Madam Speaker, as I sat listening to the speeches it really struck me what a menace this minister is. She truly is a menace.
When we think about the history of the bills and acts she has introduced and the actions she has taken in parliament she truly is a menace. Just a short time ago I remember seeing a news item on television where she was taking a swim in a polluted part of Lake Ontario. It had been approved safe to swim there. Obviously it was not cleaned up enough and corrupted her thinking in terms of sensible legislation. I do not know why her cabinet colleagues continue to humour her this much, to allow her to introduce this type of legislation, especially when we consider her history.
This is the minister who introduced a ban on the transportation of MMT. When she could not get the health department to prove to her that MMT was harmful she introduced a ban on transportation. What could be more ridiculous than that? No wonder we ended up in a fight with the United States over that. It cost us close to $100 million by the time the dust settled.
Then we had the flag fiasco. Remember that nonsense the minister ran for about a year and a half where she gave away flags, putting Canadian businesses out of work. I had people in my riding who make their living selling Canadiana who were begging with me to stop this minister from being in competition with them, giving away Canadian flags. How much did that cost us in the end? It cost $14 million for a complete fiasco which actually put people out of business. There was loss taxation and lost jobs on top of the actual cost to the treasury.
The heritage department was reported by the auditor general a month ago to be in complete disarray. It has no idea what it is spending the money on or why. The auditor general gave examples of programs that should be in completely different departments. For example, the minister's department produced a brochure on alternatives to physically disciplining children published in 16 languages, including French and English. It is unimaginable the waste that goes on.
We heard recently the minister's department gave $80,000 to a Montreal publisher to produce a book on blonde jokes. Another example is a conference to discuss promoting science and technology programs in schools for a specific racial group. A further program she funded was a conference for aboriginals on adolescent issues.
We have to ask ourselves, with this sort of history, the actions of her department and the bills that are coming in, how we can tolerate anything at all that the minister brings before us.
We have the example of the previous magazine bill that she brought before the last parliament. What a fiasco that was. Although we did not end up with the compensations we had to pay for the MMT fiasco, I will bet there were tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, human capital, resources, use of copiers and travel, all the things that went into that appeal and the challenge that took place under NAFTA.
It appears that everything the minister touches turns to poop. I hope you do not mind me saying that, Madam Speaker, but that is to put it mildly.
It makes me think of the complaints I receive in my riding about the CRTC which tries to impose through the minister culture upon the people of Canada. When a new Canadian station starts up, whether or not it is even commercially viable, whether it is mediocre or excellent, cable users are forced to pay for it and it is forced into an unimpaired part of the channel spectrum on cable. Some other channel people were getting before goes into the nether regions of space where they have to pay for an additional package to get it.
I know these sorts of complaints come to every member of the House. This is a misguided attempt to force upon people something on which they should be able to have free choice. All the things the minister is doing should be based on choice. The people producing them should have to produce excellence instead of mediocrity if they want to be accepted.
My original home country, New Zealand, went through quite an upheaval in the early nineties. It cut the size of government from something like 80,000 federal employees down to about 45,000 people today. That does not sound like much by Canadian standards but it is for New Zealand, a small country. Almost 10 years later it is running with half the people it had in 1993.
Part of the program system it had involved cultural controls, subsidies to protect New Zealand culture. It was exactly the same nonsense we have here. TV and radio stations had to have a certain amount of New Zealand content. With the upheaval in the New Zealand economy and the restructuring there was the abandonment of that approach.
After an initial faltering the culture industry in New Zealand took off because it offered opportunities for entrepreneurs and private people to put money into the system. It started to become excellent instead of mediocre. It managed to produce films like The Piano which was sold worldwide and appeared on screens all over the world, something that had never happened from New Zealand before. Mutiny on the Bounty was made there as a result of encouragement of culture. People were encouraged to come from the outside and use New Zealand talent.
The point that I am illustrating is that every attempt the minister makes to compel Canadians to go along with her plans to absorb more Canadian content is a disaster. They are a complete and utter failure. They cost us hundreds of millions of dollars and achieve absolutely nothing except to make Canadians irritated and angry about what the minister is trying to do.
The minister should be telling the people making their livings off the grants and subsidies she hands out that they are on their own. They should prove to Canadians that they can produce excellent quality material and the viewers and readers will come and they will be successful. She is not doing these cultural groups any favours at all by giving them constant subsidies.
Some of my colleagues have mentioned that we are threatening the billion dollars a day in the trade we do with our biggest trading partner all over a few arguments about advertising in magazines. It is quite clear, from the way the bill is constructed, that we would not just have the Americans challenging us. We will have Canadians taking us to court if the bill is enacted. People will ask what right the Minister of Canadian Heritage has to stop them from advertising where they want to advertise. There will be challenges.
Mr. Speaker, you always enjoy it when I make speech when you are on duty. I am pleased you have taken the chair. It is a shame you were not here before because you missed the best part about the minister being a menace and how everything she introduces turns to poop.
The national publicity the bill has received over the last week has finally brought some sense to the minister. She realizes, with the uprising in her own riding, that this attempt to protect Canadian culture at the expense of everything else is a silly fiasco. If the magazines are worth reading they will be purchased by Canadians and there will be advertisers in them. Let us get that out of the way.
We have to remember as well that only about 5% of all magazines sold in Canada are sold off magazine racks. Yet we hear all this weeping and wailing about how 80% of the magazines on the racks are from foreigners. Most of the magazines in Canada are delivered through subscriptions or through delivery along with the local newspapers or by free drop off at the door.
There is plenty of opportunity in magazines for advertisers and Canadian content. In committee representatives of the Canadian industry admitted that their biggest competition was from Canadian industry, not from across the border.
What have we done here? We have used a great big sledgehammer in an attempt to take care of a tiny, little problem that should be resolved by people in the industry sitting down with their counterparts across the border and seeing if they can work out natural trade relationships where they share advertising and editorial space. Let us use creative thinking at the commercial level instead of the nonsense that the minister keeps introducing. I urge all members to vote against the bill.