Art Hanger

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, it is interesting that the hon. member said that we should get on with the affairs of the House. It is the Prime Minister that dragged Parliament and the entire country into this debate. The general populace did not ask for it by any stretch of the imagination.

The member spoke about protection of religious freedoms and worship, which means quite a lot to me. It means a preacher is able to state the truth in the scripture. I can relate to an incident in Calgary. I am sure everyone in the House has heard of Bishop Henry. He made a statement in a letter. I will quote his comment to the media:

In one of my previous letters I wrote “Since homosexuality, adultery, prostitution and pornography undermine the foundations of the family, the basis of society, then the state must use its coercive power to proscribe or curtail them in the interests of the common good”.

He indicated very clearly what the coercive powers of the state are, which include every area of the Criminal Code and every area of law that deals with traffic, tax policy, education, communications and a whole list of other areas, including marriage. The powers for those who engage in marrying people on the civil side come from the state.

Bishop Henry clearly is a preacher who feels strongly about the word of God and has certainly preached that in all its truth. I know where he got his quote. We only need to look at 1st Corinthians, chapter 6, verses 8 and 9, which talk about that. Bishop Henry will continue to preach from the scriptures. Should he be hauled before the courts for preaching from the scriptures? The member talked about defence of religion. This man has already been hauled before a human rights tribunal twice because somebody did not like what he had to say. Bishop Henry is called to say what the truth is, whether anybody likes it or not. That is the issue at hand.

When it comes to this particular bill, I have a question about the protection of religious freedom. There is none.

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Madam Speaker, I listened to the member across the way carefully. I think one should listen to him carefully because he is very consistent in his position.

He talked about the lack of clarity in Bill C-38. The member was in the House in 1999 when the Prime Minister made a pledge to take all necessary steps to preserve the definition of marriage. The Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and the House leader, all voted in favour of that motion. Now the member is talking about a lack of clarity. I thought it was very clear what members on that side of the House would do. What happened?

[Civil Marriage Act, June 27th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I listened carefully to the comments of my colleague from Saskatchewan in reference to the issue of marriage. I know that he has been a strong advocate and supporter of the present definition of marriage, and certainly would not like to see anything happen to this wonderful institution.

There is no question that for this issue to be decided in the House at this time and being rapidly pushed through is doing an injustice to the Canadian public. The Canadian public should have a much more prominent position on the stage when it comes to deciding what is to happen here.

It does not matter what our views are on the issue, the public should be considered in the debate, and it is not. It should be a very healthy debate because we are actually proposing fundamental changes to the whole institution of marriage that we have known as the union of a man and a woman for hundreds of years. That will obviously not happen.

I do not understand the process on the other side, which talks about a democratic process to decide the issue. The Prime Minister and the justice minister are convinced that the legislation is about human rights, about the charter of rights. If they have decided that, why is it that the Prime Minister is not allowing his caucus, especially the frontbenches, to vote freely on this matter?

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 23rd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have to say that right now there is very little to distinguish the rhetoric, although maybe there never has been and maybe I just noted it more now than before, of the Liberal members on that side of the House between the rhetoric the NDP members, the socialists, on the left. The rhetoric seems to be identical from both of those particular parties. I have been listening to it all afternoon and it does not really seem to change.

The issue of socialism runs rampant in those parties. I guess that is mantra coming from the parliamentary secretary.

The member talks about affordable housing initiatives but basically that is all directed to provincial affairs and it always has been. The governing party wants to look after people from cradle to grave. The dominant theme of everything the Liberals do and say it seems is to take private initiative away. Instead of concentrating on the economy and ensuring jobs are created and there is not that dependency on state, they want to look after people in every way, shape and form.

I can go back into another life when I was a police officer. When I joined the Calgary City Police way back when, the issue of affordable housing was even on the agenda at that time but it had taken a completely different stance.

Today I see ministers and parliamentary secretaries on that side of the House running helter-skelter all over the country with cheques in hand for various municipalities and provincial governments all to do with so-called affordable housing projects. I have seen mausoleums being built with this money. Does it really benefit the community overall? I have that question in mind every time I see a new structure going up that makes it affordable for those who are maybe less fortunate.

Instead of helping the less fortunate people out of their situation, they create this dependency. However there is really nothing they can put on their own agenda to say that they own a piece of property. It is not that way at all. It is some wonderful structure that the Liberals have designed as their answer to poverty, when they should be looking at creating jobs and helping people out of that situation.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to address that point. Certainly, I was one of those members who had opted out and later stepped back into the pension plan. At that point it was at a reduced rate.

