon. members, but it seems that the reference to Bill C-68 and gun control does come up quite a bit in the discussions around Bill C-5.

I would like to concentrate my remarks this evening on one of the other bills that is subject to the motion. The bill would be reinstated at the Senate. The bill had passed the House of Commons prior to the adjournment in June. I am referring to Bill C-54, the physical activity and sport bill which I had the privilege of introducing.

Bill C-54 had received all party consent. No party had voted against the bill at third reading in June. Bill C-54 had gone through committee stage. Considerable work was done on the bill. My friend from Bras d'Or—Cape Breton was one of the members of the committee who did stellar work in getting that bill through the committee.

We also made significant amendments to Bill C-54 at committee stage, following the concerns voiced by the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Bloc Quebecois and our own caucus regarding the bill.

We made changes to ensure that services in our sports system are available in both official languages. If this motion does not get the support of the House this evening, all this work will have be for nothing, and this is definitely something that we are trying to avoid.

Getting back to some of the particulars of Bill C-54, it replaces the Fitness and Amateur Sport Act, legislation which was passed in 1961. Our new physical activity and sport bill is a modernization of our entire sports system. By changing the title to physical activity we are describing the work that it takes to become fit. We previously referred to fitness, which was the result of physical activity. By changing the wording from amateur sport to sport, we are reflecting the realities of our present system.

As members know, there are professionals at the Olympic Games. The NHL players who were in Salt Lake City and who won the gold medal are actually professionals.

Many of our athletes in Canada do not play in professional leagues, but they have contracts and sponsors. A number of them earn a fair bit of money but, technically speaking, they qualify as amateurs. The reality is such that we can no longer refer to amateur sport or professional sport. We simply refer to sport, and this is one of the goals of this new bill.

Bill C-54 on physical activity and sport was brought in after extensive consultations. Meetings and consultations were held regionally throughout the country and culminated in a summit on sport that was held here in Ottawa over which the Prime Minister presided. As a result of that consultation we ended up with a new Canadian sport policy that was endorsed by all 14 jurisdictions in the country.

The provinces, territories and the Government of Canada all endorsed the new Canadian sports policy. For the first time we now have one sports policy from coast to coast to coast in all jurisdictions. It is that policy we are entrenching in legislation with Bill C-54, this very important bill that we are trying to get brought back at the stage it was at prior to prorogation, which was after third reading. It had finished in the House of Commons and was in the Senate.

The Canadian sports policy entrenched in the bill has four pillars. One is the pursuit of excellence by improving our results in high performance sports. Another is increased participation. That is where we get to the physical activity side of it. By having a more physically active population we are sure to have a more healthy population. Obviously, there would be savings that we would obtain in future health care costs by having a very active and healthier population. The other two remaining principles in the policy entrenched in the bill are building capacity in our sports system and improving interaction among the partners in our Canadian sports system.

We have the support of all levels, the provinces, the territories, the municipalities and the federal government. We have the support of sports organizations, the national sports organizations and provincial sports organizations. We have the support of the volunteers. Our entire sports system operates primarily on a volunteer basis.

Volunteers do most of the work in our sports system here in Canada. They are truly partners, and we must ensure that they remain involved. There are also the athletes for whom our system is designed.

Last April, when we welcomed to Parliament Hill the Salt Lake City Olympic and Paralympic medallists, I pointed out in my comments that without athletes, there would be no sports system, no national organizations and no Secretary of State for Amateur Sport.

Our sports system depends on our athletes, and we must work together with all our partners.

There is the involvement of schools. I had occasion last Friday to be in Banff to meet and speak with the Canadian School Sports Federation which is the national organization of sports in our school system. It is an important partner. These are the teachers, volunteers and coaches who are involved with our young people in the high school sport system that will lead them to some of our national provincial teams and to other developments.

That is a significant portion of our Canadian sports system at the development stage where students from our high schools are exposed and coached in the relevant sports. The federation is an important partner in our entire sports system. It is looking for recognition and it is something we need to take into account. We need to consult with the Canadian School Sports Federation when we are looking at policy and sports policy in our system.

There is also in the Canadian sports policy the provision to ensure that underrepresented groups become more represented in our Canadian sports system. The groups identified were: aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities, visible minorities and women. In the case of women, I had the privilege last week to launch the Women's History Month along with my colleague, the secretary of state responsible for women's issues. This year the theme of Women's History Month is “Women in sports”. I was in Montreal, she was in London, and we were able to launch it in the high schools, along with the ESTEEM team which is a group of former athletes who speak to students and encourage them to become involved in athletics to develop the personal esteem that they will need to perform well.

This is all part of the Canadian sports policy that is being entrenched and is for the benefit of my friend who is asking what is the relevance to the motion that we are debating. We would lose the time put into the bill if we are not able to get this motion to reintroduce it at the present stage in the Senate.

If we are able to get this motion, we will be able to carry on with the bill at this stage and all of that time and effort would be saved.

That is why I find it very important. Our colleagues across the way do not seem to understand what we are trying to accomplish here. They want to continue the old fight about former Bill C-15B, and they are not going to give up easily.

We on this side, however, believe it is very important to continue trying to build on the work already done and the expenses already incurred in considering these bills.

Many of these bills are important. I go back to my concern about the time that would be lost and the expense if we had to start over on Bill C-54. Again, there are provisions in that bill that are relevant and significant, and that we need to get into place sooner rather than later.

This weekend I was in Vancouver speaking at a seminar put on by PacificSport Group, which is a coalition of the national sports centres in Vancouver and Victoria and the British Columbia provincial sports centres. PacificSport Group puts on a series of seminars for young, developing athletes and their parents to teach them about some of the processes within our Canadian sports system, which they will need to take advantage of the entire system. Bill C-54 deals with that and would set up the framework for that important work from which these young developing athletes would benefit to develop into some of the world class athletes that we are all so proud of in this country.

We cannot just support them every four years when the Olympics are taking place, we see our flag being raised and O Canada is being sung. We must be prepared to step up and support these developing athletes all the time, between Olympic games. That is what Bill C-54 would help do. It would provide the framework that would let us do that.

We must also be prepared to step up to the plate with our partners in the private sector and in the provinces, and commit the necessary resources. From the work that I have been doing in the short time that I have been in the position of Secretary of State responsible for Amateur Sport I have seen a fairly healthy appetite within the Canadian population to step forward and be prepared to dedicate more resources to our athletes.

It is very important to be there for our athletes. We can best support them by voting in favour of the motion before the House this evening. This is a motion to reintroduce bills, and Bill C-54 in particular, at the same stage they were at before prorogation, which would mean it would be referred immediately to the Senate.

For these reasons, we seek the support of all members of the House for this motion.

[Monte Solberg, Canadian Alliance, Medicine Hat, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today to address Motions Nos. 2A and 2B, which really are motions to reinstate legislation that died with the prorogation of parliament.

I want to start by talking about how in my judgment this contradicts something that members on the government side have been talking about in the last while, which is the issue of the democratic deficit.

This is an omnibus motion. I have heard the government House leader say that it is not an omnibus motion. The reason that is important, for people who do not understand, is that an omnibus motion or bill just piles a bunch of different ideas into it. It makes it very hard to vote for or against it because one might be in favour of some things or opposed to other things. Many parliamentarians regard an omnibus bill or motion as anti-democratic. Certainly we do. In this case that is precisely the situation.

There are some things in Motions Nos. 2A and Motions Nos. 2B that we can live with and other things to which we say no. They are completely contrary to what we believe in and what our constituents believe in. We also believe that there are some bills in Motions Nos. 2A and Motions Nos. 2B that still have not received scrutiny, and the government has not done a good job of listening to people. I will say a little more about that in a moment.

We are also opposed to Motions Nos. 2A and Motions Nos. 2B because the government is invoking closure. There is no method more anti-democratic to ram through legislation than to use closure. The would-be prime minister, the member for LaSalle--Émard, talked about the democratic deficit. I will be interested to see where he votes on all this legislation. I do not recall him voting on the closure motion today and that is not surprising. I am sure he probably would not have the courage to stand and vote against a closure motion, even though that is what is required if we are going to bring about some change in this place, but he did not do that. We are opposed to it on those grounds.

Finally, we are opposMotions Nos. ed to Motions Nos. 2A and 2B on the grounds that when a government brings in a throne speech, it wants all the benefits that come with a throne speech. It wants all the hype in the media and all the attention when it says that it has a new agenda and it will wipe the slate clean. However it also wants to have it the other way. It wants to bring back all the old stuff too. The reason there is a tradition of wiping the slate clean is because it is a bit of a democratic safeguard. If it has taken months, nay years in some cases, to bring legislation through, maybe that is a sign that the legislation should not come through. Maybe there is enough opposition in the public that that legislation should just die.

A good example is Bill C-5. Bill C-5 is endangered species legislation. Everybody in the House supports the idea of protecting endangered species. No one debates that. Of course we want to save endangered species. We live in a country that is environmentally sensitive. Many of us live in rural areas. We enjoy the environment. Certainly a lot of us in our party come from rural parties where we have the benefit of seeing the animals, sometimes in our yards and around our ridings, on a very frequent basis and we enjoy that. It is one of the great benefits of serving a rural riding. We are happy to support legislation that protects endangered species, however we also want legislation that is balanced, and balanced in this sense. We want legislation that if it is going to set aside lands that endangered species occupy and these lands belong to private landowners, then we would expect that in the course of ensuring natural justice that those landowners would receive fair market compensation, fair market value for the land that is taken away from them.

