Brian Fitzpatrick

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, that is a very good question. I have been sitting here trying to figure out which government department in Ottawa is the department that I can really rate out as a quality department which does a first rate job. It certainly is not health care. It obviously is not defence and national security. Fisheries I have already mentioned. Agriculture is in a real mess. For aboriginal affairs, the government had to pass a law allowing special treatment on sentencing native youth because its programs for 125 years had been a total and absolute failure and disaster. It flies in the face of a liberal, Martin Luther King, who said “I want to live in a society where we will be judged on the basis of character and merit and not on the colour of our skin”. Here is a Liberal government, in name only, coming up with laws that separate and divide people on those arbitrary criteria. That is shameful.

I left the state of Minnesota and came back to Canada in the late 1960s, just a year or two after Pierre Trudeau came into power. Our dollar was 92¢ against the U.S. dollar. Our standard of living was almost identical. I came back because this was the land of opportunity.

Today we have a 62 cent dollar. Our standard of living is 70% of the U.S. In fact, if we take the black community in the United States, its per capita income is about equal to our per capita income in Canada. The experiment of Pierre Trudeau of a bigger state, more government and the state making decisions for people was a failed experiment. I wish people on that side of the House would recognize it.

The strength of this country is the people of this country and their freedom and liberty, not the power in this town, Ottawa. The faster we can get a government in power that understand that and gives power back to the people, this country will turn around and not head in the way of Argentina.

[An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Cruelty to Animals and Firearms) and the Firearms Act, April 11th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I have a few preliminary comments about the firearms registry.

I wish the government would recognize that the firearms registry a totally failed experiment. It was ill-conceived. Let us be honest, it was more about politics than good legislation at the time. It is going nowhere and is costing the country a huge amount of money. It has created another unnecessary bureaucracy in this town and there are enough of those already without more of them.

I would like to relate my experience as a practising lawyer. One of the most troubling problems I encountered was the inadequate protection for people, and women generally, who were stalked or harassed by really dangerous people and quite often because of a marital breakdown. The resources were not in place.

I recall a number of years ago when a new mayor was elected in New York City, one of the most crime infested places in the world. The mayor was elected on a law and order platform. He was going to reduce crime and improve public safety in that city. What did he do? He hired more police officers. What did he do with those police officers? He put them on the streets where the crimes were happening.

Lo and behold, guess what eventually happened? The crime rate in New York City dramatically decreased. He was not filling up prisons with prisoners. He was deterring crime in the first place. Today, if I am correct in my figures, New York City has a lower violent crime rate than any city in Great Britain with 500,000 people or more. That is public safety and is an effective use of public resources.

Why is the government not looking at cancelling a useless program that is costing us a lot of money and instead putting money into useful programs that actually do increase public safety and provide protection to our citizens?

The problem for a lot of our law-abiding citizens is that the government does not protect them. The resources are not in place. It does politically correct things like passing more laws. I think the government believes that if it wanted to make cats bark all it would have to do is pass a law. I am convinced of that. Some of those people over there are unreal.

I practised law for 25 years. I wish I had the time to go through all the useless legislation that has been passed that interferes with our ability to make common sense decisions in our day to day lives.

I want to address the rest of my comments to the cruelty to animals amendments in the legislation. I want to make it perfectly clear that the amendments in the bill are all about harassment and mischief. Who will be the object of the legislation? Who are the criminals we are targeting under this one? Under the firearms legislation it was duck hunters, but who will be the object of this legislation? Will it be the livestock producers, the hog producers, the poultry producers, the turkey producers and anyone else who is involved in the caring for animal? Will it be the fishermen, the sports fishermen, the medical researchers, the agricultural researchers, the furriers, the trappers and many others? Most of these folks are just trying to make a living, support their families, get their kids through school, support their communities, pay their banks to get by and also support us by paying our salaries in Ottawa.

The legislation before us is about harassment and targeting those individuals. This is not a time for any of them to be targeted by more government interference.

In the U.S. one of the national parties has compromised itself by getting into bed with an organization called the American trial lawyers association.

We have seen the absurdity in the United States of those sort of policies. People with cancer sue tobacco companies because they did not understand that tobacco was not good for their health. Individuals sue a franchise coffee maker because they did not understand that coffee was hot. A person tried to commit suicide by jumping in front of a subway train and lost his legs because he jumped too far and successfully sued the New York transit authority on the basis that it should have anticipated someone would try to commit suicide and should have put up guards.

