Brian Fitzpatrick

[Canadian Heritage Act, October 26th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I do keep in touch with the park in my province, Prince Albert National Park, and the people who work there. I can assure the House that the people who work in the park today and who have been in the park system for any length of time are relieved that they will get out from underneath the heritage department and into some other government department. They feel they have been used as political tools for far too long by the heritage department, so I can confirm what the vice chair of the environment committee had to say.

I have a question for the vice-chair of the environment committee. In my park there is no money left for simple maintenance. Parks Canada buildings are deteriorating. They have no paint on them. The roads are falling apart. There is extreme, excessive regulation of national parks and the entire maintenance budget of the park is being used up to comply with environmental and other departmental requirements.

There are no funds left to take care of day to day simple maintenance matters in the park. This is becoming a real crisis. The roads in the park are literally coming apart. The buildings are an eyesore. Tourists coming to the park shake their heads in dismay. This is one of our national parks which has visitors from other countries. They must be shaking their heads at what they see in the park.

I would like to ask the vice-chair of the environment committee, could his committee look at the capital cost requirements of our national parks and the crying need for simple maintenance of existing infrastructure in our parks?

[Privilege, October 21st, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to bring up a matter in support of the point just raised by the member. It is the privacy concerns of the constituent in question as well. It is not just the members of Parliament. They have a right to access this House and government programs and so on. It seems to me members have to represent their constituents. There are privacy concerns too. When government members bring forward these documents in the House, they could be violating the privacy rights of constituents by doing that, and I find that offensive.

I would like the Speaker to consider--

[National Co-op Week, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, every year cooperatives and credit unions celebrate National Co-op Week. This year Co-op Week is being held from October 17 to 23. This year's theme is “Youth: The Future of Cooperation”. The theme recognizes the fact that our young people will be our leaders of tomorrow.

For many decades the Saskatchewan Cooperative Youth Program has been in the forefront in developing leadership among young people.

Milton Friedman, the world famous economist, has stated that voluntary cooperation, that is individuals working together for their own betterment, is the backbone of a free market economy.

The cooperative movement has contributed much to the Canadian economy, and in so doing has improved the quality of life for all Canadians. I know that all members will want to offer the Canadian cooperative movement our congratulations for so many accomplishments.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I was elected in 2000. What I predominantly heard during the last term, over and over again, was about the Kyoto protocol, how it was so necessary and how we had to get into it. I was on the industry committee, and we tried to find out what the plan was and how much that plan would cost.

Pretty soon it will be 2005. It will have been almost five years. Surely by this stage of the ball game we should know what that plan is, and every Canadian should be able to see the details of the plan. We should also have an idea of how much it is going to cost.

I am challenging the Minister of the Environment not to give me a speech on some other topic but to address those two points. Where can I find the plan for implementing the Kyoto protocol in Canada and how much is the plan going to cost Canadian taxpayers?

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 19th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to throw water on the member's speech or be a Tretiak with my question but I will proceed with my question notwithstanding my concerns that this is his first speech in the House.

I am concerned about the national child care program. We have a lot of fiscal challenges. We have a rapidly aging population. There will be huge problems. We are not even close to addressing the problems in the military. There are many other challenges.

Would the minister set out what he has in mind for a national child care plan? Would he also explain how that will be financed and how much the price tag for that program will be?

[Criminal Code, October 13th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, in regard to Bill C-2, it is fairly obvious that children need protection in this day and age. We live in an age that is much different from bygone years. Children are very vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Pedophiles and people who are bent on this and attempt to violate the rights of our children are very well organized.

However, in addition to the children, there is another group that needs help in this area. The people who need help are the parents.

Prior to 2000, I practised law in a general practice situation. I had a very difficult situation to deal with in the mid-1990s. A nice young couple in their mid-thirties came into my office. They had a 14 year old daughter who had taken up a relationship with a man in his late forties. They went to the police, who said there was nothing they could do.

I told those people at first blush that the law would provide parents with the means and ability to provide for their children and protect them. I told them to return at a prescribed time the next day and in the meantime I would do some research and would have answers to their difficulties. I spent a fair amount of time researching the topic and the Criminal Code and provincial family services legislation and so on. I thought surely parents would have the power to protect a 14 year old daughter from what was clearly an exploitive situation.

