John Godfrey

[Option Canada, April 3rd, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, we have already answered all these questions many times. We have submitted over one hundred pages of responses. The matter is totally clear. There are very few responses, because we have already provided the documents required and requested.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

As I have said, Mr. Speaker, if we take next year's theme to be readiness to learn and use that to mobilize all of our resources, whether they are provincial, community based or whether they are with families, rather than simply imposing something—the federal government telling Canadians what to do—then we have a chance to change our thinking as a society about the crucial importance of the early years of development. That is the way we are going to make social progress in this country.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about the debt, because there are two kinds of debts. There is the tax liability, of course. But more importantly there is a human debt, the social debt.

For some time now, we have watched our human capital deteriorate. This is now clearly evident in the province of Quebec, Montreal in particular. When studies are done on the condition of children in Montreal, particularly in downtown Montreal, everyone acknowledges that there are problems.

The only way to deal with this human debt, which exists almost everywhere in the country, but particularly in economically deteriorated regions, is to work together, not to get embroiled in constitutional battles, but rather to set an objective that is valid for all, since we all value the place children hold in our society.

I recognize that Quebec is often ahead of the rest of Canada as far as young children are concerned. Quebec has made enormous strides as far as daycare and other things are concerned. To me, the strength of federation is precisely the ability to acknowledge avant-garde models, such as are seen in Quebec, and to follow their example, if I may put it that way, like we did 30 years ago in the health care field, when Saskatchewan played the lead role.

Now it is up to all of us as Canadians to join forces in nation-wide societal projects. We must begin with our children.

[Budget Implementation Act, 1998, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I shall be splitting my time. I rise today not in my parliamentary secretarial capacity but in my backbench enthusiastic capacity, if I can put it that way.

Our last budget was the first of the post-deficit era. It had a format which I found quite compelling. It was a format which basically dealt to some degree with debt reduction and to some degree with tax reduction. Rather than distributing a series of investments and expenditures across the system it picked one major theme. That theme, as we have been discussing, was the theme of access to higher education. At the centre of that theme was the millennium scholarship fund.

There are many other aspects and elements to this theme including the reduction of past student debt, the ability of mature students with children to get some help with child care, and the ability of people in the future to invest in the well-being of their children and their grandchildren. We took a subject and we swarmed it. We really spent a lot of time on the whole access issue.

If this is the new format for doing budgets in the post-deficit era, what will be the major theme of next year's budget? There are compelling alternatives. There are many who would argue for a health care budget. There are others who would argue for a global warming budget.

Since we have to prepare now for next year, let me advance a third possibility which will feed in as well to a health budget. At the heart of next year's budget we should place young children, specifically children under the age of six. We should attempt to use next year's budget to achieve part 1 of the national children's agenda which is high on the list of provincial and federal governments in order to ensure that all our children, wherever they live in the country, have access not to higher education but to kindergarten in the best state of readiness we can create.

If a theme or name for this project is needed, it could be called the success by six millennium project. I see it as very much a continuation of this year's budget, a budget which focused on young Canadians as they left the formal school system and headed off toward post-secondary education.

This time we are asking how we can make sure young Canadians as they enter the educational system, notably in kindergarten, are as ready and well prepared as we can make them. These two form a complementarity, a pair of bookends.

Why pick this group of Canadians for next year's budget? What is the compelling argument, need or urgency? According to statistics it is estimated that up to 25% of all Canadian children live in poverty. We have attempted to deal with that through the national child benefit system. That is not all. Our children have other problems. It is estimated that about 20% of Canadian children between the ages of 4 and 11 have serious emotional and behavioural disorders.

We know from question period the concern of many members of the House over what happens to those children when they become older, when they become potentially criminal.

We know we have problems. We know that 5.7% of the population of this country is born under an acceptable birth weight and because of that two-thirds of all infant mortalities occur in that group. We have problems with not just the zero to six population, but the pre-zero, the pre-natal group as well.

If I were to say what the mission statement, the central theme, of next year's budget should be, it would be simply to ensure that every child in Canada is ready to learn upon entrance to the formal school system.

The challenge is huge because, as with all modern problems, they do not fall into old silos. There are at least six federal departments which deal in one way or another with children, whether it is the Ministry of Health, Human Resources Development or the Solicitor General's department, which has to deal with the product of children who have not been made ready for school or for life.

