Mr. Speaker, I was a bit surprised that the government member spoke to our motions in this group before the Reform Party had spoken, but I am glad he did.
I am very pleased to hear the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra thinks we should not consult with provinces like British Columbia that he is from. He thinks we should not have any obligation to talk to the various users and beneficiaries, for example the Marine Advisory Board. He thinks that we should not talk to any of these people, that it would be time consuming. He is right. It would be a total waste of time because clearly the minister of oceans does not listen to anybody anyway.
The Reform Party believes in the user pay concept but it also believes in-and I think I have even heard a few Liberals use it-user pay, user say. That has not happened. Furthermore, it is abundantly clear from the words of the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra that they have no intention of changing their tune and giving the users any say or any input into the various fees and policies they come up with.
I am not a regular member of the committee that dealt with the matter but I sat in on a lot of the meetings. It was pretty clear what was being said by the users the government was pretending to consult with. They understood the user pay concept, the need for them to pay for the services they used, and they are to do that. However first they wanted to make sure they were paying a reasonable amount for it. They had no idea of the true costs of the coast guard.
They are prepared to pay for them but they should be implemented after an economic impact study to determine the real costs and how to bring them forward in a manner that does cripple the industry.
I have risen in the House several times and referred to the minister as the minister of oceans. I specifically and intentionally leave off fisheries. It is not the minister himself, but certainly the department has all but destroyed the east coast fisheries and many species over the years. Now it is doing a hell of a job of doing the same thing on the west coast. If the bill were implemented in an irresponsible and improperly thought out and possibly premature manner, it would do the same thing to the oceans the minister's department has done to the fisheries.
The Reform Party policy dealing with user pay has three basic concepts: first, the users should pay for what they use; second, they should only have to use those things they need; and, third, it should be on a commercially fair and reasonable basis.
With regard to the coast guard, it has not opened its books. We do not even know if it keeps books, in the regular concept of it. We do not know if there somewhere sits a coast guard as a business with a ledger showing its expenses, its revenues, where it spends money, where its costs are, and what it is doing to control costs. There is none of that. Nobody has opened the books.
The coast guard is saying: "Trust us. There is a lot of costs out there and you should pay them". Then it says: "We are even going to be real fair in implementing this. We are only going to charge you 20 per cent so how can you possibly object?"
If the 20 per cent represents 100 per cent or more of the reasonable costs of that portion of the service they are applying to cost recovery and to the marine users, perhaps they are paying too much.
The coast guard says this is something the users should be able to absorb without any harm. The minister says that yes, a study is need but he has done one. He has consulted with the Mariport group which stated in a report that the users are going to be able to accept the impact of this with no harm.
Why should we believe some of the other things we are being told if this is the justification the minister is using? The person from Mariport who did the report has recanted the entire report. The report found there would be no unbearable impact and that these costs could be absorbed based on the information the department supplied.
The department changed all of the parameters after the report came in. The department told the consultant it was going to do this, this and this, (a), (b) and (c). On the basis of that the department wanted a study done to see if it was feasible and absorbable by the users. The department then turned around after the fact and said it was going to scrap (a), modify (b), double (c) and add (d), (e), (f) and (g). The consultant said they were now looking at fees that were four times as much as what they were led to believe would be imposed when they did the study. There is no credibility at all in the ministry or in the minister in the way these fees have been introduced.
As far as an impact study, the minister has said there should be an economic impact study. That is a great idea. It is exactly what the users asked for so it seems they may be on line. The only problem is that the users said they needed to do an impact study to see how to implement this and the minister said something totally different. He said they were going to go ahead and implement it.
The minister's own notes state that they know there will be damage and problems; they know there will be loss of business to American shippers which is going to cause problems. He stated they are going to wait and see what kind of devastation the bill does on the industry and then do an economic impact study to see what they did wrong and how much damage it caused. That is a pretty backward way of approaching this.
Reform has a total of six amendments and the Bloc has two in this group. Contrary to what the hon. member for Vancouver Quadra said, we do not think it is unreasonable to consult with people. In fact, we are here as the representatives of people, at least that is what I and my colleagues in the Reform Party are here for. We did not get elected to be the rulers.
It is absolutely despicable that the Liberal Party says it should have no obligation to consult with the provinces that are impacted by this. It says it should have absolutely no requirement to talk to the marine advisory board which is supposed be the expert on this. It says it should have no obligation whatsoever to talk to the users who are going to be impacted by this. Given that the Liberals never listen when people do talk, I suppose they are trying to save the taxpayers money by not bothering with a process that they will end up ignoring.
Contrary to what the hon. member says, I implore members opposite to join with us in bringing in reasonable measures. We need measures that limit the powers of the minister and ministers who follow him in the future, that limit the powers of the government, and which make it necessary that we, the elected representatives of the people, must actually talk to the people so we know what it is they want us to represent.