I am a parent myself and I think most people in this House have been parents at one time or another. As parents, we know that 14 year old people are not at a stage in life where they can make those sorts of decisions. They need more maturity and education before they embark on making those sorts of decisions. I think it is an area for parental control.

In any event, when those parents came back the next day to see me, it was a very troubling experience for me. I had to tell these folks that the House of Commons was not able to provide them with the relief or remedy to deal with this sort of situation. I was the messenger and quite often in that business the messenger is the one who takes the heat.

One of the reasons I am in the House is that this is where we create the laws of the land. We are letting down these folks by not dealing with that particular issue. It would take very minor changes to the existing law to protect children by changing the age from 14 to 16. Basically, to use a phrase, it would be the stroke of a pen and we would have a million children in the country who would be able to be protected by their parents. Parents would have the law on their side. Right now they do not have the law on their side. They have their hands behind their backs. The law has tied them. They are incapable of protecting those children, who are at a very vulnerable age.

I can assure members that people who are in the sex trade and exploit young people are very aware of this loophole. They exploit it for everything they can get. I think it is incumbent on Parliament to act on this matter and do something that I think can make a difference in that area.

Another area I wanted to address is the area of the defences. Any time Parliament creates a criminal offence or deals with a criminal offence and then decides to set out the defences in the Criminal Code for that offence, besides the normal common law defences, it had better be careful on the wording of those defences.

Anybody in the House who has graduated from a law school and knows anything about our court system will know what a good defence lawyer can do with ambiguous, loosely worded defences. “Art” is a mile wide and a mile deep; it is in the eye of the beholder. Good defence lawyers I know who are given that kind of leeway are going to have a heyday.

The accused does not have to prove that there is a legitimate purpose. The defence does not have to do that. Anybody who graduated from law school knows what the defence has to do. Even laymen would know that. I think even you, Madam Speaker, would know the answer to that question. All the defence has to do is raise one thing called reasonable doubt.

I am sure this is what happened in Robin Sharpe's case. He had a good lawyer, who took this artistic merit argument and said, “We do not have to prove that there is artistic merit here. All we have to do is prove that there could be. Look at this. There could be artistic merit here. If you find that, Mr. Judge, you have to acquit the accused. That is the law”.

I am very troubled by this. There may be legitimate purposes and I am not going to deny it. The justice minister said that police are in possession of child pornography for the purposes of investigation. I can accept that, but this concept of art is just way too wide. Surely we have some legal minds in this country who could tighten up this thing and close the door to defence counsel running roughshod over our court system and allowing pedophiles and sexual exploiters to walk out of the courtroom and carry out this sort of activity against our young people.

The population of young people in this country is getting smaller and smaller, but it is our future. They are the people who are going to carry our heritage into the future. It is incumbent on lawmakers in the House to take the bull by the horns and take the measures that will adequately protect our young people, so they can become people who can enjoy and optimize their God-given talents in this society and not have to live with some haunting nightmare for the rest of their lives if they manage to survive some of these ordeals with sexual predators.

I am amazed about something from the last session. We had a motion to change the age of consent from 14 to 16. It seemed to me an obvious thing for us to do in the House. Liberal members, by and large, refused to vote for that motion. Then they were appalled during the election campaign when it was said that Liberals were soft on child pornography. This was a very simple measure that would have provided some real protection and some real teeth for police and parents in protecting children at that vulnerable age. I was not the one who made the decision to vote against that motion, so let me say that if the shoe fits, wear it.

I am very disappointed, quite honestly, that some of the people in the gallery who report on our business here do not do a fairer job of trying to report these very serious issues to the public at large. They treat them as minor and insignificant issues. Children being exploited by sexual predators is a very, very serious matter. It will cause irreparable harm to those people. We should be protecting them.

Conditional sentencing is another area. I think that when people do very terrible things to other people the number one criteria of our criminal justice system should be providing protection to the public. Liberals do not understand that a legitimate purpose of our criminal justice system is to provide protection to our law-abiding citizens who want to carry on with their lives. These people have broken the social contract. We cannot live in a free and democratic society when people do not respect the rights of other people and children. When they break that law, there has to be a consequence. The consequence is that they are incarcerated and are not on the streets to bring mayhem and harm to our most vulnerable people.