Most of this sort of stuff is pure absolute nonsense. We do not need that in this country. Anyone in the United States who has any common sense would agree that sort of intrusion by the litigative nature of the American society causes people a lot of additional costs and impairs the economy.

We heard from the friends of the government in committee, the animal rights groups. They came in droves. I recall a number of those spokespeople identifying lawyers who were supportive of the legislation. Quite honestly I would identify the lawyers that were mentioned as being akin to the American trial lawyers group. They were enthusiastic supporters of the bill. I am sure many of them are even members of the American trial lawyers association.

I am disturbed because the Liberals are bringing American style litigation into Canada. This is something we do not need. Much anti-Americanism sentiment comes from members of the government from time to time. However in this area they seem to be enthusiastic endorsers of something that is unnecessary and negative.

When we stand back and look at it the Liberals generally would like to see a society dominated by courts, judges and lawyers. Why do they want to do that? It is good for the lawyers and it seems to be good for the Liberal Party. However I am not exactly sure it is good for the Canadian public.

With a certain provision in the bill the Liberals have done something that even the Americans have not done. They have introduced the concept of tort and negligence right into the criminal code. I had never heard of that concept ever existing in any other common law or democratic society that I know of where we start introducing concepts of tort and negligence and litigation directly into the criminal code.

Let me draw the House's attention to the actual section. The section has absolutely nothing to do with tinkering with existing legislation. This is an entirely new addition to the act. Subsection 182.3(1) states:

Every one commits an offence who

(a) negligently causes unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal;

Let us use an actual example. I am a sport fisherman and I do catch fish. When I catch a fish I have to do something with it. I could put it in a tank and when I get back to shore I could kill it. I could put it on a rope and hang it beside the boat in the water and when I get back to shore I could kill it. I could have a club in the boat and hit it over the head until I kill it. Or I could throw it in the boat and let it jump around until it dies itself. Another possibility is a method I use, I learned it from an aboriginal person. I take the fish by the head hold it firmly and break its neck. In my view that is a good way to kill a fish because it puts it out of its existence quickly. For ice fishing most people just throw the fish out onto the lake and it slowly freezes to death.

In this subsection everyone commits an offence who negligently causes unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal. According to this definition the fish has a vertebrae so it is an animal. Under the legislation any sport fisherman could be looking at a charge under the section. Animal rights groups would be hiring their own lawyer to prosecute the case.

The Liberals say they have put something in place that would protect people against private prosecution. There would be a preliminary hearing first to decide whether the charges should proceed or not. That is just absolute nonsense. I know what a preliminary hearing is; I practised law for 25 years. It is a trial within a trial. There is a magistrate, a lawyer on the other side and witnesses.

I envision the fisherman walking into a courtroom full of animal rights activists, their witnesses and their lawyers. That will be a very costly venture. People who go in there had better have a lawyer and some witnesses or they will lose and face charges. That is just that one subsection.

However it does not stop there. In subsection 182.3(b) it reads:

...negligently fails to provide suitable and adequate food, water, air, shelter and care for it;

When a farmer hauls livestock to market it is an hour and a half drive and it is 85° outside does that mean the facility that he is hauling in should have temperature adjustments so the livestock is being hauled in at 72° or room temperature? If it is 5° above freezing should there be a heater in there so that it is 20° above zero? What about the food, water and other matters that are raised in there? Should the truck be stopped to feed the animals and give them water? Subsection 182.3(c) states:

negligently injures an animal while it is being conveyed.

When we look at all of these provisions I suggest there is not an existing agricultural practice that would not be open to attack under the legislation.

People say I am just pandering and raising fears that are not real. They should look at the experience in Europe, England and the U.S. where this type of legislation has been introduced and listen to what the radical animal rights groups are saying.

I find it particularly disturbing. We had one justice minister who got on his high horse to introduce this useless firearms registration. It is all about politics and nothing about good public policy.

The thing I find disturbing, when I go through the animal rights website and look at the material, is who the animal rights groups backed, strongly supported and put all their resources into in the last federal election to make sure they won and defeated all those “crazy firearms people” and “wing nuts” as they call them.

