Mr. Speaker, I will not be splitting my time, as I think might have been indicated to you earlier.
It is a pleasure to stand and speak on this, but unfortunately we are not dealing with new substantive policy questions or even, frankly, some substantive policy questions that are of real and predominant concern to my constituents or to the entire province of British Columbia.
In fact, the whole idea of bringing back old government legislation and not bringing forward anything new is probably awkward for a lot of Canadians who are watching this debate here today and who will be paying attention in the coming months as we head into an election campaign. They look to this House to get a sense of what the parties are about, of what makes us different and of how the current and new Prime Minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard and the former finance minister, is really any different from the former prime minister, whom he pushed out of office in what a political science professor described to me two days ago as a civilized coup d'état.
If we ask the average everyday Canadian for the three reasons why the current Prime Minister replaced the old prime minister at the Liberal convention in Toronto just a few months ago, I think most people would say the current Prime Minister pushed out the old prime minister for three broad reasons, number one being that the old prime minister had been around too long, that he was too old and it was time for him to go. In point of fact, the current Prime Minister is about the same age as the former.
The second reason given for why we had to get rid of the old prime minister is that there is a democratic deficit in the country and it has to be addressed. That was reason number two why we had to get the current Prime Minister into that chair as soon as we possibly could. The reality is that the current Prime Minister is engaged in his own dramatic democratic deficit by not allowing for the free sale of memberships in the Liberal Party of Canada, by not respecting the votes that we have had in the House in the past, by invoking closure in his first couple weeks in the House as the current prime minister, by not allowing provinces to elect their own senators, by not allowing free votes on gun legislation and a whole host of things.
Therefore, these were three arguments about why he should have been prime minister. First, the old prime minister was too old; he is the same age. The second reason is that the democratic deficit needs to be addressed; he has failed on that count already. The third reason he said that he had to be prime minister was that we had to have this new deal for cities, a new agenda, a new grand, big vision idea for cities. The reality is what we saw in the throne speech: he does not have a new deal for cities. There is no new grand vision for cities and municipalities in the country. What he proposed and in fact delivered in the throne speech, eventually through order in council, is that municipalities in the country will be allowed to get their GST rebated back to them effective February 1, 2004.
This is what that means, for example, for a city like the city of Port Coquitlam, which will be the largest city in the new riding of Port Moody--North Coquitlam. If it bought some new sand and salting trucks and spent $50,000 on those trucks, it would pay about 4% GST, normally, because municipalities do not pay the full freight. The government is now going to rebate the city the full GST. And that is it for the average mayor who was promised a big new deal.
Again, when we hear the words “new deal” a lot of people hearken back to FDR. We think of a grand vision, a new deal, a Marshall plan type of macro economic approach or a really dramatic central piece of legislation that dramatically changes the way the government functions or the economy is shifting or the government's relation to its citizens. But in fact, the new deal for cities that this Prime Minister put forward is really nothing. All it is, is a further GST rebate that further complicates the tax code, makes the GST less efficient than it was before and does not give to municipalities the steady stream of financing that they were expecting when the Prime Minister promised them a new deal for cities.
Also, the fake new deal for cities, and in fact, the new deal for suckers, as I have been calling it, is merely a GST rebate that allows the current Prime Minister to cut cheques to mayors across the country just in time for a general election, certainly with political IOUs inferred. That very deal of the GST rebate scheme that he has set up violates the very democratic deficit that he said he was coming into power to get rid of.
When he came into power, he said, “Got to get rid of the democratic deficit”. On October 7, 2003, the House voted--and the Standing Committee on Transport concurred--202 in favour of and 31 against, I believe it was, the federal government starting immediate negotiations with provinces to transfer gas tax points immediately to provinces and municipalities so they could get immediate cash going in. There is something about the vocabulary of this Prime Minister such that he apparently does not understand what the word “immediately” means, because he has completely failed to keep the promise of the House. He has betrayed the confidence of the House.
His own vote in the House, the vote of the current finance minister and all members of the House except the Bloc Québécois showed they believed that the real new deal should happen and gas tax dollars should be flowing to municipalities. This Prime Minister has again failed municipalities and instead is giving them a GST rebate. In fact, all it will do is allow him to cut a whole bunch of cheques--$48 million a month to the treasury--to cities and mayors so that he will look good just in time for a general election campaign.
It is cynical. It is bad tax policy and it makes the GST less efficient and opens it up for complications. It will require negotiations with provinces anyway because of the harmonized sales tax in Atlantic Canada. Also in some ways it may even be perceived by the people of Quebec, who are certainly rightly sensitive about these things, as yet again the federal government coming into an area of provincial jurisdiction, which is entirely inappropriate and has been done far too often by Liberal governments in the country.
I have some prepared remarks that I do want to read into the record about a bill that has been reinstated by the government, Bill C-2, which was put forward this morning in the House.
Bill C-2 is very troubling legislation. Again, as someone who is a passionate believer in personal liberty, free speech, openness and free markets, I think Bill C-2 betrays the very essence of what small “l” John Stewart Liberals of the federal Liberal Party were about at one time.
Bill C-2 would make it illegal for new immigrants to watch programming from the Middle East, Latin America or southeast Asia, simply because the station would not be distributed by a Canadian company. We have to wonder if the government even understands what the word “free” means.
For my generation, one of the basic rights is the right to channel surf, to watch what we want to watch, to have choice and to do it all as long as we are willing to pay and do it according to the law.
When this Prime Minister was my age, shortwave radio was the window to different cultures in far off lands. Freedom was the ability to tune into Radio Moscow or the BBC World Service and to get news that was unavailable elsewhere. It was also the grim feeling one got realizing that people in places such as Cuba, North Korea and the former Soviet Union were risking their lives by listening to the Voice of America or Radio Free Berlin.
In the 1960s freedom was based on radio signals. Over the past 40 years we have added pictures and gone digital. Today satellite television in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq is the primary symbol of liberty and openness and the images that they represent allow viewers to feel as though they are as free as a bird in the sky.
That the Prime Minister's very first bill in the House would target this technology with Bill C-2 tells me he fundamentally does not understand what freedom is about. Perhaps the Prime Minister thinks that freedom is really only distributed by the government, rather than sanctioned and prevented by the government. It is sad that the Prime Minister commonly mentions in his speeches people who he believes in profoundly in terms of ideological reasoning, people such as Pierre Trudeau, and people intellectually he believes are believers in freedom. He mentions Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, who is a hero of mine, as passionate believers in free speech.
Yet his very first bill in the House of Commons, Bill C-2, would prevent freedom of speech and prevent ethnic and minority communities from having free access to people to speak their own language because cable companies do not happen to provide that kind of programming.
In fact, so out of step is the Prime Minister's first new bill with the priorities of ordinary Canadians that, when this issue was raised in the 2002 Windsor West byelection, the NDP won the seat that had been held by the Liberals for 39 years. It was a profoundly important issue in that election campaign.
It gets worse. Not only is the Prime Minister's first new bill out of step with the priorities of Canadians and potentially oppressive to minorities, it is actually useless in achieving the goals he has in mind. Anyone who has been paying attention to this issue knows that there is a high likelihood that Bill C-2 will become the object of a lengthy court battle.
By the time the courts settle the question, technology will have advanced to the point that Canadians will be watching TV via the Internet and laws such as Bill C-2 will simply be unenforceable.
One has to wonder why Bill C-2 would be the government's first priority. After all, on November 14, 2003, in accepting the Liberal leadership, he told Canadians, “We need a new approach to politics, to what we do and how we do it”.