The justice minister has to deal with crime prevention and appropriate behaviour can best be taught between the years of zero and six.

Then we have the department of Indian affairs. We know that children among our aboriginal populations are severely at risk.

Finally we have the Minister of Finance, who allows all of these potential reforms to go ahead.

We have to, within our own government, get our act together.

It is also complicated because in our Constitution we do not say who is responsible for young children before they hit the school system.

We know intuitively that it is the primary responsibility of their families, but it is also the responsibility of communities and, in some cases, social agencies and not for profit organizations, along with municipalities, the provinces and the federal government itself.

We cannot afford to wait until we delineate who is precisely in charge of what. We just have to admit that it is a huge challenge for this country and we all have to work on it together.

What we need to do is to have the notion of projet de société, as we say in French, a national project, something which rallies us around a great cause that cannot otherwise be achieved.

We know about national projects. We have done them in the past, whether it was building a railway or creating the health care system. We understand that the outstanding characteristic is that this is a job which is so big there is not one part of society which can do this by itself.

The role of the federal government is not to dictate what the answers are. The role of the federal government is to bring us all together for the good of all to undertake a mighty task, which is to make sure that our children are ready for school.

We know from literature the way in which children specifically, and human beings in general, develop. The most crucial period for the development of the brain and social behavioural patterns is in the early years.

We know if children can be given coping skills that will be the greatest single denominator of adult health status of anything we can do. We know it is linked to the health care system because it is linked to the prevention system.

We know that crime finds its origin most clearly in things that go wrong before the age of six. If we know that, why would we not do ourselves a collective favour by taking on this task, huge as it is?

How do we start? The way we start is by actually trying to keep score. We do not know how our population is on a community basis. I have tried to find out in my own part of Toronto, East York, east Toronto, what we are doing for children from zero to six.

After the birth weight of all children is measured, which is taken at the hospital, there is no way of finding out much until they actually hit the school system.

When they hit the school system there is no way of finding out just how well prepared they are. We do not measure that. Until we start keeping score, we are not going to be able to change the collective social institutions, whether it is child care, whether it is screening for risk, whether it is parenting courses, until we know how we are doing.

The readiness to learn measure has to be at the heart of our “success by six” program. Without measurement, the rest is just guessing.

The measure not only passes a judgment on all of the social institutions in a community which have contributed to that child's state, but it also allows the school system to understand what deficiencies have to be attended to when the child enters school. If that is done the child will not be burdened with inabilities. If we attend to those soon, the child can get on with it and not fall further and further behind.

This is a tremendous challenge. We have already started to do something about it. The federal government in North York, which is part of my community, has started to finance a research project on readiness to learn. That research project involves all sorts of community institutions, including the health care system, schools and social agencies so that they are not simply measuring how children do when they enter kindergarten, they are actually going to start changing the way in which they interact with each other so that children will have a seamless web of services to support them.

The readiness to learn project, which we promised in our second red book and which we promised as well in the Speech from the Throne, is only the beginning. Coming out of that we can then work collectively. I emphasize that this cannot be dictated by the federal government. The federal government has to pull people together on a community basis to work with children.

Starting with that measure we will then be in a much stronger position to fill in the gaps at the community level and at the national level which impede the full human development of our children.

A number of measures are in place now, tools which we might want to make the equivalent of the millennium scholarship fund. We have, for example, the community action program for children which is already in place. That program is a platform, if you like, of 12 agreements between the provinces and the territories and the federal government. It has 550 communities organizing themselves in a holistic fashion around the zero to six population, particularly children at risk. It will allow for a measurement of success to take place which we might wish to convert to a readiness to learn measure.

What we probably need is to multiply that example by about tenfold, but understanding—

[Option Canada, March 24th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the hon. member's allegation is totally false. We have followed the guidelines and are conducting an investigation on the subject.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, on the second point of consultation, the regime described in the bill is simply a carryover of the existing practice. The minister is accountable in this House for those decisions. The minister is a politician like the rest of us. It is normal to expect the minister in order to avoid a political firestorm to consult widely to protect the government in the fashion which has been the practice up to the current moment. It is a practice which is simply being reincarnated in the proposed legislation.