I cannot emphasize that enough, at a time when in agricultural areas of the country people are really struggling. In my riding we have had a drought for the last number of years. This year we have had a pretty moist year and things are looking good. Now we have the other problem. Now we cannot get the crops off. We have rain like crazy. I just talked to home not very long ago. It is raining and we have lots of valuable hay laying out in the fields turning black. We have all kinds of crops that we cannot take off.

I was talking to some people on Sunday morning. Believe it or not, in my part of the world, we actually have some areas that are very high in altitude. My part is a very flat. However if one goes up into the Cypress Hills, it is the highest point east of the Rockies. They had eight inches of snow up there. They had to bring the cattle in out of the pasture there was so much snow.

The point is that we have weather problems that are hurting agriculture right now, combined with the government's inability to really address agriculture in a meaningful way, and I will say more about that in a moment, and insensitive pieces of legislation, like Bill C-5, where the government does not recognize that farmers need to have fair market value if their land is taken out of production.

In our part of the world we have burrowing owls. If people have burrowing owl colonies on their property, they can occupy a lot of acres. It is possible that taking those acres out of production and not providing fair market value to compensate the farmer or rancher could mean the difference between them holding on. We have to be sensitive to that.

What does the government do in response? It says that it will give some reasonable compensation. However that is so arbitrary. Fair market value tells people something. It says that they can get someone who is an independent real estate appraiser to assess the value of that property and then the government can provide a level of payment that will allow farmers and ranchers to get that fair market value. That is important to us. We just do not understand why the government is so opposed to that, even when it understands that it will be very hurtful to farmers and ranchers.

Bill C-15B is another part of legislation in Motion Nos. 2A and 2B that we do not want to come back. The reason we do not want it to come back in its present form, and the reason why we want it to come back right from the beginning, is that it deserves further debate. Again, it is tied to farming and ranching.

Nobody in this place favours cruelty to animals. Let me make that very clear. However we also understand that in the course of normal animal husbandry there are things that farmers and ranchers need to do with animals that are unpleasant but necessary. Dehorning a calf is not a pleasant thing but is necessary. Putting an ear tag on or even providing vaccinations causes some pain to animals but it is in their interest in the long run. We are very concerned that radical environmental groups and animal rights groups, like PETA, will use this legislation to impede the ability of farmers and ranchers from making a living.

We know that Liberal members across the way are on the same page here. They have said it to us privately. We have heard some of it in the debate today. We heard a member from near Hamilton talk about how he would like to see the minister bring the legislation back to the House for debate again and put some safeguards in place so that radical animal rights groups could not challenge the legislation and put farmers through all kinds of hoops to get them to stop what they do, which is raise livestock. The problem is that is a whim and a hope. It is a wish.

What we want from the government is a commitment that it will hive Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B off of Motion Nos. 2A and 2B so that we can have that discussion again and address the very real concerns people have, again at a time when people in agriculture are really struggling. We are not asking for the moon. We are asking for some very small changes that would clarify the legislation, that would continue, in the case of Bill C-5, to allow protection to endangered species and would continue to allow animals to be protected from cruelty, in the case of Bill C-15B, so that farmers, ranchers and landowners also are protected.

We will have an emergency debate on agriculture tonight. I regret that everybody wanted to debate that because I was unable to get my name the list. However I do want to say a little about that. I have already touched on it somewhat, but I want to say a little more.

My riding occupies a big chunk of southeastern Alberta. It goes from the Saskatchewan border, probably close to 150 miles toward the west, and then from the Montana border, probably 200 miles up to the Red Deer River. It is a big riding and full of lots of prairie, farms, ranches and very good people

What I am concerned about is that the government, when it brought down its throne speech, really displayed how insensitive and out of touch it is with rural Canada. There was exactly one sentence in that throne speech that said anything at all about agriculture. That concerns me because agriculture is being assaulted from a hundred different ways. Sometimes those people are being assaulted by their own government in the legislation it brings down, like Bill C-15B and Bill C-5. Sometimes they are being assaulted by governments in other countries which unfairly subsidize to the point where they depress prices and make it impossible for countries like Canada, which is trying to play by the rules, to have fair market prices so that farmers can prosper when they raise these crops and take them to market.

Sometimes it is the weather. We have drought occurring in central Alberta and it is devastating.

I came back from the airport last week. I swung up into central Alberta, where my son is goes to college. I spent some time with him and then came back down toward my riding. It is a beautiful drive. It is nice to see those beautiful fields but there are pretty sparse. When one gets up into the riding of my friend from Wild Rose, up around Three Hills, where I was, and in through there, where in the past they have had some beautiful crops, it is not pretty. They are having a terrible drought.

There are all kinds of people, my friend was telling me, who are actually having their power cut off because they cannot afford to pay for it. It is very serious. It is the most serious drought they have had in 133 years.

As one makes one's way down to my riding, one sees some better crops. It is a beautiful time of year. Every once in a while there is a combine but not often because it has been so wet.

People say, “It's dry. It's wet. What's your problem?” The problem is that it has been just so many years in a row. In the past our farmers have been able to survive because they have had some good years and put something away. They are proud people. They do not want handouts. They do not want subsidies. However when there are so many things arrayed against them, especially things like foreign subsidies that make it very difficult, they would like to know that the government has some kind of safety net in mind.

They also grow very frustrated when they find that the government is imposing all kinds of restrictions on farmers and ranchers which are not imposed on the rest of the economy. I am thinking of the Canadian Wheat Board.

A farmer in my riding, John Turcato, will go to prison for 113 days for the great crime of selling his own wheat in the United States. Here is a guy who wants to support his family by going down and accessing the United States market where he can make a few extra bucks on his wheat. Know what is going to happen? He will go to prison for that. Would that ever happen in any other sector of the economy where people make things with their own hands and take them to another country to sell? I do not think so.

For reasons that will never make sense to me, the government says that back during the second world war it used its powers to put in place the Canadian Wheat Board, which imposed all kinds of restrictions. That may have made sense during wartime, but guess what? We are no longer in war. It has been 57 years since the war ended and we still have the same legislation in place.

All people like John Turcato want to do is make a living but they cannot do it. It is ridiculous. I just cannot understand why the government still imposes that on people still today. They want the ability to do with their property what they will, as long as they are not hurting anybody else. That is not too much to ask. For reasons that I do not understand, the government is stuck in the 1940s when it comes to agriculture.

I could go on about that but I will not. I know lots will be said on that tonight. However when October 31 rolls around, members should watch the news and watch a bunch of farmers go to jail for selling their own grain. It is a disgrace but it is going to happen.

There are a number of other things I want to talk about. The government is bringing in some of these old measures. Strangely enough, a throne speech is a time when it is also supposed to bring in new measures. Of course in a lot ways it is not. The government is bringing in recycled policies from the past.

This time the throne speech says the government will provide money to help aboriginals. We all want to help aboriginals, but the government does this year after year in the throne speech “This time we have a program and this time it will work”. Year after year nothing gets better. Maybe it is time for a new approach. Maybe we should try something different. How about that?

The same thing applies with child poverty. The government says it will cancel the youth employment strategy and present a new strategy. Maybe it is time for a different approach. What about if we did some things to really stimulate the economy? We could get the economy moving at such a pace that employers had to look really hard for workers and said, “We know you are young and you do not have any experience but we really need you and we will give you on the job training”. What if we tried that approach instead? It is time for some different thinking.

One of the things that is in the throne speech of course is Kyoto. Kyoto is such a mistake on so many levels. The situation is the government has not provided any kind of an assessment of the impact Kyoto would have, but it wants to ratify it. The government has no idea how it would be implemented but it wants to ratify it. The government says it is consulting people. The government has not even finished consulting people, but it wants to ratify it.

How can Kyoto be ratified if the government does not know what people are going to say about it? Maybe they will say they do not want Kyoto in its present form but they want other measures to deal with real environmental issues that affect them directly every day, things like smog in the city they live in or acid rain, or maybe there is a problem with the lake they live beside. If they live in Sydney maybe it is the tar ponds. Would it not be more practical and direct to address those things that have such an immediate and direct impact on people's health? I think so.

We could go to Canadians and give them a choice. Should we deal with Kyoto and ratify the treaty which will have almost no impact overall on the environment and the issue of global warming? We have 2% of the emissions. How big an impact could it have? It would jeopardize many jobs, and I do not think anyone disputes that. Even the cabinet now acknowledges that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be affected or lost by this and it would cost billions of dollars. No one is denying that. We could ask Canadians if they want to do that or if they want to look at each local situation and see how it can be dealt with.

In Calgary where there is an inversion problem perhaps people would say to council they should burn a little ethanol to help clean up the inversion problem and get rid of some of that smog. That is what has been done in Denver, Colorado. California has its own emissions standards because it has an inversion problem. Maybe some of the local jurisdictions should be driving some of the environmental changes. That makes a lot more sense because every place is different. Everyone has their own situation.

People in Atlantic Canada they may say that is not their big problem. Maybe their problem is pollution in Halifax harbour. I know the government has put some money toward that and that is good. It is a good idea and a good approach. Then there is the Sydney tar ponds and other things. That is the approach we should take when it comes to the environment.

