Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased today to follow the member from British Columbia, who has made a fantastic speech on the Speech from the Throne.
I certainly will get into some of the negative aspects of the throne speech and the actions of the government, but at the beginning I think I should point out that we do see some positives in what the government has presented in the throne speech. For example, we are pleased that the government promised to investigate the murders of 500 aboriginal women. We are pleased that the government is concerned about workers affected by corporate bankruptcies. We are pleased about its help for military families. We are also pleased about the government's intention to endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, its support for Obama's efforts on nuclear non-proliferation and its commitment to boost support for apprenticeships and skills training.
Having said that, throne speeches are often very vague and they are promises of what we are going to do in the future. Many times I have seen in the province of Manitoba that the same material keeps appearing in throne speech after throne speech over a number of years. The government never actually gets around to doing anything about it. Therefore I hope that in this case it is going to be different and that these points that we support in the throne speech are not only announced in the throne speech but are actually acted upon and dealt with over the course of the year.
There is a large number of issues coming out of the throne speech that I want to deal with. Unfortunately there is not going to be enough time in this particular speech to deal with all of them.
However, I want to start out by talking about the whole issue of Canada-U.S. cross-border tourism. A couple of weeks ago, several members of the House were on a Canada-U.S. congressional visit. We had the member for Kings—Hants and the member for Berthier—Maskinongé along. We attended the governors conference and after that we had some visitations with congressional members.
These are ongoing visits. I was involved with them for a number of years as a provincial MLA; perhaps I went down a dozen times. It seems sometimes that we are making some progress, and the next year when we visit we find that the progress we made has been reversed.
We were meeting on a half-hour, individual basis all day long. I think we met with 40 people from Congress and quite a number of senators. One of the issues, among others, that we dealt with while we were there was that we made certain we got across to them the whole idea that cross-border tourism figures are down. They understand that too.
The issue is what we can do about it. We have lodge owners and fishing camp owners across the country who have seen the numbers and their revenues drop off a lot. We felt that government should be making it easier for people to cross the border, and one of the ways we can do that is by reducing the cost of passports.
The government should be making an extra effort on its part to do exactly that. U.S. citizens actually do not need a passport to get into Canada. They just need a passport to get back into their own country. The result is that when passport costs are so high, $80 per passport, a lot of people are unable to afford them.
We had a Congress person tell us, and the member would agree, that he multiplied the cost of the passports just for his own family. He said that is $400, and he might think twice before he makes that fishing trip to Manitoba or Ontario. This is a member of Congress. So what would the average person have to say about those sorts of costs?
Clearly we have to get greater numbers of people holding passports on both sides of the border, and perhaps a two for one, a half-priced passport for six months, should be attempted to try to solve this problem.
Instead, what we have is the government's talking about biometric passports.
The government saw this coming. It saw that the Americans were going to require passports. We were given at least a couple of years' warning on this. And the Province of Manitoba, and other provinces I believe, asked the federal government to intervene, to go to the passport office and have the passport office introduce, basically, an enhanced card so that people could go across the border for a visit to the United States. They were told they were on their own and they should develop their own card. So the Manitoba government has spent, I do not know, $13 million I think at this point developing its own card, duplicating the processes of the passport office and offering this card to people at $35 or $40. To be honest, it is not getting a big uptake at this point because people are saying that if they are going to pay $30 for a card that would just get them across the border, they may as well add another $30 or $40 to it and have a passport with which they could go across the world.
By the government's dragging its feet and not forcing the passport office to deal with the program, we now have this cottage industry across the country with all these provinces and border states developing enhanced driver's licences, in a way competing with and duplicating what the passport office is already doing. Meanwhile, time is going by and the lodge owners are suffering as a result.
It is fine that the government is announcing it is going to look at biometric passports. But when it does not even have its existing system working properly, then I think that might be a pipe dream, at least for the short term.
The Nexus program has been around a number of years. We spoke with a congress person who had not renewed his Nexus card.
There just seems to be a plethora of programs, a lack of coordination, a lack of advertising, and a lack of understanding by the public out there as to how to get these programs. If people get a Nexus card, not only do they have to go through all the security and the applications but they can only use the card at certain borders. I have been told that, for example, the Nexus lane has next to nobody in it. There is a dedicated lane at the border for people with Nexus cards. But since very few people have the card, there is hardly anybody there. It is like the Maytag repairman sitting there, waiting for the next customer to come through.
That is no way to be running a country. That is no way to be facilitating business.
We all know that the bad guys are not going to go through the border. They are going to go around the border. For several years now, at every one of the Midwest legislators' conferences, I bring up this point and I get full agreement from pretty much everybody. People from North Dakota and South Dakota and anybody who understands the issue will tell us that there is a broad uninhabited expanse along the border, and bad guys cross there. They import liquor, cigarettes, drugs, guns and so on across the border. They fly them across the border. They do not line up at the border crossing. We have constrained ourselves, tied ourselves up in shackles and knots and made it a real chore for people to get across the border, and the bad guys just go around it. So we have all the good guys lined up at the border, and the bad guys are walking around the border. It is time for us to rethink this whole border issue.
I do not think I have a lot of time to talk about these new airport scanners. The government is spending $250 million per scanner, I think it is, and the bad guys have already figured out that all they have to do is put the explosives in body cavities and they defeat the scanner. We do not have them installed yet, nor paid for, and yet they are already redundant.
I am told that my time is up, but I would be happy to take any questions that any members have on this or any other topic.