In the Edmonton riding, where the past justice minister came from, they backed her to the teeth and now she is delivering the bacon. She is delivering a piece of legislation that they wanted.

There is another provision in the bill that really bothers me. It is how what is negligent is determined. I doubt anyone on that side of the House has the slightest clue what process would be used to determine what negligent is. Sometimes I wonder whether any of the folks on the other side of the House ever spent two minutes in a court of law in the country, let alone knowing what that would mean. Subsection 182.3(2) states:

For the purposes of subsection (1), “negligently” means departing markedly from the standard of care that a reasonable person would use.

I know what that will entail; I have seen it. When one is involved with negligence cases in the court one hauls in a whole pile of expert witnesses and they tell the court what they think reasonable care is. Usually the people who have the most and best experts win the case. They are very expensive. Expert witnesses can easily cost $5,000 a day and the more the better. The rich and wealthy have a major advantage in this sort of thing.

It would have been so simple. The Canadian Alliance and other parties wanted a simple amendment whereby we would determine the standard based on the practices of the industry. In agriculture the practices that have been longstanding would become the test under this arrangement, but no, the government would not accept that proposal. We would not stand in the way but it did.

This is another area that seemed so simple to me. When talking about fishermen and the way they kill fish, the accepted practice would be an absolute defence. For a livestock producer, the acceptable standard would be an absolute defence to the charges. It would alleviate the concerns that all these groups and producers in our economy are concerned about, but the government would not do it. It is so simple.

I guess the reason it will not accept that sort of standard as a defence is because it is promoting the radical animal rights groups objectives. They want to challenge every existing standard we have in place. They want to challenge every one of them and make it perfectly clear that is their objective.

Bill C-15B underscores the whole approach of the Liberal government. There was a government recently elected in British Columbia whose name matches up a lot better with liberty than that party's does. It actually believe in that word. The government in British Columbia committed itself to reducing one-third of the regulatory burden in that province.

It defined regulatory burden as a regulation that restricts the freedom of an individual or imposes obligations on the individual. It found 400,000 specific regulations that fit that definition. I would be curious to know if the government across the floor would submit itself to that sort of review, how many regulations we would find in Ottawa. It would absolutely be frightening.

Another thing the government of British Columbia discovered when it looked at the regulations and analyzed them was that for every dollar it costs the government to create laws and regulations, and enforce them, it costs the people affected on average something like $17 to $20. Here is a government that is passing a cruelty to animals law but it does not care about the consequences to the industries affected. It passed it because the minister made a deal with animal rights groups to get this thing shoved through. This will cost the affected industries a lot of money.

The government is good at that. It likes to pass laws and interfere with our day to day lives and our abilities to make decision without worrying about the costs. It just does it. The government is always pushing for environmental impact studies before something is done. I wish sometimes that before we pass laws in the House that we have an economic impact study of the laws before they are ever passed.

In conclusion, the Liberal way is more about more regulation. The Liberal way is more about more government. The Liberal way is more intrusion in our day to day lives as citizens. Liberals, contrary to their name, place very little value on personal freedom and liberty. They believe the government is better equipped on this matter to take over that role, to start making the decisions for individual citizens and to transfer more and more power to the bureaucracy in Ottawa. This is despite the fact that the Canada pension plan is in huge difficulty. We have probably more people working in fisheries in this town than we have actual fishers. We have an agriculture industry--

[Supply, March 18th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, there have been references made to the view of fiscal federalism of professional economists. I would like to bring forth one study with which I am familiar.

Mr. Mansell, chair of the University of Calgary economics department, has made some fairly extensive studies on fiscal federalism in the broad sense. He published a paper in 1998 that studied the period 1961 to 1998.

There were some interesting findings in that report. Only two provinces were net contributors to federalism under his study. There was Alberta with an average per capita contribution of $2,000 per year and Ontario was second with $244. Every other province was a net taker from the system.

There are some real disparities. Manitoba and Saskatchewan had the same standard of living as New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, but they received considerably less in the way of transfer payments, equalization payments and other benefits from the federal government.

One of the really perverse findings which relates to a comment that was raised by the member is that Alberta actually has a law which prohibits the provincial government from giving direct subsidies to a corporation or government. The federal government takes money out of Alberta and then turns around and gives grants to entities such as Bombardier.

