Madam Speaker, there are two processes governments can use to deal with problems in society. One way is to command or order a result. The former Soviet Union had a command system. In a command system the government orders people to do things and hopes it works out.
The other approach to good public policy is to manage situations so all stakeholders involved in the process co-operate. History and the study of public administration show the second method is far preferable to the first. However the Liberal government chooses the first. It is too much work to do it the other way. It is far easier to get bureaucrats to draw up legislation and regulations that command or order a result.
We pride ourselves on living in a free and democratic society. It would be wise for some of my colleagues across the House to sometimes stand back and ask what the ingredients are of a free and democratic society. One of the things that separates us from countries that are not free and democratic is that we do not convict people of serious offences without a guilty mind. That may be the way of other countries. I am certain the Taliban dealt harshly with a lot of people who did not do anything criminal in their minds.
It is offensive that people could be looking at five year jail sentences and $250,000 fines when they did not have guilty minds and did not intend to cause harm to endangered species. Maybe a lot of folks in Toronto would be guilty of this crime. I am sure the lifestyles of urban people in Toronto and Montreal have a far bigger impact on endangered species than those of farmers and landowners in Canada.
Another ingredient of a free and democratic society is respect for property rights and the freedom of the individual. Increasingly the government is showing a hostile attitude toward individual freedoms and property rights in our society. It is as if the government owned all the property and people had their property at the pleasure of the Liberal government.
There is another thing that bothers me, and we can look at the Booth case in the British system and so on. Free and democratic societies respect privacy. Free and democratic societies do not allow the state to charge into someone's home in the middle of the night to conduct a search and seizure. However the Liberal government allows it. Why does it allow it? It does not allow it with regard to dangerous sexual offenders, terrorists or people like that. It allows it with respect to people who own long guns. They are the people who break the law.
In many respects the name Liberal is becoming the antithesis of liberty and freedom. The Liberals should seriously look at changing their name because it no longer matches up with these concepts.
There are a whole host of examples where the government has an agenda of hostility to rural Canada. It is as if it hired Warren Kinsella to become the general of kicking butt in rural Canada.
There are some species that should be at risk in our society. We should be looking at that. We had the pleasure of having this individual aim his gun at us during the federal election. Now he is aiming the gun at some of his own people and they are starting to get a dose of their own medicine. I think we can all agree that maybe this person should become an endangered species.
I will go through some examples of the continual war on rural Canada the government keeps pushing through. It is shameful. It shows an ignorance of the realities of rural Canada but the government insists on going ahead with it.
A huge bureaucracy in the fisheries department goes around harassing farmers, landowners and local governments for doing such simple things as maintaining bridges and roads, removing hazards in their communities and doing minor ditching. The government imposes huge fines on people for doing things they have been doing for ages. The government is crippling organizations by asking them to do environmental impact studies on the most minor of things. These people do not have the money or resources to get into that sort of thing but the government has done that.
Let us look at the wheat board. Let us suppose an individual is trying to support a family of four. Bankers are knocking on his door, commodity prices are low and he finds a market for his product in the United States. He gets double what he can get in Canada by selling it to the United States. A lot of Liberals feel the U.S. is a great evil empire or dangerous concept, but he takes his grain across the border and sells it to the Americans.
What is the nexus of his crime? Is it selling drugs to youth? Is it violating someone's basic rights and so on? I cannot think of any rights being violated except the farmer's right to make a living. The government turns him into a criminal and puts him in jail for six months. It hauls him to court with irons on his legs as if he were a menace to society. The government targets him to send a message to other farmers that they do not have property rights. If they grow their grain and so on the government will decide who they sell it to, how they sell it and how much money they get. That is the Liberal way. It is not the Canadian way but it is the Liberal way.
Canada has all these livestock, poultry and pork producers who are trying to make a living and keep people fed. Along comes the fanatical animal rights movement and the Liberal government buys it hook, line and sinker. If that became law it would be as negative to the rural way of life as the endangered species legislation. We would have fanatics challenging longstanding agricultural practices, harassing law abiding citizens with unnecessary court proceedings and prosecutions, and putting people further into the hole.
The Liberals like putting people in holes. It is the Liberal way. When they get them in holes they have them under their control. Rather than giving them ladders to climb out they like to dig the holes deeper and impoverish Canadians.
We have the wheat board, the firearms registry, and the endangered species legislation which would have horrendous consequences for accidentally causing damage to endangered species. When we go down the list we wonder what the government is up to. Liberals pander to real criminals. They make sure someone serving 25 years with eligibility for parole has the right to vote in federal elections. That is important. The government does not register dangerous sexual offenders. That would be going too far. However it is perfectly okay to register all law abiding citizens in Canada who have long barrel rifles. The government brings in anti-terrorism legislation that seems to target regular Canadians more than the real threat of al-Qaeda and terrorist networks around the world that can move in and out of the country unimpaired. It is a strange thing.
I understood the Bloc would be supporting the bill but they tell me they are not. I am glad to hear that. Bill C-5 would be the culmination of the Trudeau way. It would transfer all the power to the enlightened, friendly dictatorship in Ottawa and let it manage and run everything in the country. A lot of people including those in the caucus are starting to realize it is a dictatorship but enlightened and friendly is perhaps not the correct terminology for it.
I think of people in certain female caucuses who found how enlightened and friendly the dictatorship is and what its dangers are. The country needs to realize that the transferring of more power to this centralized and unenlightened dictatorship must stop.