I think Liberals watch too many Hollywood movies. They get taken up with the Hollywood culture. In fact, a lot of Hollywood is run by people with a small-l liberal philosophy. I think that in their minds there are a lot of Jean Valjeans in this society, that is, falsely accused people, but they do not look at the victims and casualties of these kinds of policies.

The scales have to tip back to protecting our most vulnerable people, especially our children. The government has seriously let us down on this matter.

I thank you very much for your attention, Madam Speaker. I think you were even nodding at some points and I very much appreciate that. I just wish I could get more of your colleagues to agree with me.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank member for her first speech in the House of Commons. I have constituents who are very anxious for details from the government. The government is good for platitudes and describing where it wants to go, but when it comes to the road map, how we get to where the government wants to go, that is where the problems usually ensue.

Therefore, I have two areas on which I would like the member to enlighten everyone in the House. I have many constituents who are anxiously wondering how they will get their gas tax rebates to their municipalities for badly needed infrastructure. Rural municipalities, towns, villages and cities in Saskatchewan all have infrastructure problems. Would the Liberal member explain to me what the formula will be for redistributing the gas tax in a fair and equitable manner to all communities across the country?

My second question is this. I am still trying to find the implementation plan to the Kyoto protocol. We all want to see what the plan is. Could the member direct me to a website or something that explains in detail how the Kyoto plan will be implemented in Canada? I anxiously await the precise answers to these good questions.

[Resumption of Debate on Address in Reply, October 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, based on the summer, I was very disappointed with the throne speech in one particular area and that was the devastating effect that BSE has had on agricultural producers in my riding. It is just shameful. I know some of the people individually who spent their last 25 years getting a lot of calluses on their hands to build up their operations only to see their equity literally disappear before their eyes.

I would like to direct a question to the member from Quebec and ask for his comments about the BSE situation in the Province of Quebec. Is his party and his members also concerned about the glaring omission in the throne speech to deal with this real travesty that is affecting so many people across the country?

[Criminal Code, May 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I want to relate to the House an experience I had in my lifetime. I practised law in rural Saskatchewan for 23 years, in the great community of Nipawin, Saskatchewan, a community of 5,000 to 6,000 people. When people have lived in a community as long as I have, everybody knows one another.

I must say, too, that when one practises law, the law sometimes leaves something to be desired. From time to time we encounter things that just make us just shake our heads and wonder why the people who make the laws in the land, in Parliament and so on, do not remedy them.

A couple I knew quite well came to my office in tears. They had a great family. I knew some of the kids. Some of them were in university and some out of university and so on. Their daughter, who had just turned 14, had them weeping in my office. The problem was that the girl had taken up with a man who was 48 years of age. The parents were very concerned about this situation. They believed that it was an abusive and exploitive situation. The girl was too immature, in their minds, to make decisions like that herself, and she was in this situation. Quite frankly, I found it appalling.

I told them that there must be something we could do in this land, that there had to be a law that would allow parents to be parents and take care of their young children and protect them from those sorts of situations. In the peace and quiet of my own law office that evening, I went through everything I had, including the Criminal Code, the provincial laws and so on.

I found that under the provincial laws it is the parent's responsibility to provide children with schooling and the necessaries of life and so on until they are of legal age. That was clearly in the law. As well, there are custody disputes between parents who are splitting up as to who would have actual guardianship of these of 14 year old children so they can see them through their teen years and make sure they come out as good, solid young Canadian adults.

Then I went to the Criminal Code. I said, “There has to be something missing here. I cannot believe the law would not empower parents”. I went through the Criminal Code and found the provisions that this government is responsible for and refuses to do anything about. It basically gives a 14 year old the right to have sexual relationships as if she is a full adult. There is no help for the parents. It occurred to me that every sexual predator, especially those with a pedophiliac background, knows that this is the law of this land. And in this Internet age, boy, is that a huge opportunity. It is not a crack in the door. It is opening the barn door right up for a whole pile of exploitation.

