Mr. Speaker, today we are debating Bill C-5, which has been around for a while and which deals with the Canadian Tourism Commission. The purpose of this bill is to transform the CTC from a special operating agency into a crown corporation.
I must tell the House from the outset that the Bloc Quebecois will not be supporting this bill for a number of reasons, which I will state during my speech.
First of all, we must ask ourselves what are the objectives pursued by the government in passing such a bill. There has been a growing tendency over the last few years within government in general, but even more so within this federal government, to take public funds and put them into an agency of some kind outside the government, an agency which is often run by friends of the government and which, for all intents and purposes, is not accountable directly to parliament.
In the case of the Canadian Tourism Commission, the federal government puts $65 million into that agency each year. The board of directors will be appointed by the minister, who will maintain that power. However, if there is ever a problem or if there is a policy with which parliament as a whole disagrees, we can anticipate what the minister's answer will be when he is questioned about that. He will say “Look, they are independent, they are the ones in charge of managing this Crown corporation”. The government will just wash its hands of all that.
Let us not forget that the money going to this organization comes from the taxpayers and that parliament will essentially lose control over the management of public funds.
What was the reason given for taking such an approach since the beginning of the debate on the Canadian Tourism Commission over a year ago, especially during the last weeks in committee? Flexibility. Commission and government officials say “More partnership with the private sector will be possible. It will be simpler and the rules will be more flexible”. As if it were impossible to figure out why a special section of a department is not able to give itself more flexible and faster rules for partnerships with the private sector.
One example has been given. It was the only one, because concrete examples have been very rare, as if mere mention of a vague principle were enough to make it true. We were told that partnership would be easier and flexible. Oh really, and why? No witness had an answer for that, except for the one who said “For example, selling advertising or soliciting revenue is easier for a crown corporation than for a special service of the government. If, for example, there is an internet site looking for business or selling advertising, that will be easier”.
There is a risk of this happening more and more in future. Why not look at the internal rules that make this partnership complicated to set up? All the other departments might benefit from this. The government as a whole could be made more efficient. We are not required to create a crown corporation in order to do so.
If the federal government wants to be more efficient, let us talk about tourism in its broadest sense. Who is involved in this area? There is the Canadian Tourism Commission, which receives $65 million yearly. There are the economic development agencies. In the case of Quebec, it is Economic Development Canada. There are also other agencies for the other regions.
These too spend money to fund projects locally, whether infrastructure, promotional plans or any other program. In Quebec, Canada Economic Development is spending money. The Canadian Tourism Commission has money to promote Canada in broad terms. That said, part of its budget still goes for promotional purposes within Quebec. We were told it represented 7% of its budget.
I will discuss this a little later in greater detail. There is also Attractions Canada, which spends $4 million annually. Who manages Attractions Canada? The Minister of Public Works, the one managing the CIO and administering another $40 million budget, the federal government's sponsorship budget, whose presence is strongly felt at festivals and tourist events.
This same minister, who might be described as being in charge of patronage, or nearly, has two tourism budgets in his control. If the federal government wanted to be more effective, it could first put this money into a single agency. I am saying this without getting into a debate over whether the provinces would be in a better position, or, in some cases, the municipalities that do this. We would much prefer a Quebec tourism promotion plan, sold under the aegis of Quebec, with our own events, our own festivals and our own label. Our tourism product is sold differently from Canada's.
In case the Liberals forget, even if they are the ones reminding us from time to time, though as little as possible, we are distinct and different. So we do not sell Quebec as they sell Canada internationally. We would prefer to have that money along with our taxes in order to manage it ourselves.
That said, as we know about their obsession with visibility and their desire to manage, let them clean up their own yard. Let them dig in the pockets of the minister of public works to see if there is anything there.
I am going to give the example of Attractions Canada. Because, after a long battle in committee, we managed to have these obscure people from the Attractions Canada program testify.
Just look at how things work. These $4 million are given to the Everest group, the buddies of the party, so that it will manage that money on behalf of the federal government. The Everest group is not subject to the same constraints, to the same transparency rules and so on. The government gave $4 million to buddies. They must get a cut on that. I do not know how much, but we will eventually find out. And these people sponsor or display advertising on huge Mediacom billboards, and it is signed Attractions Canada.
Strangely enough, the government did not create a crown corporation for that purpose. It would rather create partnerships with the private sector. It has such partnerships with Cadbury, Via Rail—although Via Rail is not quite a private company and the government gives it a lot of support—and others.
With the money he has in his pockets, the Minister of Public Works is capable of creating partnerships with the private sector. But it did not seem to be the case at Industry Canada. So, a crown corporation was established.
