Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure for me to speak to the international space agency bill today.
I say to the member of the Bloc who just spoke that during the course of my comments I will be addressing a couple of private members' bills the member has brought forward on the ratification of international treaties. I know it is of interest to him, as it is to me. I look forward to supporting his bill, if it ever comes to the House for a vote.
It is another one of those strange coincidences on how a populist party will agree on some of the broad issues about the necessity of consulting parliament on issues of national and international concern. The member of the Bloc and I may have disagreements about many things, but the priority of making the House relevant has to do with allowing us to deal with meaty issues, big important issues not after they are a fait accompli but during the ratification process.
I encourage the member to continue with his private member's initiative. I look forward to one day debating and hopefully approving that private member's bill.
The bill we are talking about today deals with the civil international space station, the funding required and the co-operative efforts of the Government of Japan, the Government of the Russian federation, the Government of the United States, the European Space Agency and ourselves to put together the space station in the years to come.
This leads me to talk about the station and about five truths that we can get from this bill. There are five principles that I think are true in the bill and are true in many of the bills we discuss.
First is the truth of fiscal matters. This bill involves the expenditure of well over a billion dollars. It is a long range commitment of Canada to the international space agency. It is not a one time budgetary expenditure. If we are to be a serious player in the international space agency, we have to commit to it in the long term.
When talking about numbers this large, over a billion dollars over the course of the next few years, it is important that we also say that government spending is about priorities. It is about picking and choosing the things we can and should be involved in as a country and as parliament. By doing that we also say there are some things we are not going to spend money on. In other words, we cannot be all things to all people. We have to pick the issues that we think governments can address. Once we make those choices, some things are approved and some things are rejected. It is up to us to pick and choose between them.
Personally, I think this is going to be money well spent. I hope that 10 years from now we will look back and, as what the Canadarm did for us in the aerospace industry, our participation in the space station will have brought awareness to Canadian talents and expertise in engineering and so on. I hope it will be the next big boost to the Canadian aeronautical industry. This money will be seen as money well spent. I hope that years from now people will thank this parliament for having approved this expenditure and for having made this international commitment.
It is true that a billion dollars is a lot of money. It reminds me that many people in British Columbia are saying that we also made choices last night when we committed to the Nisga'a agreement. We said there was a billion dollars. We made a priority choice that the money spent not just by this parliament but by the B.C. legislature was a priority and it would be well spent. This parliament and the government have said that we will look back years from now and be grateful that we spent it. How can that be true?
In the case of the Nisga'a agreement, how can we say that we are going to perpetuate a system of treaties and separateness for one group of people over another group and treat them differently on things like property rights, the rights of women and the rights of people to vote for the government that taxes them? How can we say that a billion dollars spent to perpetuate the current reserve system in Canada is money well spent?
Most Canadians will say that we should move forward on the space station. It binds all the provinces. It is a good project for the federal government. It deals with international relations. We are going to get some other side benefits from it. It affects all of us. All of us are in favour of it, so let us move it forward. I think we are going to find that that is basically going to be the case.
For many people however, and in British Columbia at least where they understand the Nisga'a agreement, that is not the case. Once they know about the Nisga'a agreement, the majority of British Columbians say that they do not approve of the current expenditures on Nisga'a. More important, they do not agree with the principle behind it.
The principle is that a system that has been proven to be a failure over the past 130 years has been enshrined in our constitution at the next level in the Nisga'a agreement. Some money has been thrown at it in the hope that a giant collectivity called the Nisga'a government will somehow be all things to all people in that environment and it will somehow make life better for them for all time.
That is not a good expenditure of money. More important, it is not a sound principle to treat one group of people separately, to give them a different set of laws, a different set of privileges, a different set of rights, one from another and think it is a good thing for Canada. It is almost the same amount of dollars we are talking about for the space agency but it takes us down a path I think most Canadians will not support.
It is interesting how we can all rally around the flag on the space station idea. We see the benefits for all Canadians, Nisga'a and non-Nisga'a, aboriginal and non-aboriginal, immigrants and non-immigrants. Everyone will benefit from it. But the same amount of dollars being spent on the Nisga'a agreement is driving a wedge between people rather than bringing people together.
That is the first truth. The truth about fiscal matters is that each decision we make means not only that the taxpayer is footing the bill but that there is something else we cannot afford to do because we spent that billion dollars. A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon we are talking real money.
The second truth is the truth about democracy that I get from the debate we are having today. It is interesting. The reason we are talking about the international space agency bill today is that last night the government rammed through the second reading stage of Nisga'a. After four hours of debate it brought in time allocation which means that it is all over but the crying and the soft music by the end of the day. That is what happened last night. We had four hours of debate. The B.C. legislature had four weeks of debate, the longest debate in the history of B.C., on the Nisga'a agreement. But here we did not have a long debate. We did not even have one week of debate. We did not even approach a record of any kind except for a record number of times for the application of time allocation.
We can learn a lesson about democracy. The truth is that we are only on this bill today because yesterday we saw what the B.C. Liberal leader called a reprehensible demonstration of undemocratic government. It was a reprehensible example from over there. The leader of the B.C. Liberal Party was appalled at what he saw going on here in the House.
We are on this bill today, rather than talking about having a big principled debate about the future role for aboriginal people within Canada, because democracy fell on its sword yesterday. That is an absolute truth. People who review what went on yesterday in the House will know that to be true. For a record number of times the government has said: “If there is dissent, opposition or a problem, we will bring in closure and shut down the debate”. The Liberals have done it more times now than Brian Mulroney did in his heyday.
The Liberals brought it in on Bill C-78, the public servants pension fund. They scooped the excess out of that fund. We opposed the bill. We debated it for one hour and they brought in closure and shut down the debate.