I will wrap up by saying a word on behalf of the Canadian military. This summer I spent a week with our troops in Wainwright. I slept in tents with them, put on the web gear, carried a rifle and did the whole thing. They are the most professional, disciplined, dedicated people I have ever met. It is unbelievable how hard they work and how little respect they get from the government. It is a disgrace.

Our troops are prepared to go to Afghanistan and put their lives on the line.They are prepared to go anywhere the government sends them, but they want some respect. I do not think that is too much to ask. They want it in the form of just some proper equipment.

I ask the government to heed some of the things I have said. I can tell the House that my remarks come directly from the folks in my riding and some of the people I have associated with. If the government were a little more in step with the public, I think it would have had a much better throne speech and maybe a much better approach in general.

[Roy H. Bailey, Canadian Alliance, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to be back and see you after the summer. I hope all members had as much fun in their constituencies this summer as I had.

In my constituency we ended the summer by having the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Musical Ride entertain five times in the space of 10 days. I was fortunate enough to attend all of them. The people who sponsored the musical ride did a great service for the youth of Canada. The youth were able to attend the morning programs and it was a tremendous summer.

During the summer people invited me to their wedding anniversaries and family reunions. I had the pleasure of attending the 60th anniversary ceremony in Dieppe. I was proud to lay the wreath at the monument in honour of the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Most of the members of that regiment came from my constituency. It was with humility that I was able to walk among the graves and look at the tombstones and recognize a name from the offspring and kinfolk still living in my constituency. I was thankful for that opportunity.

Members do not usually receive many compliments in the House. We receive a lot of jabs here and there, but the other night I received a compliment. It was not directed at me personally and it was not meant to be a compliment. A member from the other side of the House while speaking referred to Texas cowboy thinking. The member was referring to the President of the United States.

The member then made reference to those on this side of the House and this party as cowboy thinkers. That is one of the best compliments I have had for a long time. I grew up with cowboys. There are certain characteristics of cowboys that are right on. When a cowboy says “yes, sir”, he means “yes, sir”. When he says “no, ma'am”, he means no. When cowboys make a deal they shake hands and that is the deal. They do not have to go to a lawyer with a bunch of paper and all the rest. That is cowboy thinking and that is what I grew up with.

I was not insulted by the remark. I took that as an extreme compliment. For example, if I were to ask my neighbour when I was farming, “How much would it cost me to have the hay cut on that piece of land?” If it was a long way from where he was, I would say, “Just give me a third and let me know how many bales and we will figure out a price”. That is cowboy thinking. People are respected and their word is respected.

Many people told me this summer, no matter where I went, that Parliament was not for them any more. The people do not respect Parliament any more. Then I pick up the Ottawa Citizen and it says, “Canadians don't trust government. They feel alienated.”

Where I come from, the home of some great cowboys, some of them still living, we trusted cowboys. We trusted them when we were at school. We trusted them to their word. I would trust that person who wanted to buy the hay from me. We would trust each other and agree to what was fair and reasonable and we would shake hands.

I spent a lot of time last session on the environment committee before the House prorogued. The committee members were great people to work with. We had a great chairman and we got along fine. We spent many hours together. We then found out that the Prime Minister did not even trust us. He chucked most of the amendments we made. In cowboy country that is not fair. Pure and simple, that was just not fair.

All that the opposition, these cowboy thinkers over here, asked for in the way of remuneration for land is the same as the fellow who wanted to buy my hay. We asked the government, to proceed if it had to expropriate land, for a fair and reasonable compensation. I want to ask the House, was that too much to ask for in the bill that if land was expropriated that landowners would receive fair and reasonable compensation? I do not find that difficult to understand.

I want to touch on something else that bothered me and it was in the cruelty to animals bill, Bill C-15B. I know what was said. Many of the government members were going to vote against the bill. There was no question. Everyone on this side of the House knew that. I will tell members something about cowboys. If people are cruel to animals they are going to hear from a cowboy. Do not mistreat an animal such as a horse, a cow or any animal. If the member is referring to us as being cowboy thinkers, we truly are. However, all that we asked to be included in the bill was that those animal practices that had been carried on for over a century would not be considered as being cruel to animals. That is all a cowboy or a rancher would ask.

It is easy to put that into the legislation. It would not have to come back. We would agree to both bills if all that was put in. That was it. Now government members are calling us cowboy thinkers on this side. We have all had this before. We are asking why we have to keep telling them the same thing. All we want is fair and reasonable settlement or compensation. It is that simple.

I will let members in on a little secret. I went out to visit some burrowing owls the other day. The neighbours do not know about it and the guy whose property they are on trusts me. I am a cowboy with cowboy thinking. Hidden at least four miles from where he lives, he has 30 or 40 burrowing owls fenced off. I asked him if he had reported this and he had not. He wanted to protect them his way. He told me his neighbour had the owls which the authorities found out about. They put a sign up, went through every gate, left them open and even caused a fire in one area. He was not willing to tell the authorities where his owls were because he was not using the land and wanted to protect them himself.

These cowboys have been protecting the environment long before Saskatchewan became a province. We have had practices of dehorning and branding. All the legislation had to say was that in Bill C-15B “normal animal husbandry practices will not be part of this bill”.

I took some kids to the circus. I found out the Rotary Club, which puts on the circus, has had warnings from the animal rights people that this may be its last circus.

Somebody who spoke this morning mentioned PETA and how its members have been allowed to go to schools telling children that milk is not good for them and by drinking milk they are causing pain to the cow. I have milked a few cows. One cow I had would stand at the barn and bawl her head off because she wanted to be milked. My nephew at one time had a large goat herd. They would do the same thing. Yet these people are allowed to go around as a group and tell people that milking cows is painful so we must abolish milk. The ultimate goal of the animal rights people is to shut down the Calgary Stampede. We heard about it this summer.

Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B have no business being brought back to the House at all. They should have been passed a long time ago. What happened when the backbenchers supported the cruelty to animals bill? The government said that the Senate would change it. When the press release came out the Senate said it did not take orders from anybody, and it does not. The bill was not amended and it will come back from the Senate. If these cowboy thinkers over on this side of the House still do not agree with the bill, it is very simple, it could be flawed.

When I think back to the people I know who were called cowboys, some of them have received the Order of Canada. One cowboy I know was at Dieppe. He was captured and spent two years in a prison camp. He is a great deep thinker. All of these people I know at whom the Liberals want to point their fingers are honest, people of integrity, who think things out carefully, are respectful of their neighbours, and are always willing to help their neighbours. I hope somebody calls me a cowboy thinker again, because I would really be proud of that.

Members might be interested to know that after all the hubbub about the gophers and how barbaric we were, I found out that, despite the fact that there was a contest, fewer gophers were shot this year than ever. However I must show members my new award. It is on a hat. I have now become the official gopher herder. I am proud of that because this House and the people who phoned in did not know that gophers could be herded.

What bothers me is that if the government had amended Bill C-5 or included our recommendations in Bill C-5 it would have been law by now. It would have been passed. If the government had done what we recommended with C-15B, it too would have been law by now.

Members should not blame the official opposition for the non-passage of the two bills in the first place. It is incorrect because in committee and many times in the House we agreed that nobody was more against animal cruelty than the cowboy thinkers, nobody. We do not tolerate it. At the same time if it is not possible to persuade the people on that side that they are listening to lobby groups, they should go out there and talk to cowboys, for goodness sake. It will do their hearts good.

As the official gopher herder and as a cowboy of notoriety, I want to assure members that I will continue to be proud of the cowboy heritage and of cowboy thinking.

[Vic Toews, Canadian Alliance, Provencher, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to support the opposition amendment to the motion that would enable ministers to reinstate government legislation from the last session. The opposition amendment would exclude Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B from that motion.

Both the species at risk bill, Bill C-5, and the legislation dealing with animal cruelty, Bill C-15B, should not be reinstated. The official opposition, other opposition parties, as well as several members of the government side, belatedly but nevertheless, have raised numerous and legitimate objections to these bills in the course of debate. Unfortunately, the ministers responsible for the bills, and the federal cabinet, have consistently refused to address any of these concerns.

Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B deal with different provisions. They both negatively impact on Canadians in similar ways, particularly rural Canadians. This is more and more a trend that we see in the government. It is not concerned about what is happening in rural Canada. It is simply concerned about vote rich cities. We saw it in the throne speech where it talked about a commitment to infrastructure. However, the wording of that commitment was intended to convey benefits upon urban centres rather than rural areas.

These particular bills, Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B, are more than that. They do not simply ignore the valid concerns of people in rural areas but in fact impact negatively on those Canadians. Under both bills there is a real potential that the livelihoods of rural Canadians would be put at risk.

As the member for a primarily rural riding, Provencher in southeast Manitoba, I am proud to represent a large population of farmers who are some of the most committed stewards of both the environment and of animals in this country. I am concerned that these two pieces of legislation, while no doubt are well-intentioned, will put rural Canadians who are already facing overwhelming challenges, both in terms of the environment and in terms of trade practices, into an unworkable situation.