As for the point about the renaming aspect of the bill, I would venture a personal opinion here. When we have a brand name like Parks Canada we would be a little careful about frittering away the benefits of that brand name. It may be that the agency aspect may simply be the title of record. Those are decisions we will have to make in due course.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, let us talk about planning in two ways. In terms of creating a stable regime for the parks, like so many other government agencies Parks Canada has been subject to tremendous pressures through downsizing. This has been a difficult period for Parks Canada. That period is over. The thought now is to create a regime which will give the parks a better chance for stability by allowing them for example to keep moneys at the end of the year which they have made through their various ancillary activities.

The actual efficiency aspects will be coming in to place as soon as the act is passed. In terms of planning in the grander sense as to how we complete our national parks system, I think that as I suggested in my speech this law indirectly will allow that to happen by providing more money and a more stable regime. In that way we can either complete existing parks or get on with the new ones a bit faster.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the answer is straightforward. > Since the present National Parks Act remains in effect, everything regarding economic decisions such as the ones mentioned by the member will remain in effect. Therefore, this new scheme will not allow the agency to go beyond the usual standards regarding the environment or consultations at the local level.

This bill deals strictly with organizational matters, and with regard to the kind of decisions mentioned by the member opposite, current procedures will remain. So the answer is no.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, the first question was about the expansion of the parks system. The member asked if we are using new mechanisms to involve all the appropriate levels of government.

We are developing such mechanisms when we create things like the new national marine conservation areas. We are continually involving local populations and provincial governments in order to arrive at common objectives. As the member indicated, these are complex matters with many layers. Existing mechanisms are being adapted for new challenges such as these marine conservation areas.

Two things can be said on the second point of user fees. It is a mandate of the parks not to charge more than the service costs. In other words they are not designed to be profit centres. More important, under section 25(1) of the act, the minister is responsible for the setting of park fees and must do so only after consulting with the group of relevant people in the area to see what would be the consequences of raising those fees. If it were in any way a barrier, that would affect the final decision on the fees.

[Canadian Parks Agency Act, March 19th, 1998]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House today on the occasion of the second reading of Bill C-29, an act to establish the Canadian parks agency and to amend other acts in consequence thereof.

This bill will make it possible to modernize the agency responsible for managing Canada's national parks, national historic sites and other protected heritage areas.

The mandate of this organization, presently known as the Parks Canada program of the Department of Canadian Heritage, is to play the leading role in federal government activities related to recognizing places representative of Canada's natural heritage and places of national historical importance, protecting these places and presenting them to the public.

Along with national parks and national historic sites these special places include historic canals, a system of heritage railway stations, heritage rivers, federal heritage buildings and the vibrant federal archaeological program as well as Canada's UNESCO world heritage sites including most recently a favourite of mine, the old town of Lunenburg in Nova Scotia.

The establishment of the Canadian parks agency will bring two main benefits to Canadians. First, and I say this to reassure and to respond to the concerns of the member for Churchill River. It is to assist in the creation of new national parks, the designation of additional national historic sites and the management of other related protected heritage areas including the creation of national marine conservation areas. In other words this is not an act of retrenchment. It is an act which permits the ultimate expansion of these programs.

The second is the continued delivery of quality service to Canadians at existing parks and sites.

Canadians attach great importance to their system of protected natural and cultural heritage areas. Our national parks, our national historic sites and other protected heritage areas are characteristic of the geography, history, culture, economy and even the identity of our country.

Canadians are joining forces to protect these exceptional sites and to further expand our system of national parks, national historic sites and other protected heritage areas. In so doing, we are not just protecting our environment and our historical and cultural artifacts; we are preserving what makes us Canadians, what sets us apart from the rest of the world.

We have every reason to be proud of these sites, which represent Canada and which are evidence of the sound and sustainable management of the cultural and environmental resources of our heritage.

I also reassure the member for Churchill that the new Canadian parks agency will not change the mandate of the Parks Canada program.

The act creating the agency will support and wherever possible strengthen that mandate, enhancing its stewardship role in relation to Canada's natural and cultural heritage.

The Canadian parks agency will remain fully accountable to the Minister of Canadian Heritage and to parliament. The agency will report to parliament through the Minister of Canadian Heritage who will retain power of direction over agency activities.