Today's debate is on a kind of motherhood and apple pie issue. We all want the space station. We all think it is a good idea which should move forward. But it is bittersweet. Instead of relishing the debate and being able to focus only on the space station, we are left with a bad taste in our mouths. Yesterday was a travesty of justice and democracy and that is why we are on this bill today.
That is the truth about democracy in this place. It does not happen like Canadians think it happens. The government pushes through, rams through and shoves through anything it wants that is the least bit contentious. That is where we are at today.
The Bloc member who has a private member's bill on the approval of international treaties will be pleased that at least this bill is before the House for ratification. This is rare in international agreements. It does not happen very often. Whether it is behind closed doors negotiations on the multilateral agreement on investment, the next phase of the WTO, the Kyoto agreement or other UN forums, time and again, it is just brought back to us here by fiat.
A minister will say “While I was away last weekend sunning myself wherever, I signed an agreement and it binds Canada for the rest of our lives”. We will read about the details in the paper but we are not allowed to debate them, discuss them, amend them, propose alternatives, inform Canadians, travel the country or do any of the democratic things that Canadians assume are happening.
It is like the Nisga'a agreement again. We were delivered a document that said it is the enabling legislation. It is just a few short pages, but there are also two thick books and we are not allowed to change, amend or alter in any way a dot, jot or a tittle in the entire Nisga'a agreement. It came here as a done deal.
People think we come here to debate the issues. They wonder whether the environmental part of that agreement is too strong or not strong enough. What about the conflicting jurisdictions between the province, the feds and the Nisga'a governments? Could there be some better language? No, it is brought forward as perfection. The government says that a few people negotiated it behind closed doors and the 301 members of parliament are just window dressing.
The government brings it here because it technically has to, but the truth is that the Liberals do not respect this place at all. They disrespect the opinions of members of parliament. They disrespect the entire contingent of people in the official opposition who have concerns about it and who would like to see a different process that we would hope would clarify some of the 50 unsettled sidebar agreements that have to go into the Nisga'a agreement. We would like to see those clarified before we stick up our hands and vote yes.
The Liberals ignored all of that. Any concerns we have are written off as sour grapes, bad attitude or whatever they want to chalk it up to, instead of saying that this place should be supreme and should have some pre-eminence in the political life of the country. Instead, the Liberals defer to the backroom negotiations. They defer to the behind the scenes stuff. They defer to the courts. They defer to the tribunals. They defer to anything, except to the seat of democracy which is this place. It is discouraging.
If a young person who wanted to influence the future of the country were to ask me if he or she should follow in my footsteps in Fraser Valley, I would say, “Well, I suppose you could, but if I were you I would get a seat on the supreme court. That is where it is happening”. I might even tell that young person to get on as a delegate at the United Nations or at one of the NGOs because they negotiate and settle things that we as parliamentarians are not even allowed to debate. We are not even allowed to know what they are discussing. It just comes back to us, pressed down and rolled over. We are expected to shrug our shoulders and say “Look what they negotiated for us today”.
At least in the space agency agreement we can see what was negotiated. We may not have had a hand in the negotiations, but at least we can see what we are committed to in terms of money and what the structure of the management team will be. We can talk about a lot of that stuff, and to me it looks pretty good. At least we get to vote on it.
If young people asked me today if this was the place where big changes will be made and big decisions will be made, I would have to say, under the current government, sadly, no. They will have to wait for a change in government, because the attitude on that side of the House is “It is our way or the highway”. The government's highway involves time allocation, closure, lack of consultation and bypassing parliamentarians in favour of special interest groups which government members say know more than the people who were elected to this place.
That is the truth about democracy. That is why we are debating this bill today. All of those other things I mentioned are absolutely true. People can look at what happened yesterday. Yesterday democracy took the fall for the expediency of this government.
Another thing I would like to talk about briefly is the truth about intellectual property rights, because a lot of what will be developed on this space station will become valuable. There will be an exchange of information and there will be scientific data developed, which is key to the success of the project. The reason all of these countries are getting together is to develop intellectual property which will be beneficial to those living on Earth. It could be anything from the development of future medicines to things which are happening on Earth which can be observed from space. All of that will become incredibly valuable.
What about intellectual property rights? More important, what about property rights in general? What about the property rights that the government has never recognized? I think most Canadians watching would say “Yes, but I own my house. That is my property. It is mine”. I am sorry to break the news to those people, but this government does not recognize property rights.
During the Charlottetown accord debate one of the big problems in my area, and I cannot speak for the whole country, was that we wanted to include the right to own property and to develop intellectual property rights because the ability to have property rights is the cornerstone to the development of assets, wealth and prosperity for any people. The fact that the government does not seem to be concerned about intellectual property rights and about property rights in general is a very alarming leftover from its socialist roots. It just believes that property is communally owned. We do not have to worry about property rights because we are all together. What we have to do is hug one another. If we hug one another and love one another things will be fine.
Where are the property rights, for example, for aboriginal women on Nisga'a reserves? When there is a divorce, the property that people enjoyed during the years they were married has to be separated. We have a long set of rules governing most of Canada which set out how the property will be divided, what the paternal and maternal rights will be, and rules governing the visitation of children.
If a person does not own anything personally, if it is all owned by the Nisga'a government, guess what? The aboriginal women will get short shrift down the road because they do not own the houses they live in. They are sitting on communal property which is owned by the Nisga'a. The whole territory is owned communally. Rather than having individual property rights and being able to enhance the value of the property, to make sales, to use that land to develop wealth and opportunities, the Nisga'a agreement will unfortunately not allow that.