Many of my colleagues have spoken about the drought that has occurred in Canada this last summer. In my riding we have been suffering from flooding. Southeast Manitoba has been inundated with water. Many of my farmers, whether they are dairy farmers or other types of farmers, have been severely affected by flooding. Despite those kinds of environmental issues that they are already facing, they do not need the kind of legislation that is being proposed both in Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B.

In the case of Bill C-5, the most serious flaw is that the federal government would be permitted to expropriate land from property owners without full or guaranteed compensation. The issue of compensation was debated at length at committee stage of the bill. All Canadians are concerned about our environment. The real question is who will bear the cost of the measures that must be taken in respect of those environmental steps.

I think we will see that similar debate develop in the context of the Kyoto accord. Whether or not one agrees with that particular accord, the question is, who bears the cost of this particular government action?

In the case of Bill C-5 the answer must clearly be that if the Canadian public considers it to be a good thing to preserve endangered species and their habitat, then the burden of protecting those species and the habitat must not fall on a particular segment of our society. It must fall on the shoulders of all Canadians equally.

This issue was debated at length at committee. Unfortunately the amendments proposed by my colleagues requiring mandatory compensation were defeated. Instead the environment minister indicated to the committee that compensation would be given out on a case by case basis. For the rule of law, compensation on a case by case basis simply is not acceptable.

Property owners need to know that there are criteria, that there are laws in place, and that compensation is determined by reference to an objective standard of laws. It cannot simply be granted at the whim or on the best wishes of any particular minister. While some compensation is certainly better than none, this lack of a commitment to compensate all property owners is disconcerting for many Canadians, especially those who are property owners.

We need to ensure that those property owners who buy this property to farm it for example can go to the banks on the strength of that property and say they require a mortgage so that they can pay for that property. However if the banks realize that property or the use of that property can be expropriated without any guarantee of compensation, what prudent lender will lend money on the flimsy guarantee of the environment minister saying that he will consider compensation on a case by case basis?

This is simply not the way things are done in a civilized country, in a country where we need to respect private property. Private property is the basis of our wealth. If we allow governments to introduce legislation that undermines the basis of our wealth creation, we will cripple our economy.

Another serious flaw in Bill C-5 is that the bill provides for various offences in which a very low level of mens rea is required, mens rea of course being the ingredient in a criminal offence of a guilty mind. We have on the one hand the actus reus and on the other the guilty mind or the mens rea. In a true criminal offence both elements must be present, the actus reus and the mens rea.

Those who committed offences under the legislation would be under what is called strict liability. This means the courts would be required to take into account the level of criminal intent of the accused for sentencing purposes only.

The issue or level of criminal intent is a very low requirement. The person who commits the act is held strictly accountable for a breach of the provisions of the act and as I said, the courts can then take into account in sentencing the degree of that guilty mind or mens rea. It still is almost unintended that an individual could be held liable for a criminal offence. This makes many landowners and farmers in my riding, and it should make people all across the country, very nervous.

There are hundreds of species at risk. That is admitted. Steps need to be taken. However, it is not always easy to recognize these species. The landowners and farmers could be faced with expensive and cumbersome criminal prosecutions, even where they are not eventually found guilty. Many farmers and landowners today are working under difficult financial circumstances and the idea of having to defend themselves against criminal charges for unintended actions is alarming.

We have seen in the American context with similar legislation where the right to property is threatened and governments have not put in place sufficient assurances to provide compensation or to clearly delineate the level of criminal intent required, that individuals are being proactive. As soon as they hear rumours that there might be an endangered species on their land they are going out to till the soil or rip up the habitat so that government inspectors and enforcement officers cannot determine whether in fact there was a species at risk on the land.

The intention here, which is to preserve endangered species, will in fact result in the destruction of species. I think we can take the American experience as a clear example of where that happened.

Instead of writing into the law assurances that Canadians will be compensated for their losses and not prosecuted unjustly, the government has simply asked Canadians to trust it. Not only has the government failed to calculate long term costs to every Canadian taxpayer from the legislation and failed to estimate or even consider the burden it may place on landowners or farmers, it has ignored the need of the public to be informed and consulted on matters that their way of life depends upon.

This approach serves not only to foster mistrust on the federal government but ultimately renders the legislation less effective as it does not promote a spirit of cooperation between those who are making the laws and those who must adhere to them.

I note in this particular context the right of the federal minister to impose federal standards on provincially owned land. This is not just federal land in a province, it is provincially owned land, and contrary to the division of powers, the fact that civil rights and property within the provinces are the jurisdiction of the provinces, there is a unilateral approach by the federal government moving in to deny the provinces and individuals in those provinces control over their natural resources.

The federal government needs to step back and fashion a new approach that is cooperative and respectful not only of the spirit of the Constitution and the division of powers, but the private property that is owned in these provinces.

In respect of Bill C-15B, the government expects Canadians to simply trust it that they will not be unjustly prosecuted. As the justice critic for the official opposition, I have said for months that in its current form the bill poses serious concerns for not only farmers, but others who depend on the legitimate use of animals for their livelihood, including scientific researchers.

I do not think that anyone including government members wants to see farmers, sporting groups and scientific researchers unjustly prosecuted for carrying out traditionally accepted practices involving animals. However animal rights groups in Canada have already stated their intention to use this legislation as the basis for such prosecutions and the bill as it stands does not preclude the possibility of such prosecutions.

We have repeatedly asked the Minister of Justice to provide certainty to Canadians who depend on the use of animals that their livelihood will not be threatened. Unfortunately, the Liberal cabinet has consistently refused to make the necessary protections explicit in the law. The former justice minister and now the present justice minister have said the defences that are required are implicit in the law, that they are not intended to allow for these prosecutions against scientific researchers, farmers, hunters, and others in the animal food production industry. The position of the minister is that they are not intended, that they are implicit.

Speaking as a former lawyer and as a former prosecutor, defences are not implicit in the law in our Criminal Code where we have a statutory Criminal Code. Defences and their applicability to any particular provision are spelled out in the Criminal Code as they are presently spelled out in the Criminal Code. The movement of these new animal cruelty charges into a new section of the Criminal Code leaving the old defences behind leads to the inescapable legal and statutory conclusions that the intent is to alter the defences that are available in respect of those offences.

I say to members opposite and specifically to the former Minister of Justice and the present Minister of Justice that if they have already conceded that those defences are implicit in the law, why not make them explicit? What not provide that certainty? Why not make it explicit to scientific researchers, people in the medical field, hunters, sports people and farmers?

The chair of the rural Liberal caucus, the member for Dufferin--Peel--Wellington--Grey, has also echoed these same concerns about Bill C-15B in the House of Commons. He asked the Liberal rural members to vote for the bill on the assurance that the Minister of Justice gave him that the bill would be amended once it went to the Senate.

When the bill went to the Senate, the Senate indicated it had no intentions of amending it. The minister then said there was no obligation and he had no intention to make any amendments. Now is the opportunity for Liberal rural members, specifically the member for Dufferin--Peel--Wellington--Grey, to make good on their word that they will protect farmers and people in rural Canada.

[Howard Hilstrom, Canadian Alliance, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I will be using up my full time because of the importance of this issue.

In any event the member for Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey and other members, but this member in particular, had to come up with a reason why they would vote for a bad bill for farmers when they knew that the farm associations, lobby groups and farmers in their own ridings did not want it.

The reason was because a promise had been made by the justice minister to the Liberal rural caucus that the bill could be amended in the Senate, that they should just vote for it, that it would be amended and then things would be all right for the livestock industry and medical research.

That was a fine enough reason. There was a public press release, and I am not telling any stories here or making anything up. It turns out that when the bill went to the Senate, the senator who was responsible for shepherding the bill through the Senate, said that absolutely no deal had been made to amend the bill. I could stand to be corrected, but I think justice minister himself denied that he had made any deal to have it amended in the Senate. In fact I do not know how the House could force the Senate to amend a bill anyway. That is totally up to the senators. That is what happened.

The exact case the Canadian Alliance is putting forward now is that the House, including the member I have been talking about and the Liberal rural caucus, should now separate Bill C-15B, the cruelty to animal legislation and Bill C-5, the species at risk legislation, out of this omnibus motion, pass what is left of it to reinstate the bills to the position they were at before Parliament prorogued. Where we in the House collectively made a mistake on Bills C-15B and C-5, we would now have the opportunity to correct that mistake. The Canadian Alliance members will take that opportunity to correct the mistake made on the cruelty to animal legislation, by separating it, not having it sent back to the Senate and let the government reintroduce a new bill that satisfies the very concerns of the livestock industry, medical research and others who are so opposed to these bills.

What a glorious opportunity to simply do that. I have heard from my friends in the Bloc Quebecois and the other parties that our motion to separate the bills is a good one. Let us correct the mistakes that have been made. How many times in life do we say “I wish I had done things differently” then have the opportunity to go back and correct those mistakes?

We have seen the broken promises from the justice minister and the member for Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, promises that were not kept or promises that were never made in the first place. We do not know. It was tangled web that they got themselves into. Who would have ever known in that the members in the Liberal rural caucus would have to own up to the tangled web they wove by having the bills come back from the Senate, back into our own little hands right here in the House of Commons? This is a glorious opportunity for those members to stand up and say that they made a mistake when they passed those bills in the first place and now they will not have them come back.