One of the difficult things I had to do in that particular situation was to phone those people the next day to be the messenger for the law. Quite often as a lawyer one gets shot for being the messenger. One of the reasons I am here is that I hope I can influence the law sometimes so that we can be a better messenger when advising people and telling them what the state of the law is. It was a very painful experience for me to let those good folks know that there was nothing in the law that would help them. The police could not do anything; their hands were tied. The whole thing was just total nonsense.

There are 301 of us who were sent here. We are supposed to bring our common sense to this House and deal with matters like that. It seems to me that this is not a complicated issue. If we had questions and comments now, I would once again like to ask members opposite to give me one single reason why 14 year olds should not be protected and under the care of their parents and not left to be exploited by sexual predators and pedophiles in our society. This is shameful.

This is shameful; if only there were one ballot question on this in the next election when people go to mark their ballots. The Liberals mention things like artistic merit to defend the right of people who exploit young children to hide behind some sort of bogus argument like public good or artistic merit. Another thing that the Liberals hang their hats on is these sorts of defences.

Some say there has to be a youth offenders act because these people are not responsible for their actions and cannot be dealt with in criminal court and we have to treat them differently. However, when it comes to sexual relationships with 48-year-old men, then they are old enough to make those decisions, the state has no interest and neither do their parents and they can get out of the picture. This is appalling.

We talk about the culture of corruption and incompetence. I would say that one of the appalling things is the mentality to defend these kind of laws which falls within the parameters of corruption as well. Where are people's ethics and values when they can honestly stand behind these sorts of protections afforded to these sexual predators and people that prey upon our youth?

Every Canadian would want this House to stand up for 14-year-old people and support the parents who are trying to help their kids out, instead of letting them down like this.

I was not planning on speaking to this issue, but I am certainly glad I took the opportunity to do so. I wish there were questions and comments because the last time this bill came before us, I never heard a member from the opposite side come up with one intelligent reason why we could not change this law.

In fact, I want to raise an issue. When the question was raised the last time, a member of the Bloc actually stood up and said he thought the age should be lowered. He said that in his riding people want it lowered. I think he mentioned 12 years of age.

It made me scratch my head. Maybe I am from the wrong planet or the wrong part of the country. I am from rural Saskatchewan and people there are out of touch with this modern world. It has passed me by very quickly. I cannot actually believe that the member's constituents in the riding that he represents in that province would actually believe there would be anything good coming from lowering the age to 12 years from 14 years.

Once again, if people are scratching their heads and cannot find a reason to vote in this election, I would say this issue alone should get all Canadians out to vote, if they cannot figure out a reason to vote in the next election. Parliament should be a force for good. We should not be defending those people who are not there to do good things for our young people.

This is something that the lawmakers could do. It could be very effective. It would certainly help the police. It is appalling that police officers do extensive investigations on pedophiles. They set their trap only to find out that the victim of the pedophile was a 14 year old.

In my riding last summer there were two men in their twenties charged with sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl. They were acquitted. If I can believe the newspaper accounts in this case, they picked up an aboriginal girl 12 years of age and I guess they gave her liquor and so on and had a sexual situation with this young girl. It was a very painful thing; there was a lot of publicity in my province of Saskatchewan.

What was their lawyer's defence when it came to arguing the case before the judge? They thought she was over 14. Guess what happened? The judge acquitted them. The assaults had taken place. The girl had clearly been assaulted. The sexual relations had taken place. The judge acquitted the two men in their twenties because there was a reasonable doubt. Maybe someone thought there was a chance she was be 14.

I find this whole area very disturbing. This should not be a partisan issue. It should be a common sense issue, but common sense does not seem to be a strong point for the members opposite.

[Equalization Payments, May 11th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, Saskatchewan is being seriously mistreated. Academics say that the current equalization formula is grossly unfair toward the province of Saskatchewan. Who is responsible for this gross inequity? It appears that our new Minister of Finance is the culprit.

Academics say the problem could be resolved by removing the formula's reliance on non-renewable natural resources and moving to a 10 province formula.

The minister's response is that the formula is far too complicated to change in any significant way. In other words, he is saying to the people of Saskatchewan that they may as well get used to being treated in an unfair manner.

The Canada West Foundation says that of all the western provinces, Saskatchewan has the highest degree of western alienation. With the unfair treatment that Saskatchewan people are receiving from the Liberal government, is there any wonder that my province is alienated?