I heard the member make comments that she thought Quebec was being shortchanged in that regard. I have a difficult time understanding her point. If I understand the Bombardier situation correctly, a whole lot of loans have never been repaid. They seem to be loans that nobody ever calls in. They just sit on the books and so on.

In her mathematics about Quebec being shortchanged on subsidies to corporations did she include these loans that never seem to have to be repaid by Bombardier?

[Species at Risk Act, February 26th, 2002]

Madam Speaker, I come from Saskatchewan. In the history of Saskatchewan we have dealt with a lot of problems by using co-operation and respect for one another's rights. We have solved a lot using that approach.

Very seldom does government compulsion work. Governments, particularly the Liberal government, pay little or no attention to the consequences of their policies. The Liberal government demands that other people do expensive studies on the most minor of things to determine the impacts of its policies but does not do it itself.

A conference sponsored by 12 nations was held in Stockholm recently. It was called the Stockholm Progressive Summit. Members of the conference tried to figure out strategies to counter the dangerous trend developing in the world whereby people have been choosing right of centre and free market solutions to their problems. Conference members tried to plot a strategy to deal with the problems. It was quite a list. Thirty years ago they were called socialists. Twenty years ago they were called social democrats. Today they are called progressives.

The conference was called the Stockholm Progressive Summit. Can members guess who one of the 12 sponsors of the convention was? Canada was one of the sponsors. Can members guess who one of the chief speakers at the conference was? It was our Prime Minister. Now I know why the government that rules our country chose the colour of its party. It is clear to me today.

This type of conference leads to this sort of legislation. It is the same mentality. If anything is clear from history it is that socialism is a failed experiment, not an instrument of innovation. The government talks about an innovation agenda. When has the government ever innovated on anything? Some people say the only thing government ever created that was innovative was welfare.

I am not sure what long list of innovation governments have, especially this government. I know one thing. Socialism has created declining economies. It has created poverty. It has destroyed and undermined individual freedoms and property rights. It has undermined the rule of law. Where it has taken root and has strength we see declining countries.

The market system works well when governments create the proper environment. That environment consists of the rule of law, certainty, predictability, simplicity in the law so everyone understands the rules, stable monetary policy, national and personal security at home and abroad, and respect for the rights of the individual including liberty and property rights. This is very important.

There are a number of difficulties with the bill. Chief among them is that there has been no meaningful dialogue with the stakeholders involved, especially at the front end. The government is trying to carry on a dialogue after the decision is made. To me that is a public relations exercise. If we want good policy built on a solid foundation we need to have a dialogue at the front end. That has not been done with this legislation.

Another criticism I have of the government and its environmental policies is that they ignore the human element. We are part of the planet as well. Too many of the government's policies ignore the human element and the economy that must function in our society. If we want first class social services and a strong environment we need a first class economy.

An individual died in 1993 who was known as the equivalent to management circles that Einstein was to physics. His name was Dr. Deming. He was a critic of the way government policy is created. He said governments dictated results and created regulations and laws in a vacuum. He said such laws were totally unworkable and based on a lack of understanding of their impact on the economy.

Dr. Deming was preoccupied with creating quality services and goods and having an economy that produced these things. Any world class organization today that is well managed knows who Dr. Deming was. The Liberal government failed to involve stakeholders in developing its species at risk policy. It went back to its socialistic roots of trying to dictate results using government compulsion.

The government does not have a clue about the economic impact the species at risk legislation would have. The minister does not. He threw out a figure of $45 million at one point but was not sure about it. It sounds like the Kyoto accord. He does not have a clue what the economic impact would be. Before the government shoves compulsory legislation like this down our throats it is high time we had a meaningful economic impact study.

President Reagan once described the Liberal approach to economic problems. He said if the thing is alive, moving and healthy, tax it. If that does not slow it down, regulate it into the ground. When the thing is almost dead, start subsidizing. That is Liberal policy.

Do members know what is missing for rural Canada? It is the third part. The government has been good regarding the first part. It has taxed and regulated rural Canada into the ground. It has been weak regarding the subsidizing part. Rural Canada is dying because of the government's policies.