Should we expect the Liberal members who are opposed to Bill C-15B and Bill C-5 to stand and vote against their own government? I would hope they would. There is an opportunity for them to go to the Prime Minister and to the other cabinet ministers and tell them that they do not want to vote against the government on this omnibus bill, so why do they not take those bills which they are opposed to, Bill C-15B and Bill C-5, out of the omnibus motion and they will vote for the rest of it.

That could be done without any embarrassment on the side of the Prime Minister or the cabinet or the individual members who are so opposed to that bill. There is an opportunity, and it is getting a little late for them to do that now, that they may have to vote against their own government. So be it.

We have had a lot of talk in the House about reform of Parliament. There is talk about individual members not having enough clout to do anything about some of the major issues coming along. When it comes to having clout with a majority government, the Liberal rural caucus has enough members who are elected, in essence, by farmers that they should at this point represent their constituents by defeating this omnibus bill to correct the mistake that they made earlier on.

If that does not happen, we go back to our ridings and put out another press release saying that the Senate may fix the mistakes in the House because we had two chances at it, but we did not fix it; perhaps the Senate will do it this time. That will be seen as another false hope for change.

I would like to talk about Bill C-15B. That included the Firearms Act. The Firearms Act, from day one when it was first brought in going back as far as the federal Progressive Conservatives when former Prime Minister Kim Campbell started to bring in firearms legislation, had the ultimate goal registering all rifles and shotguns, having no due regard that the people who owned rifles and shotguns were not criminals.

If they were criminals, why would they be given a registration and licence for firearms? This was to nail the poor average citizen who just happened to own firearms or wanted to own firearms. This is another good reason why Bill C-15B should not go back to the Senate to be passed.

Under the firearms amendments there is a new commissioner of firearms being established, who would report to the justice minister thus taking away from the commissioner of the RCMP this coordinating effort on the registration of firearms. We would create a brand new bureaucracy, a new commissioner of firearms, and have that new commissioner report to the justice minister. More costs going up constantly and not solving one crime.

In my riding there was a man whose son had been in trouble under the Young Offenders Act. Police went to the house and asked if there were any firearms in the house. The man said that he did have firearms, but that his son did not. The son did not have access to the gun cabinet. He did not have the key. The police had to get it from the father. The father had committed absolutely no crime, but his firearms are in police custody right now because somehow this act has a catch-all clause that says “if something happens”. As a result, police have the authority to take people's guns away. This man was a law-abiding citizen who did absolutely nothing wrong, yet his guns have been seized and locked up.

We have a lot of good reasons to have Bill C-15B and Bill C-5 separated away from the omnibus bill. Let us bring it back into the House of Commons. Let us do it right, then all our constituents will be happy. I appreciate the time today that I have been given to speak on these bills. I hope that it has made some impression on those Liberal rural caucus members. I am sure that when they reconsider they will vote the right way this time.

[Howard Hilstrom, Canadian Alliance, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, after the proroguing of Parliament, it is once again my pleasure to be back here to debate with members of the opposition party and, in particular, the members of the governing Liberal Party.

We are speaking today of the omnibus motion and the amendment by my party to have two bills separated out, Bill C-15B and Bill C-5. They are such bad bills that they should be separated out so Parliament can reconsider the votes held, re-examine the issues and do it right.

It was very interested to listen to the hon. member for Mississauga South, I believe, talk about members of the official opposition and the fact that we were talking about the merits, the reasons and all the facts behind debating Bill C-15B and Bill C-5 again. Somehow it is not good when we on this side of the House talk about redebating bills, particularly when we talk about this big omnibus motion, but that member himself sees fit to go into a lengthy debate on his pet bill with regard to stem cell research.

What we have is a debate on an omnibus motion that the rules are good when for use by the government side, but if the opposition plays by those same official rules, then somehow it is bad.

We intend to speak up about bills that are bad and about the fact that those bills have ended up back here because Parliament was prorogued. It is necessary for Parliament to once again pass a motion that will reinstate those bills that died on the Order Paper to their former position. I do not think it is a waste of Parliament's time, as the Liberal government has put forward, to talk about the substance of the issues of those bills that died on the Order Paper.

The question of whether it was necessary to prorogue Parliament in the first place is one that deserves a bit of comment because that has put us back in this position of having to debate this and some of the very same bills that were already been passed.

The proroguing of Parliament was done so that there could be a throne speech. That throne speech was to lay out some grand visions for Canada, its problems and opportunities for the future. We expected something new in a throne speech. What did we get? We got talk about trying to do something about health care, child poverty and first nations problems, everything from education through to health and governance issues. There was talk about infrastructure. The opportunity was there for the government and the Prime Minister to do something about those topics. He has had 40 years as minister of various portfolios, including as the Minister of Indian Affairs, and as Prime Minister since 1993 to have fixed those issues or to have laid out the plan and instituted it. By proroguing Parliament, he was trying to make these promises again as if they were something new and that somehow that would make things all right.

The Prime Minister has said that he will not be around very long, that he will quit and make room for the next leader of the Liberal Party. However he has insisted on trying to set out an agenda, committing Parliament to vote in the future to spend money on his promises in the throne speech. It is pointless.

Should I be in the House as the various spending bills, which the Prime Minister has promised, come up, I can guarantee that I will not have my hands tied for votes in the House because that Prime Minister wanted to have a throne speech and therefore prorogued Parliament.

With regard to the question the member for Mississauga South raised about saving time and reinstating these bills, what point is there in trying to save time when a really bad piece of legislation, which was opposed by many members on the government side and the opposition side, was passed because of the terrible whipping backbench Liberals received. That legislation, Bill C-15B, ended up going to the Senate.

Bill C-15B has an interesting little story onto itself. It goes to the very essence of whether we in the House should simply pass this omnibus motion and put everything back in place the way it was, or should we have a second thought and look at this again. From the Liberal point of view, I cannot imagine that they would not be really excited about having a second chance to look at the legislation contained in this omnibus motion.

With regard to Bill C-15B, while it was going through the House and committee, the Liberal rural caucus with its chairman, the member for Dufferin--Peel--Wellington--Grey, criticized and pointed out that this was a really bad bill. They said it hurt medical research and the livestock industry. They said it would hurt hunting, fishing and other pastimes that involve the use of animals in our daily lives.

However, when push came to shove, at the final vote in the House at third reading stage, the Liberal rural caucus members, including the chairman, stood up and voted in favour of Bill C-15B. The question immediately arose: Why, when members and their constituents were opposed to a bill as in the case of rural Liberal caucus members, would they vote for that legislation? The truth of the matter is, the Prime Minister told them that if they did not, there would be certain repercussions in any number of ways. He told them they could forget about their future political careers.

However that could not be said to the general public. That could not be said to our farmers and ranchers. They could not tell these people that they had been whipped by the Prime Minister and leaders in cabinet, so they had to come up with some other reason. What did the reason turn out to be? The member for, and he has a long riding name so I want to get it right--

[Werner Schmidt, Canadian Alliance, Kelowna, BC]

Maybe the hon. member did not do it but I know there are some over there who did. Maybe he did not but that does not make it right.

The issue has to be addressed and it has to be addressed just as soon as we possibly can. We should eliminate and take away from this particular motion Bill C-5 and Bill C-15 and then democracy at least would have the potential of being served.

[Werner Schmidt, Canadian Alliance, Kelowna, BC]

Yes, it is many more than Mulroney. In fact, I dare say that it is about 50% more than Mulroney did in total.

I am wondering what it is that the government is trying to do with this. Is it really trying to defy or deny the democratic process? The hon. member for Medicine Hat suggested that we have a democratic deficit. Well, we have a democratic deficit, a financial deficit and a deficit of new ideas.

There was an excellent opportunity to rectify some of the errors and shortcomings in both Bill C-5 and Bill C-15 but nothing happened. The government will bring them forward just as they were before.

I cannot help but draw attention to a particular issue that really bothered me with regard to Bill C-15, which is the cruelty to animals bill. I met with some dairy people this summer. When we first entered the debate some time ago I read into the record at that time about a group by the name of PETA and what they were doing. This summer I had the occasion to meet with the people at PETA and to ask them whether this was really true, whether this had really happened. Let me tell the House exactly what it was that had happened at that time.

There was a group known as PETA, People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Guess what this group did? When I read what they did I could not believe it had happened. I thought it was some kind of misinterpretation or mis-statement. However I found out this summer that it was absolutely correct. PETA launched an anti-dairy campaign targeting school children. It essentially told them that if children drank milk they would be responsible for the torture of cows. Why would anyone do that?

My colleagues and I in the Canadian Alliance, including my party's agriculture critic, are concerned that groups such as PETA are about to be armed with a powerful new weapon against farmers. I hope you, Mr. Speaker, and all the other members opposite recognize the door that has been opened for groups like this. We have to say to ourselves that it will never happen again, but it did just happen.

We had another indication earlier that told us that very clearly. On Bill C-5 a group told us that if the legislation was not tested in the courts it would have no value. We hear all this talk about there not being any frivolous litigation launched on the basis of cruelty of animals. Liz White, I believe it was, said clearly that not only would there be contests, but it was essential that litigation like that take place to prove in fact that this legislation was real.

Can anyone imagine a government putting legislation on the table that has already indicated that it will be tested in the courts? To prove what? To prove that it can be read in a variety of different ways? We do not have to go to the courts for that. We already know that.