The pattern will be the same. Money will again be given out, and who is to say that it will not also become some kind of a propaganda agency? So, the minister of public works will award contracts to his buddies, while appointments will be made at the agency. We are very concerned by all this.
I do not doubt that there are people within the commission who are full of good intentions. But once the directors have been appointed or approved by cabinet, on the recommendation of the Minister of Industry, might they not conveniently forget that they are accountable to the minister?
I too am concerned about the principle of accountability in the management of public funds. I have in my hands the 1998 report of the Canadian Tourism Commission. I will not show it to the House, because props are not permitted. I challenge the House to find in this annual report the public money contributed. The $65 million from taxpayers is mentioned nowhere in the report.
We see how they spent all the money they collected—the partnerships with the private sector and so on—but nowhere is it mentioned that this money comes from taxpayers, to the tune of $65 million for the federal contribution. There are also contributions from provincial governments and municipalities, and other public agencies. So there is a real problem.
There is also the case of the Office du tourisme et des congrès du Grand Montréal, a group that appeared before the committee. These folks appeared, claiming to be private partners. I was very surprised and I asked questions.
Of this organization's $15 million budget, $1 million comes from each level of government—the municipality, the Government of Quebec and the federal government. That accounts for $3 million. Another $4 million comes from private enterprise, and $8 million comes from a tax on hotel rooms in Montreal of $2 a night.
Mr. Lapointe, the former Liberal minister who now directs the office, told me in committee that this $8 million was private funding, as though no legislation had been necessary to give him the right to levy a tax of $2 a night. I am not kidding—that was what I was told.
Sorry, but when the figures are added up at the Commission on interventions by a body such as that, and the bulk of them are classified as private interventions, I say wait a minute. We must make not mistake about the Canadian Tourism Commission: it is funded largely by public funds, whether federal, provincial or what not. But for the taxpayer, that is all the same.
Obviously, there will always be a certain number of events and partnerships the commission will be publicizing. Let us look at the whole thing here. In our regions, what organizations or events really benefit?
There are the major events, the major festivals, which manage to get included. A highly select few at the top. As for the others, they do not manage to gain anything from the spill-over effect, and still less so from small direct patronage programs such as Attractions Canada. What events in Quebec regions such as Abitibi—Témiscamingue or others even know such a program exists?
When we asked the public servants in charge, their answer was “All people have to do is to consult our internet site. They will perhaps find that there is some information available”. Yet they did not seem to be very clear themselves on how Everest determined its criteria for handing out money.
There are a lot of problems. Before taking the $65 million in public funds from the commission and making it into an institutionalized crown corporation, some internal housecleaning would be in order.
Representatives of the Professional Institute of the Public Service also came to testify at the hearings. For the rest, for the most part, those who came to defend their viewpoint were former members of the board or people still close to the commission. I do not blame them. They did their job. These people were all connected with the commission.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service appeared near the end. At the same sitting in which we were to begin voting on the bill, we heard these people in the morning, the first to speak out against the bill, and the bill was expected to pass before the end of the session, as if it served no purpose to take a step back and consider their arguments. The government took care to have them testify at the end.
I will read a few quotes from their brief:
The government makes much of the success of the commission since 1995 in promoting and enhancing tourism. Since this is such a success story now, why is there a need to change the crown corporation status?
A very good question. A little further on:
As proposed, the Canadian Tourism Commission will provide nothing new, except for the extra implementation cost. Bill C-5 is a measure that is so vague that employees' rights are not stipulated.
They went on a little further in their brief:
It is the institute's position that an internal adjustment of the special operating agency's powers is the way to continue and add to the success story that began in 1995.
They were therefore saying “Since we are told everything is fine, a few small changes would help us to improve things, without having to create a crown corporation”.
A bit further on, they say:
Therefore, there is no need at this point to engage in any creation of a crown corporation, since the agency can continue to undertake the dialogue, research, and marketing that are necessary in the tourism industry.
Their brief concludes as follows:
The institute feels that the extension of crown corporation status to the Canadian Tourism Commission is a completely unnecessary move, based on the fact that no particular advantage vis-à-vis the tourism industry will be gained.
This is an initial brief. There are also other people who appeared before the committee and questions were asked which, in my view, show how confused the federal government's approach is.
When Mr. Francis, the commission's chairman, appeared before the committee, I asked him about Attractions Canada, which I mentioned earlier. I asked him whether Attractions Canada was part of the Canadian Tourism Commission. He told me it was not. I asked him what then was it was part of and he told me that he thought it was part of the Canada Information Office. That was close; he had the right minister, but it was not the Canada Information Office; it was the Minister of Public Works and Government Services.
I then asked him how the various departments got along together, and this is what he said:
“It is an ongoing challenge, something that we have been attempting to do over the last two or three years”.