Using President Reagan's model we must ask what Bill C-5 would do. Landowners would become slave labour to the state. They would have to be the state's stewards and carry out the responsibilities of the act. They would have to give up property rights without proper compensation and due process. It is a typical Liberal approach. I am sure the government learned it at the Stockholm conference. That is the way it does things.

Confiscating a citizen's property is a dangerous concept. Turning people into slave labour without compensation is another problem. What takes the cake about Bill C-5 is that if the slave labourers accidently did something to an endangered species the government would turn them into criminals. One of the principles of the rule of law is that we do not make our citizens criminals without a guilty mind. The government probably learned its approach at the Stockholm conference. It is the sort of thing they teach at those conferences. It is the socialistic or progressive way of doing things.

Maybe people in rural Canada should turn their land over to one of the companies in central Canada the government likes to support. The regulation thing would be resolved. The taxation thing would be resolved. The people would get money from the government. It would not be taxing them. The subsidies would pour in and they would be healthy. Maybe that is what they should do. They should voluntarily turn over their land.

I can name a whole slew of companies that seem to have a direct pipeline to our enlightened leader and dictatorship in Ottawa. Forestry, agriculture and rural industries are not part of that family compact arrangement. They are shut out. The government has a hostile agenda toward them.

In summary, we in my party cannot support Bill C-5 for a whole host of reasons. The bill has little or no regard for the impact it would have on the rural economy and people's livelihoods. It reveals an arrogance and contempt for citizens and property rights. It undermines a simple principle of the rule of law in a democratic society: we do not make criminals out of citizens without a guilty mind.

[The Environment, February 22nd, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of the Environment continues to speak about consulting with the provinces and Canadians on the Kyoto accord. When will the minister start consulting with the House of Commons?

[Courts Administration Service Act, February 22nd, 2002]

Yes, may even more than there are cod. Some people feel we should give the federal government more power because we will somehow get better quality. Well I do not share those comments.

A third area that I am not exactly excited about is the talk about judicial independence. The problem we have with judicial independence is the appointment process we have for judges. There are no committees to review this matter and the public has no say in it. Our friendly dictator picks up his phone, gets someone's agreement to be a judge and bingo, someone is a judge. That is our system and there is a problem in terms of judicial independence.

In my view I can hardly think of a court system that has more power than in this country. Prime Minister Trudeau, back in the early 1980s, created something called the charter of rights which gave our courts so much power that most of those people sitting in the other house have become quite irrelevant in terms of power and in exercising that power. The Supreme Court of Canada has far more power than anybody on that side of the house.

I want to go through a few things that the Supreme Court has decided in its wisdom. It decided that prisoners should have the right to vote in federal elections. It made the decision to give people like Bernardo and Olson the right to vote, a decision on which it overruled the Parliament of Canada. It decided that anybody who lands on Canadian soil shall be entitled to the full rights under the charter in our judicial system. We have made it virtually impossible to extradite some of the most dangerous criminals in the world who land on our soil. Through its wisdom, it created absolute chaos in the lobster fishery and in the relations between native and non-native people. The list goes on and on.

The Supreme Court has a lot of independence and this is a bogus claim. What in the world does the staffing of the court system have to do with judicial independence? It is way beyond my imagination. The judicial independence issue is a creative argument in the labour management area. Judges must get paid, they must have staff and so on, but please bear in mind that they are employees of the government and they are in a bit of a conflict. If we look at it from a labour management standpoint, we are giving up a lot when we tell the courts that they have free run at hiring their administration staff and in determining their own salaries.

I have noticed a disturbing trend at the provincial level where we have actually had labour management disputes between the judges and the government over salary and benefits. Because these disputes cannot be resolved, the judges go off to the courts to have these matters resolved. Guess who the courts side with? Invariably they side with the judges on these disputes on the premise that the government is interfering with judicial independence. What labour union would not mind having that relationship? If there is a dispute, people could just apply to their labour union brothers who sit on some tribunal and they would make the decision.

I really do not understand this argument that we need to have this restructuring because it is in the interest of judicial independence.

I want to emphasize one final point for the government. It has embarked upon a piece of legislation with certain aims. I do not see one single tool or mechanism in place to monitor it to see if any of the aims will be achieved.

The government is very good at passing legislation that has negative and bad results. It is because it does not have a plan in place. It gets some bureaucrat to create the legislation. It brings the legislation to the House, rubber stamps it and then rams it through with the hope that it will work out in the final end.