No less a person than the attorney general for the Province of British Columbia wrote a book. His name is Alex Macdonald. You probably know him, Mr. Speaker. This gentleman said that in Canada we do not have a system of justice, we have a legal system. He goes through the book to illustrate case after case where the principle was one of legality, where the principle was one of how much money do the litigants have and then proceeded to carry on until the resources were exhausted. That is not justice. That means that the justice system is being abused, and much more than being abused, it is being misused when that happens. I know that is not true in all cases but why would the government introduce legislation that permits this kind of thing to happen?

We are now at the point where some people have said that what we have in Canada today is judicial imperialism. What does that really mean? It means rule by judges. How do they do this? They do something they call “write in”. They write into legislation what they think that legislation should be saying if it is not saying exactly what it is they want it to say. The legislation is written in such an ambiguous fashion that indeed they can do this and they do it with impunity. However, that is not all. It then has the force of law.

Members here are the lawmakers, not the judges. It should be incumbent upon us, the Prime Minister and every member here to make sure that the intention of the legislation on the books is portrayed clearly and unequivocally. When it becomes so ambiguous that a judge can write into it whatever he wishes, that is an abuse and a misuse of the parliamentary system.

I think it goes even further than that. I am looking over at some of the backbenchers over there and I know some of them very well. I know that when they voted in favour of Bill C-15 they were voting against the wishes of their constituents. Why did they do that? They did it because they were clipped into shape? No. It was because they were whipped into voting against their conscience, against their better knowledge and against the wishes of their constituents. That is a complete abuse of the democratic system and it should never happen again.

[Gerry Ritz, Canadian Alliance, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise again. This is the first chance we have had to speak in the House since the government prorogued. We are speaking about a motion to reinstate a lot of what it left behind when it decided to shut down the House for two weeks and not address the very serious and important issues that we felt should have been brought to bear here almost immediately. I am talking about the agricultural crisis in Western Canada.

We see nothing like that in a reinstatement bill here in this motion because the government has totally ignored that crisis. It has tossed some money here and there and an ad hoc program here and there. It is kind of like putting one's finger in a dike which is leaking all the way across. It is just playing fast and loose with agricultural members out there who are taxpayers. They tend to pay their bills and would love to do that, if the government would allow them to and if it would come up with some programs and long term vision that would see some strength put back into fundamental agriculture. It is basic: the guys own the land.

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

Getting back to agriculture, we see two issues in this motion, and it is an omnibus motion. We see the Liberals again envelope in one little motion a huge cross-section of what they have on their wish list that certainly does not resonate with most Canadians out there.

Agriculture, as I said is in crisis in Saskatchewan and Alberta in the north halves of the provinces where huge amount of agriculture goes on. The Liberals have dedicated $600 million across the country. They did not even prioritize. They did not even send it where it needed to go. The only action we saw that prioritized the need in those two areas was the Hay West campaign, generated by some terrific citizens in Ontario, moving east from Quebec into the Maritimes. They did a great job.

However, unfortunately the amount of hay that can get through the bureaucratic eye of the needle is maybe 30,000 tonnes. That is not even an appetizer for the cattle herds that we have out west. One RM where my hay land is requires at least 50,000 tonnes all by itself. That is one RM out of 200, 300 or 400 that requires that kind of volume. What goes out from Hay West is equivalent to half of what that RM needs, and there are 300 or 400 more requiring that same sort of commitment.

Did the government do the right thing? No, it did not. Its own Liberal senator said that it was a joke, an absolute travesty, what the government did not do or recognize.

The agriculture minister did show up in Saskatchewan but did he get his boots dusty? No. He landed on both ends of where the problem lies, close to an airport, but he did not get out and see the real world. He did not come out through my riding. Politics aside, I offered to take him through to have a look. He just, I guess, did not figure it was worth his time so he did not come.

We have two other parts of this omnibus motion that deal with agriculture in a huge, negative way. I am talking about Bill C-5, the species at risk legislation. No one with clear common sense thinking in Canada wants to see a species disappear from this country. However, when we look at legislation like this that is so encompassing and is such a horrendous load on primary producers and others folks who work the land, we have to have some sound science.

I watched a documentary the other night on the spotted owl in British Columbia. There is concern that because some of the lobbying has moved them from an area and so on, they could become an endangered species in Canada. The problem is the vast majority of their nesting grounds is across the line. These owls do not care where the 49th parallel is. We are going to list them as endangered but in some parts across the line they may be a nuisance. That is the problem with legislation like this that is not built or even founded on sound science.

I hear the peanut gallery chipping over there. It is the only time the backbenchers get.

Let us get back to Bill C-5 for just one second. The huge stumbling block for those of us in the Alliance is the lack of the wording in the bill, where we want to see compensation based on fair market value. That is just bedrock. No one would see that as the wrong way to go. If people lose access to land, working it, going across it or whatever, they have to have some compensation. They cannot keep on paying taxes on land of which they no longer have any use.

Fair market value compensation is all we are asking. It is a very simple thing to put in.

A lot of the rural Ontario caucus fell for the line that the government would let the Liberals in the Senate make those changes. It did not happen. It will be now reintroduced, go back over there and it still will not happen because the Liberals do not see that private property rights have to be paramount in any legislation like this. Fair market compensation are three little words that are just a huge stumbling block on that piece of legislation.

Then we get into Bill C-15B which talks about cruelty to animals. Again, no one out there in rural Canada or in the cities for that matter want to see animals treated cruelly. It is just not done. People of good conscience would never accept that.

All we are looking for is a couple of little words in the legislation so that proper, acceptable husbandry rules and regulations, which we already have, will be maintained. We cannot get that. Dehorning a cow, or castrating a bull or snipping the tail on a hog has been accepted for years. However the Liberals cannot understand that we have to entrench the basic premise that accepted husbandry practices will continue. It leads to all sorts of nuisance liability suits and everything.

There are good, free thinking members on the other side. However they are falling for the line that they can support this and some amendments will go through at the Senate. That will not happen because the Senate is not accountable to anybody. Senators are not accountable to the people who never have a chance to elect them. They are accountable to the Prime Minister, just like the ethics counsellor. That leads us into another part.

Where is the ethics package? Where are the priorities of the government? Rather than reintroducing the flawed, failed legislation of the last session, where is the new stuff? Where is the fresh thinking. Where is the outline, the impact assessment on Kyoto? Where the heck is that? The Liberals have not even thought about that, yet they will ratify it by the end of this year. That is another huge hit to my particular area where any farm that is still open and viable is because of an off farm job relating to the oil patch.

The Liberals will be hammering these poor folks again just because they will not start to address the bedrock principles of free market. What will the impact be? How many jobs will we lose? How high will the cost of home heating, power and gasoline at the pump go? The Liberals say that we all have to do that for future generations. Certainly, we have to slow down the train when it is running away, but that is being done now. We have already got environmental assessments on every drill site in western Canada and they are doing a great job.

When we look at everything that is not in the bill, it just screams out to the electorate there that we need a change of government. There are absolutely no fresh ideas in the throne speech. It is a rehash, a mishmash, a reintroduction of a lot of failed initiatives from the last nine years. The Liberals are trying to build a legacy for a Prime Minister whom nobody wants or likes any more. It cannot be done. He is tired out and there is nothing left. There is no direction there

Last week there was another huge example of a tremendous lack of ethical conduct by a minister of the Crown. Will he be sanctioned? No, he will be covered. He will be covered by the blanket of the ethics counsellor, who reports to the Prime Minister whom the minister supports, one of the last few on the front bench. Will he be given blanket amnesty? Certainly, for hiding behind the fact that it was a company, not the individual. The individual signed it and a partnership says that money that comes into the partnership in which he takes part.

I have not had time to concentrate on a lot of the things that are mentioned in there. The member who spoke before me from Etobicoke has talked about the drug committee and the wonderful work it is doing. Certainly it is doing wonderful work. Then we have the Senate coming through saying to legalize marijuana. That will not go to the committee.

He talked about the member for Esquimalt--Juan de Fuca who had his private member's bill hoisted, hijacked in this very House. Private members' business has been hijacked by the government and sent to a committee where it will not be votable. As a private member's bill it was to be votable. It would have come before all of us so that we could represent our constituents. It is gone, hoisted, hijacked and sent to a committee that is still stacked with a number of Liberal members. It is a totally democratic deficit. That is what is wrong in the House, and we will continue to raise those issues.

[Rick Casson, Canadian Alliance, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I thought the member just split his time with another member of the government, but I guess he has not.

It was interesting to hear some of the comments from the previous speaker about the bills coming back, that the ministers have some prerogative as to at what stage, that they could take them right back to the beginning, that the evidence that was heard would have to be recollected and reheard and that possibly there will be some changes made in some of these bills.

We have tried for the last couple of years to make some changes. Of course we were able to have Bill C-15 split into parts A and B in order to pass the parts we supported. After a lot of negotiation and a lot of work on our behalf that happened. With Bill C-15B there are issues there that we still have problems with, such as the cruelty to animals section and how that would affect animal husbandry practices in the country. We still need to bring those issues to light.

Also, because Bill C-5 does not have a full compensation aspect in it for affected landowners, we cannot accept it. We thought we had some support from the government side of the House on that particular issue, but when it came time for the vote the members on that side of the House who were against it lined up and voted for it so it went forward.