Finally, the National Parks Act and other legislation setting out the mandate of the program will continue to be enforced. In short, we will not be turning our national parks into Disney theme parks despite the concerns of the member opposite. Indeed, if anybody attempted to try to sell off Canada's national parks or to reduce their territory, they would have to come back to parliament to do so.

What will change is that a new framework will be put in place to administer these existing pieces of legislation.

The Canadian Parks Agency will differ from the existing organization in two significant ways.

First, control of the agency will be through direct hierarchic links between it and the Minister of Canadian Heritage.

Second, administrative provisions will be made to measure so as to respond to the agency's specific objectives and unique operational requirements.

In practical terms, this means that the Canadian Parks Agency will use the tools and instruments that best suit its highly decentralized and diversified operations.

The member for Jonquière raised a number of justified concerns on the proposed agency's financial arrangements. I want to reassure her that its financial management practices will still be governed by the Financial Administration Act. It will continue to prepare its main estimates and to receive parliamentary appropriations. The agency will still be audited by the office of the auditor general.

One of the main reasons for creating the Canadian Parks Agency was to ensure Canadians continued to enjoy a high level of service. Another objective was, to respond to the concerns of the member for Beauséjour—Petitcodiac, to create a stable administration that would provide parks' employees with some assurance their jobs would remain. In fact, there is even the possibility of extending jobs, contrary to what she feared.

To this end new flexibilities are being created. Canadians will benefit from them in very concrete ways such as the way in which the new agency will now be able to work toward the completion of the national parks system and the expansion of the system of national historic sites and other protected heritage areas as I described earlier.

For example, the Canadian parks agency will receive the authority to keep and spend most of its revenue. This will result in additional dollars for investment in new national parks, new national historic sites and other protected heritage areas. A new non-lapsing account will be used to fund the creation of new parks and sites, as well as to complete those parks and sites which have not yet been fully developed. This account would be able to carry moneys forward into the future and will help the agency achieve existing government commitments.

A two year rolling budget will make it easier for the agency to plan and carry out its expenditures and will result in a greater stability of service for Canadians and a greater stability of regime for employees.

The agency will also receive a higher level of delegated financial and administrative authorities from Treasury Board. This will reduce the time needed to make decisions and to get approvals.

The agency will continue to come under Government of Canada contracts regulations, but will have increased powers to manage the purchase and sale of properties, award architectural and engineering services contracts and award construction contracts.

The agency will be able to negotiate the optional delivery of certain common services with the departments responsible. Examples of these are surveying, property assessments, disposal of surplus assets, printing and publishing. This will put managers in a better position to seek out the most economical and convenient services.

In discussing the organization's mandate, it is important to note that, even if it does not have a direct mandate for tourism, it does play an important role, as the hon. member for Chicoutimi has pointed out, in visitors' image of Canada, helps maintain a prosperous and solid economy, and encourages sustainable development to the benefit of local communities.

Canada's national parks, national historical monuments and other protected heritage sites generate more than $2 billion yearly in direct and indirect economic benefits, which are of crucial importance to local economies in rural, isolated or economically underdeveloped regions. Once again, I am picking up on what the hon. member for Chicoutimi has said.

It is therefore very important to note that the Canadian Parks Agency will continue to operate Parks Canada's corporate units and urban townsites revolving funds, which are used to administer the hot springs in Banff, Jasper and Kootenay national parks, the golf course in Cape Breton Highlands National Park and the six townsites within a national park.

The future integrity of Canada's natural and cultural heritage sites will continue to represent a priority for the Canadian Parks Agency, as it does for the present government. The challenges facing Canada's heritage areas will continue to increase, as will the demands upon them. It is essential not only to design policies that can protect these irreplaceable treasures forever, but also to ensure that the organization with key responsibility for our heritage is equipped with the necessary tools and structures to fulfil the mandate with which the people of Canada have entrusted it.>

The legislation before us will enable the new Canadian parks agency to meet the challenges now facing our heritage areas in a most efficient way. It will continue to provide for the use and enjoyment of Canadians a system of national parks, national historic sites and related protected heritage areas and to manage these places in ways that leave them unimpaired for future generations.