When legislation is created in the House it is high time we put monitoring mechanisms in place to make sure the legislation does what it was intended to do and, if it does not, we get rid of it.

[Courts Administration Service Act, February 22nd, 2002]

Madam Speaker, the Canadian Alliance supports the aims of the bill which are efficiency, presumably cost savings, which the Canadian Alliance would certainly agree with, and improved quality. However, we are not so sure about judicial independence.

I want to comment on some of these points because the government has a habit of putting some good aims into its legislation and then forgetting about them after the legislation comes into effect. The government does not review or monitor its legislation. We then become frustrated to learn that the aims were never achieved.

I will begin with efficiency and cost savings. How will there be efficiency and cost savings through these consolidation procedures? I presume duplication will be eliminated and positions will be eliminated. Obviously if all the personnel are being brought under one roof, with one chief clerk of the court, positions will be eliminated.

I have not seen anything from the government as to how many people will lose their jobs through redundancy. I am not exactly sure what kind of standardized procedures will be brought in to bring about greater efficiency.

I suspect that in five years we might see a report from the auditor general saying that in the administration of the court system there are more employees than there are today and the costs are higher than they are today. I expect to hear that but the aim is good. The government has problems executing the legislation to get the results that are talked about.

The government is also talking about the need for improved quality. For most Canadians access to our court system is next to impossible. Unless people are very wealthy, unless it is a government or unless it is a group that is funded by the government, they do not have access to the court system. It is beyond their reach. From a cost standpoint, most people would have to mortgage their house in order to use the system.

The court system is extremely complex and the procedures are very lengthy. The federal court system is even Greek to most lawyers. It is still a great mystery how this thing, which was created in the early 1970s, fits in with the rest of the court system.

I do not see any specific plan or quality objectives enunciated by the government. The government says that there will be improved quality but I do not see a plan or a process to improve quality. I am rather dubious about it.

The Liberals seem to assume that if a process is centralized and consolidated, and if more power is concentrated in the centre of Ottawa then that automatically translates into quality improvements, despite the fact that almost every public administration academic person or public management person would say that is a false assumption.

In the private sector good organizations use ISO standards to measure quality. This is a very objective way of determining quality and standard and making sure that services and products meet standard quality services.

I surmise that if the government started using ISO standards, the court system would fail miserably and not meet the standards. If ISO standards were applied to the department of Indian affairs it would certainly fail miserably. We only have to look at the results of programs in that area. It is a disaster and there is no quality in that department.

If ISO standards were applied to immigration, I wonder what would be said about the 27,000 refugee claimants who were subject to deportation orders by a government that does not even know where they are any more or what has become of them.

What about the military? How in the world could any person apply objective standards of quality, in terms of materials, resources and equipment, and say that the military meets ISO standards for quality?

What about Correctional Service Canada and the parole system? It is a dismal disaster in terms of providing quality there.

What about the fisheries department? There are probably more people working in the fisheries department than there are actual fishermen and fisher ladies.

[Species at Risk Act, February 21st, 2002]

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.

[Species at Risk Act, February 18th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to make some preliminary comments. I am from Saskatchewan and my riding is largely a rural one. The signals sent out by the government are not friendly toward rural Canada or are not perceived as friendly. There seems to be a total lack of sympathy by the government toward the plight of Canadian farmers and producers.

I noticed in the budget run-up the Minister of Finance noted that the average per capita contribution of Americans toward agriculture was $350 per person whereas in Canada it was less than half at $168. I was expecting some initiative in the budget but I did not see any. I guess this is more of the same with the government.

Bill C-68 was another piece of legislation that was perceived as a hostile step by rural Canadians. They cannot see any logic or reason behind the legislation. They see a total waste of money coming out of the legislation and they cannot see one single benefit other than maybe more job creation in this town for public servants.

The cruelty to animals legislation seems to be driven by the fanatics in the cruelty to animals industry. The last thing my constituents need is this sort of thing to enter their part of the world, with the aid of all the resources of government on its side, and harass people who are having a difficult time making a living, paying their taxes and supporting their families.