I think the member who spoke before me made a good point about the fact that if we start a bill at the beginning we have to rehear the evidence. That being so, I do not think there is anything wrong with that. In most instances at committee, time is short and witness lists have to be pared back because all who want to appear cannot, and there are all the requests that go forward for people to appear at committee stage who cannot get here to do that. There is the also aspect that some of these bills are so wide-ranging and cumbersome in the legislation they put onto the citizens of Canada that opening them up for debate again is not a concern of mine. The more debate that goes on, the better. It is an opportunity to bring forward witnesses who were not able to appear last time. They could now be heard.

Bill C-5 is one of the two bills that we have some problems with. We opposed it vigorously all through the last stages and actually through the last number of years. I remember when campaigning in 1997 that it was an issue then. It continued to be an issue for the next two Parliaments and finally in this Parliament it was brought forward.

To prorogue the House is to allow the government to start with a throne speech to give a new focus and a new direction for government. Unfortunately that did not happen. As we saw, most of what was in the throne speech had been presented before, and now the government is saying except for what it wants to bring back as it was. If the government is going to have a new direction and a new focus for Canadians, why would it go back to the same old, tired past throne speeches and legislation? Let us do what the throne speech is really intended to do and start afresh.

As for some of the issues in Bill C-5, the species at risk act, certainly there is the compensation issue for affected landowners. It is absolutely critical. For us to accept this legislation in any form, it has to be in there. If it is not, we will continue to fight the battles and try to stop it. We feel this is just going to create such havoc in the environmental field that it will actually be a detriment to saving endangered species instead of helping them, particularly the aspect whereby a person could be charged under the act for unknowingly disturbing the habitat of an endangered species. That is not right. People are going to be very cautious about how they approach this. If they do have endangered species on their property, are not aware of it, disturb the habitat and are somehow reported, the fines and penalties are absolutely huge and will be very hard for people to deal with. We feel that this is another aspect of the compensation issue, the fact that someone can be charged unknowingly. The mens rea aspect needs to be in there. Surely criminal intent should have to be established before the book, or this law, can be thrown at anyone.

There is also the fact that this bill deals with other than crown lands. Most of the provinces have endangered species legislation. They do a good job of policing. I know that particularly in our part of world in southern Alberta there are very many mitigation projects in place through a very wide aspect of industry. The farm industries, the irrigation districts and the resource sectors all make special efforts to leave habitat for species at risk and to leave habitat for all species. It is really good to see that this can happen without legislation and that it happens because these industries and people realize and support that things have to be done to protect endangered species.

We still have some problems with these two bills, Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B. Hopefully, as the member from the government side previously indicated, perhaps something could be done with the Minister of Justice to change that bill so that it would be more acceptable to people who deal with animals in their day-to-day lives, in research, in agriculture, and to those who deal with animals in general. Certainly we do not in any way condone cruelty to animals. It is terrible thing when people go out of their way to purposefully abuse an animal. We do need legislation to protect animals, but we have to make sure that it does not intrude on the animal husbandry practices in existence today.

I will be splitting my time with the member for Yellowhead, and I have a motion I would like to move as I conclude. I move that the amendment be amended by adding the following words: and the 66th Report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs that called for all private members' business to be votable, tabled in the previous session, be deemed presented and adopted in the second session.

Mr. Speaker, before you rule on the admissibility of the subamendment, I point out that the main motion reads:

That, in order to provide for the resumption and continuation of the business of the House begun in the previous Session of Parliament it is ordered--

The issue of private members' business has been mentioned here by many people and its votable status was an important issue in the last session, in the last Parliament and in the Parliament before that. In fact, it has been the subject matter of numerous points of order and questions of privilege. In the last session, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs finally agreed to make all private members' business votable. Just before the House had a chance to adopt the report, the House adjourned and then the government prorogued. It is essential that this report be brought back and adopted. We can consider it as one of the positive issues Motion No. 2A can bring back from the previous session instead of having to focus on all the negative issues the government was in during the middle of the last session, like Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B.

I present this motion.

[John Bryden, Liberal, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Aldershot, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are debating today a motion that would bring back to the House the legislation that was before the House before the time of prorogation, that is legislation that was before the House in June, and also bring back to the House the evidence that was before the committee at that time.

People should understand that when the House prorogues all these bills and evidence basically collapse and are lost unless Parliament moves a motion that allows them to be brought back. This motion would allow all these bills to be brought back at the same standing as they were in the process they were last June, at the discretion of the minister.

I am in sort of a funny situation. There is an amendment to the motion that was moved by the member for Macleod. He suggested in his amendment that the former bills, Bill C-5 and Bill C-15B, should be exempted from the motion. In other words, the motion could go forward but the two particular bills, one the cruelty to animal bill and the other the species at risk bill, would not be allowed to go forward where they are right now, which is in the Senate. They would have to begin the process all over again.

I find myself in a quandary. Had the member for Macleod simply said that Bill C-15B should be excluded from this motion, I think he would have received a chorus of support on this side of the House. I myself would have supported that motion. That bill, which is now in the Senate and almost ready to be passed into law, is a terrible bill.

There is no doubt on this side of the House and many of the MPs, particularly from rural Canada, are very much against this piece of legislation. There has been a long battle both in the House and behind the scenes to halt that piece of legislation.

Even though cruelty to animals is a dreadful thing, and we all want to prevent cruelty to animals, that piece of legislation is incredibly and horribly flawed in its definition of animal. Basically that definition says that any creature that has the capacity to feel pain is covered by the legislation. Amoebas, worms, lobsters and so on, all these creatures have a capacity to feel pain because we can see their reaction when they are subject to any sort of physical violence.

Therefore, we have a piece of legislation that is so broad in its reach that we expect that special interest, animal rights lobbies will use this legislation to bring all kinds of cases before the courts which will enable them to do all kinds of fundraising and will create great anguish and unhappiness in the farming community because the farming community and its farming practices will be unfairly the target of this type of litigation as a result of this over broad definition.

If ever there was a bill that is now in the Senate or ever has been in the Senate that I would wish, as one MP, should be restarted or perhaps forgotten altogether, it is the former Bill C-15B.

Unfortunately the amendment includes the former Bill C-5, species at risk and I have a completely opposite attitude to that. The species at risk bill was enormously contentious but which spent years being wrangled upon in committee, negotiated and talked about in the House, behind the scenes, between House leaders and so on. I remember no other bill in my nines years in this Parliament where there has been so much toing and froing, so much struggle to come up with the final version, and I suppose all legislation is a compromise, a version that I think is reasonably acceptable to all Canadians.

It is a very important bill, but unfortunately we are dealing with legislation that has the possibility of interfering with the rights of property owners, which is one of the things about the species at risk bill. It requires the protection of habitat, mostly on public lands indeed, and sets up a regime for the protection of habitat and the protection of endangered species. That was the subject of a lot of controversy. However finally compromise was reached and I believe the species of risk legislation in the Senate now should be passed and it should not be restarted.

I have this dilemma. I find myself with an amendment to the original motion which I would love to support, but cannot because I really do believe that the species at risk bill must go forward as it has taken literally years to get where it is.

I would point out, however, that the cruelty to animals legislation has no such history. It was, shall we say, sprung on Parliament and on the Liberal caucus out of the blue. It was the result of behind the scenes lobbying from various animal rights organizations which had a better line into policy-makers than perhaps most members of Parliament sometimes have. It is very unfortunate.

The story goes with the rest of the bills that are being brought back.

For the most part, I have to support the main motion because the other bills that are being brought back are non-controversial and need to go forward quickly, in the public interest. By that I mean the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, which is another very important piece of legislation; the Copyright Act, which is in the Senate, and that has been contentious as well, and it is very important that it go forward so that we have security in the whole regime of copyright because there are a lot of problems in copyright legislation right now; the Pest Control Products Act which is in the Senate; and the specific claims resolution act which is in committee. We do not really need to go back to the process with those.

However there are other bills that would be reintroduced at the same level as they were last June that I have reservations about and I would prefer that they be started at the very beginning. One is the assisted human reproduction act, which is in committee. We cannot have too much debate on the subject. This is the whole question of whether embryonic material can be used for research purposes to look for cures for various disease. This is the stem cell debate.

I took part in that debate before second reading. It was one of the most elevated debates I have ever seen in the House of Commons. Both sides were trying to find a way around, a problem that touches the very core of our human values. On the one hand, there are the people who are very afraid that the use of embryonic stem cells will open the door to a disrespect for human life. Then there are the people on the other side of the equation who feel that any type of research or any means that can save lives and who feel that the use of discarded, and I stress discarded, embryonic cells could speed up research that would lead to cures of Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, ALS and all these other diseases is a worthy aim. However that debate is not over.

I would not be opposed to seeing that piece of legislation start again through the process so that we could have a similar debate again because I think it is Parliament at its best, first and foremost, and it is an issue that, because it touches the core values of individual Canadians, really needs to be debated at great depth in the House. I would actually hope that the minister does not reinstate it at the committee stage and that he actually brings it back as a new bill.

The other bill that I would like to see started at the very beginning is the first nations governance act. Again this is very important legislation. If it is reinstated, it will be in committee. We did not have enough debate on that. The message is not going out clearly enough, particularly to the aboriginal community, that this legislation, of all the bills before the House, is tremendously good for Canada's native people. It would require aboriginal organizations to have democratic elections and to open their financial books to scrutiny.