People say “We are looking at all this. We do not have much of an idea of how it works, but we are looking at it”. So they came to sell us on the merits of creating a crown corporation out of the commission, but without even having done their own homework within the federal government.
I raised a lot of interesting questions but, in the final analysis, they said they were fully in agreement with what was going on.
I asked some witnesses to give me concrete examples of how partnership with the private sector would be easier if they were a crown corporation. These were people who were very close to the action, people who had sat on the board, or those working in tourism. They had no examples to offer.
I asked Mr. Lapointe of the greater Montreal tourism bureau “Are you familiar with Attractions Canada?” His answer was “Vaguely”. I then asked “Are you familiar with its mandate?” He started to explain to me that there were billboards, and that his understanding was that the purpose was to do this or that type of promotion.
How is it that people involved year in and year out in tourism are not fully familiar with the mandate of Attractions Canada, which spends dollars to promote tourism?
How can it be that they are not familiar with the rules for intervention by the minister through his sponsorship budget which, I might point out in passing, ensures that Quebec gets the lion's share? Yes, there are some programs where Quebec gets more than its share of propaganda, whether in billboards or in Canada Day spending. In this area Quebec gets more than its share.
However, when the time comes to ask the Minister of Industry, for instance, to do his part for a project such as the creation of a semi-conductor plant in Montreal, then the answer is: that takes time, it is complicated, they do not want to set a precedent by using a different approach in Quebec. But when it comes to flags, or what approximates a flag, or to nurture the friends of the government, it is a different matter.
I invite anyone who is interested to reread all that was said during the brief week we studied the matter in committee to see that nothing specific was put before us to enable us to conclude that this step of turning a special service into a crown corporation was necessary.
Naturally, there are the clichés “It is a normal stage of development”, “Partnerships will be easier”, “It will be very flexible”. But in practice, there is no specific proof. When we scratch the surface, we see that there are problems left and right. And I have not spoken in detail of Economic Development Canada, because its representatives did not appear before the committee.
However, in order to hear the others I mentioned, whether it be Attractions Canada, or opinions on sharing jurisdiction, it took a real battle in committee to get the minister himself to come and present his bill. They wanted, on the pretext that it was the end of a session, to hustle it through at committee stage, so as few people as possible would be heard on the potential problems.
Economic Development Canada, this federal government agency whose intervention criteria we will never clearly know, had long been an issue with me. Last year, they toured the various regions of Quebec, and in all the press releases, it was obvious there were funds available for tourism. In certain regions, ours for example, we have learned that they are putting money into one project in particular in order to help fund a regional development or marketing plan, but the criteria are not known in advance to those in the area.
We are told that $1.2 million is available, but we are not told how it will be allocated. When government funding is involved and there is a desire to manage it transparently, how can those in the business be expected to know that they are eligible and apply?
Economic Development Canada tells people to send in their applications and it will examine them. What criteria will apply? Nobody really knows. And then, to justify refusals, all we are told is that it did not meet their priorities. Oh? What priorities? Perhaps my region is an exception, but I do not think so. I think that this goes on in many regions in Quebec and I am certain that it also happens elsewhere with regional development agencies.
There is therefore a serious problem. For a minister who says he is concerned about promoting tourism, he should look at what is going on in his agencies, and do a little housecleaning so that his interventions are a bit more effective.
We know that the federal government will not withdraw from a sector such as tourism. The furthest it has gone is to say in the throne speech that it would try to establish new models of partnership with the provinces. Given its obsession with visibility, that is what it will continue to do. But it should at least start by striving for effectiveness and co-ordination in what it does. That would already be a big step forward.
In short, for reasons of efficiency and out of respect for those who pay taxes and who want transparency in the management of public funds, we cannot support a bill like this, especially when we look at the parallel interventions by the government in sponsorship and tourism, we see that public funds tend to be spent on other things and, under the guise of promoting tourism, provide encouragement to friends, such as those in the Groupe Everest.
Drawing parallels, the same minister manages the Canada Information Office or the federal government Liberal Party office of propaganda.
It may be rather alarming to see that there is still a lot of money: $44 million annually in the case of the minister of public works—this is a lot of money—, $65 million in the case of the Canadian Tourism Commission. Taxpayers pay out a lot of money, and we might as why it is used to fund the promotion of an industry that is currently flourishing.
We must not ignore the fact that the weakness of the Canadian dollar helps a lot to improve tourism both in Quebec and in Canada. I am not saying that the tourism market has not improved, but we must realize that the main factor was the quality of what we have to offer and the fact that our dollar is very weak, making other currencies stronger.
We will vote against this bill. I invite all members of this House to bear in mind the fact that we risk turning this agency into another federal government propaganda agency, yet again.