The endangered species legislation is just another intrusion in the lives of my constituents and they do not feel it is necessary either. When Liberals go around the country trying to determine why they are not very popular in rural Canada, they just have to look at their actions. The actions are the reason why there is this feeling of alienation in that part of the world.

In the fall we debated Bill C-36 and much hot air was let out over sunset clauses. We would be better served in the House if we started evaluating existing government policy with sunset clauses to determine whether they are achieving any useful results or not. We would probably find that a good part of what we have created is irrelevant, useless and we could do away with. We could simplify the world.

The reason I raise this is that the majority of members on the other side of the House believe that if there is a problem in society they can make it go away by passing a law.

Generals do not win wars by ordering a result. They win wars by having a solid strategic plan in place and having motivated, well equipped personnel who can carry out the plan. Anyone can order a result. The members over there could get a private member's bill or something that orders a result but that does not mean there will be a result. Getting and achieving results is something totally different than just ordering them.

Good laws, like success in the military field, require a plan that will work along with the resources necessary to complete the plan. It involves the co-operation of the necessary participants. The bill is a miserable failure on just about every count that we can look at. It totally overlooks two levels of government, municipal and provincial. The government has a bad habit of ignoring them. It likes to go right over their heads and ram something through without considering the impact.

The recent kerfuffle in Russia over the Kyoto accord is another example of how the government is out of touch with the people of this country.

This bill ignores one of the most important participants required to make the legislation work, the landowners. The Liberal government has continually shown contempt for property rights. When it brought home the constitution it absolutely refused to comprehend that the charter of rights should include some protection for property rights. Just about every other country that has something like that does entrench property rights or some recognition, but the Liberals did not. The Liberals had an opportunity to patch up their omissions with the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, however they failed there as well.

Most people I know are involved in their businesses or their careers. They devote a huge part of their week toward creating income for themselves, their families, their communities and their government. In my province, government consumes something like 50% of all such income. At the end of the day, only a small portion is left over and people use that generally to acquire property and equity in property. We are no different.

Last spring the Liberals, with much enthusiasm, voted for a pay increase. Why did they want a pay increase? To buy a better boat, get a better home, get a better car or take a nice trip. Basically, what they were after was trying to materially improve their standard of living as Canadians, that is, property.

Everyone appreciates that the government, in trying to carry out its obligations or responsibilities, from time to time must interfere with property rights. No one is arguing with that belief. However, we do object to a government that ignores due process, and fair and reasonable compensation.

That is why the Liberal government, back in the early 1980s, refused to recognize property rights in our charter of rights. It did not believe in due process when it dealt with property rights. It did not believe in fair compensation to citizens who had their property robbed or damaged by government action. Maybe it was the Trudeau effect on liberalism. A little of that left wing, socialist mentality has crept into its way of thinking and is flourishing today in this society.

The Liberal government has a good track record of interfering by imposing obligations on Canadian citizens without providing compensation such as: the Canadian Pension Plan, EI, GST, fuel taxes, and payroll deductions. It imposed these obligations on businesses and put onerous responsibilities on them. It made them become its bookkeepers and tax collectors and, in most cases, there was absolutely no compensation whatsoever for doing these things. Again, it showed a wanton disregard for property rights and the economic interests of Canadians.

What really takes the cake, from the Magna Carta to where we are today, is that the British-American Anglo justice system says that it takes a guilty mind not just a guilty act to create a criminal offence. The government has a consistent track record of chipping away at that concept and turning things into strict liability. I do not know why it wants to do that because when it gets people in prison, no sooner does it get them in prison and it wants them out. It is a crazy system. Just about everyone else in the world recognizes mens rea, mental elements and so on and the government ignores it.

[National Defence, February 5th, 2002]

Mr. Speaker, the dark shadow of the Liberals continues to loom over the Canadian armed forces. First the Liberals eradicated the army, navy and air force with an ill-conceived policy of unification. Then they took the word armed out of Canadian armed forces. Now they want to get rid of the Canadian identification and just call it forces.

Is there a Liberal in the House who can tell Canadians and our men and women in uniform what this is all about? Apparently this accelerated assault on our Canadian military heritage is being driven by a desire to connect with young people.

When the Liberals learn that our Canadian military heritage is what attracts young people to the military we will be accomplishing something. Renaming or disguising the armed forces will not attract new recruits; it will only further tarnish the image of a once proud institution.