Right now we know, and nobody likes to hear it, that all kinds of money goes to aboriginal communities and never reaches the people. This is federal money that just never gets to the people who need it. Therefore, we have this peculiar situation where the federal government is putting out many billions of dollars to assist Canada's aboriginals and that money is just not getting there. The reason the money is not getting there is that the aboriginal people themselves cannot see how that money is being managed.

I think all Canadians should support transparency and accountability. It is a given. Unfortunately, that bill, particularly because of its timing in the life of the House this past year, did not get the debate it deserves. Therefore, I would like to see it actually restarted.

Again, I am in this quandary. I have to support the main motion because, quite apart from the bills I think need to go forward immediately, what is even more crucial to me and what is key, and I am directing this right at the opposition members who are giving me very good attention and I thank them, is the motion would reinstate evidence before committees.

That has two consequences. It means that the evidence the committee on public accounts, of which I was a member, heard pertaining to the sponsorship files, all this notorious stuff about organizations, businesses in Quebec receiving government money to provide advice to the government on sponsorship, the advertising of or putting forward of the government logo, would be reinstated. There was I think quite a justifiable concern when the Auditor General and others reported that there appeared to be no records kept of these transactions, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, and little evidence that any work was actually done. Public accounts heard evidence on this.

Public accounts tends to work in a very non-partisan way. I think all members of public accounts felt that we had done a good job in hearing evidence. We felt that we had a report that was of great value to the House. However, unless this motion goes forward in allowing the reinstatement of evidence before committees, the House will never hear its report. I think it is so important that the committee hear what we have to say on an issue that caused great discomfort to members on the government side, in the front benches.

The other committee that had evidence before it that we need to see reinstated is the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, which heard a lot of evidence about the need to reform private members' business. It heard from MPs on all sides of the House. This is a terribly important issue to private members. As the situation stands now the whole business of bringing forward private members' legislation is totally flawed. If a member tries to bring forward a bill of value, it may be defeated for partisan and political reasons. That is not acceptable. It is not acceptable that private members' business can be interfered with by the leadership of any party, for example. That is the situation right now.

After much debate, the procedures and House affairs committee recommended that all private members' bills be votable, at least one member per session. What it means basically is that each MP will be entitled to put forward, per parliamentary session, one bill and that bill, no matter what it contains, would be votable. It would go before the House to be debated. The system now is a blind lottery. It is a flawed committee process that sees very good initiatives from both opposition and government MPs fail.

What has happened is the Stanting Committee on Procedures and House Affairs has tabled the report on that debate, has made that recommendation, and all that needs to happen is for the government to adopt that report and then there will be a change in the Standing Orders that will permit private members' bills to be votable. With prorogation that is lost unless the evidence of committees is reinstated as proposed in this motion. Then of course we would expect the government would reissue the same report that it tabled last June. I can say that if it did not, there would certainly be trouble on this side, not to mention, I am sure, the other side.

There it is. It is a dilemma. The motion is to reinstate bills and evidence before committees to the same status that these bills and evidence were before prorogation last June.

Mr. Speaker, no matter what side of the House, one always finds oneself in the position where one is forced to support a flawed motion or a flawed piece of legislation. I would certainly support this motion, but I can tell you one thing, Mr. Speaker: If this motion goes forward I can assure you that on this side of the House there will be pressure put on the individual ministers to make changes to one or two of those bills, because the thing about the motion is that these bills can only come back at the status they left the House last June if the minister reintroduces them without changes.

I would suggest to you, Mr. Speaker, that perhaps the Minister of Justice make a little change to the cruelty to animals legislation, forcing it to go back to the beginning. Perhaps the Indian Affairs minister could make a little change to the Indian accountability act that would force it to go back to the beginning. Maybe the health minister could do the same thing with the assisted reproduction act.

So even though I would have supported the amendment proposed originally, I cannot support it now because I want to see the species at risk bill go forward, but I do hope that the Minister of Justice will have second thoughts about the cruelty to animals bill because we do not like it over here. A lot of us have a lot of reservations about it. I would love to see it go back to the beginning again because I doubt if it would survive the process a second time.

Having said all of that, let me say that even if this motion goes forward--and the motion will go forward, I am sure it will pass the House--there will be those of us on this side and those on that side, Mr. Speaker, who will be working on the ministers to try to persuade them that certain of those bills should be started at the very beginning and perhaps some of them will come out of the process much better than they certainly are in their current state.

[Inky Mark, Canadian Alliance, Dauphin—Swan River, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in the debate on the government's amendment to shut down debate in the House, which is called closure. Should I be surprised? Not really. Nothing has really changed in the House since the Liberal government came to power in 1993. In fact, we heard this morning from other members of the opposition that the Liberals have already established a record of closing debate in this democratic House. I believe it has been over 70 times

I would like to talk about the democratic deficit of the government and the whole issue of prorogation as well as some of the bills that the government wants to bring back to the House.

It is rather ironic that throughout the summer we read newspaper articles on comments made by Liberal members about the democratic deficit in Parliament. Here again we have, in the second week of Parliament, another example of why this place is in deficit when it comes to practising democratic values.

It is also unfortunate that the government House leader could not come to an agreement with the opposition House parties that would have avoided the situation that obviously led the government side to bring in a motion to shut down debate again.

The first thing on which members of the Liberal Party need to be reminded is that they rarely listen to Canadians. They do a lot of talking about consulting and listening but when it comes to putting their beliefs into practice usually it does not work out very well.

On the whole issue of proroguing the House and returning two weeks later, I had no complaints because I am always busy at home doing constituency work. However, in terms of delaying the House business for two weeks and then coming back here today with the government asking to almost reverse the process of prorogation, in other words, bringing the legislation that died on the order paper back into the House at this point in time, is rather a mockery.

It tells me that the throne speech, this whole business of going through the motions at the beginning of last week, was really all for show and for nothing else. I have been told that when we have a throne speech the government is supposed to put in place a new agenda, a new set of legislation that it wants to put through the House. Obviously, there is nothing new. We see the request of the government to bring back into the House old pieces of legislation which leads me to believe that we really did not need to prorogue the House in the first place.

I would like to comment on some of the bills that the government wants to bring back which are very contentious. It seems to be in the order of the day for the government to divide Canadians along the lines of urban and rural. We know for a fact that 80% of Canadians live in urban centres. That is probably the reason they would rather support the urban type legislation and many times forget about the effect they have in the rural communities.

Bill C-5 is a good example, the cruelty to animals legislation. My riding of Dauphin—Swan River is a very agricultural based riding. It is truly the backbone of our economy, the way our economic health is determined by the health of the agriculture industry. This bill really could be called a pet bill if someone did not know what it was. It is about the protection of pets. I do not think there is a Canadian who would disagree with the principal premise of this bill, of cruelty to animals, not only pets but also animals that we raise for food.

I believe farmers throughout the country agree that we need to treat all animals in the right manner. We live in the 21st century. We do not believe in beating animals, beating our children or beating our pets. The problem is that the way the legislation is written it could have a huge impact on people raising animals for the purpose of producing food for Canadians.

That leads me to make another statement which is that the government really does not value the whole food production industry. With that kind of bill it certainly does not respect or have any value for the people putting food on the table with reference to the raising of animals.

Another very contentious bill and one that was mentioned this morning is Bill C-15B, the species at risk bill. It would have a huge impact. Canadians have a great interest in our environment. In our nature as Canadians, we are environmentalists. The problem is we need to also look at the pitfalls of bills such as Bill C-15B and the impact they would have on people who live in the rural parts of the country. Farmers already are very aware of species that are at risk and do their utmost. They leave land untilled and leave an environment that is conducive to helping the species survive. We see that throughout this country. However, if it is legislated into law the demands on lands, and with absolutely no reasonable approach to compensation, it would create a conflict between rural Canadians and urban Canadians.

Unfortunately the government has a track record of dividing Canadians along urban-rural lines. I do not need to remind Canadians and certainly the Liberal government how the gun control bill, Bill C-68 has done exactly that. In fact, Bill C-68 is still paramount in the minds of most Canadians. It has absolutely nothing to do with the intent of the bill, which is to reduce violence in our society with which we all agree as Canadians. The problem is that the Liberals do not understand that the use of firearms as a tool is a way of life in rural Canada. Every time we look at a firearm, it is not a dangerous piece of material by itself. It is the person behind it and the person using it. In fact it has created a mess. The firearm registration system for long guns is a disaster. As Canadians know, we have had handgun registration in the country for over 60 years. Unfortunately, with the mixing of the two, even that registration system will be a mess.

On top of that, we talk about the financial deficit of the military. We are wasting over $1 billion on the long gun registration which easily could have been put into health care or put toward the needs of the military.

Another contentious bill in the eyes of aboriginal Canadians is Bill C-61, the first nations governance bill. The biggest criticism of the bill was that it lacked consultation with the first nations communities. Let me say that not all first nations agree with that comment. The minister has said that he himself consulted with many first nations communities.

I will close by saying that the Liberals as usual do not walk the talk. They tend to do a lot of talking. They have a history of that. Most Canadians agree that the whole political system needs an overhaul. Certainly we should begin in the House. It is really called democracy. If we are really to practise democracy then let us begin in the House.