In all fairness there were members on that side of the House who felt the same way about that pension plan. There were members in the NDP who felt the same way about the plan. There were some in the Bloc who felt the same way.

It took initiative to do something about it, because these things do not happen on their own. Somewhere, somehow, someone has to sacrifice something. We were prepared to do that. I believe our action benefited all members of the House, not just ourselves. I will not, and many of my colleagues will not, take full credit for what happened. However, somewhere along the way someone has to stand up and stop the bleeding and make it more accountable. It is not hard. It just takes the will to do it.

We often talk about the will not just in matters of fiscal restraint, but in other areas as well, such as supporting security measures in this nation. If we had the will to do it, we would do it. We would support it, but it takes more than that politically. Someone has to sacrifice something.

I am still prepared to do so for my part in this whole initiative as a member of Parliament.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Wild Rose certainly comes from the same background as I do politically. We want to see fiscal responsibility. We want to see some accountability, smaller government, programs to honestly and legitimately help other people and security in this nation. I could go through a list of things that have fallen apart, which I and most of the members sitting in this chamber behind me have experienced over the last 12 years.

Yes, the same programs and the same issues keep coming up time and time again. No one seems to know where all the money goes. Every so often we hear about a scandal over the way some of the programs have been handled. We hear of friends of those who are sitting on the other side benefiting in a substantial way from contracts. By the time we add it all up, we are looking at billions of dollars. That has gone on for 12 years.

I do not know how members on that side of the House can live with themselves without addressing some very, very significant moral questions. I do not understand it, but the issues are real and they have to be addressed.

Fortunately, there are some members on this side of the House who want to hold the members on that side to account, and we will continue to do that.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I will tell the member that I am very proud of my roots, believe me. I have a very solid foundation when it comes to these issues that we brought to the House. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I do not believe there is one single person sitting behind me who has anything to be ashamed about regarding our position not only on fiscal matters but on social conservative matters as well. We have nothing to be ashamed of.

As we have heard in the speeches tonight by members of my party, we are continuing the legacy of fiscal responsibility, smaller government, transparency and accountability. What more would one want? That is still what we represent.

Let us look back to 1993 when there was a $43 billion deficit. The member is absolutely right in that there is no running away from that. How did the Liberal government straighten it out? The Liberals did it on the backs of the workers who paid EI. That is what they did. They brought in high premiums that paid down the deficit on the backs of the working people in this country. Shame on the Liberals.

[An Act to Authorize the Minister of Finance to make Certain Payments, June 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to debate Bill C-48. It is interesting to hear the rhetoric from the other side of the House, on the Liberal side. The Liberals have accused some of our members of repeating ourselves on the issue of fiscal responsibility, accountability, excesses and scandal. I think those are the terms that have been used on our side and certainly does bear repeating.

However, if we all think back to 1993, when the Reform Party came into this House, the issues at that time were just as paramount on issues of accountability and fiscal responsibility as they are today. In fact, they are worse today, and there is only one government that has been in power and that is the Liberal Party. It has been in power since 1993.

At that time, the debt was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $525 billion. The servicing of that debt was somewhere in the neighbourhood of $40 billion to $45 billion every year. That was a huge amount of debt and debt servicing. In 1995 this country almost hit the wall fiscally and economically. It was so close.

In the first two years that the Liberal government was in power, how much did it add to that debt? It was $525 billion or $520 billion. It bounced up to near $550 billion. In fact, if it were not for the Reform Party back in those days, there would have been no control exhibited on the other side of this House on expenditures. That is how serious the matter was back in those days.

If it were not for the efforts of the members on this side of the House, the issue of smaller government would not have even entered the mind of the Liberal Party. In fact, it was pretty much embarrassed but had to cut back on the size of the bureaucracy for a while. The Liberal Party was embarrassed because it had to deal with the deficit spending that it was so engaged in and could not control. It was only because of members on this side of the House which brought that about. We had a message to deliver from the ridings to the government. It was not the other way around.

Up until that particular time, the government of the day was the messenger to the outlying areas. The representatives went back there to tell the constituents what was good for them. We are fast approaching that kind of scenario again. In fact, it never really changed. However, we did manage to dampen that ridiculous spirit that the Liberal Party had in trying to turn things around and tell people in this country what was good for them.

Since that time, in the last two, maybe two and a half years, the bureaucracy is again on the rise. It has increased somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25%. That side of the House does not understand what it means to prepare for those days when things may not be as lucrative as they are now. We will come upon those days. It is a matter of course.

No doubt the majority of us came to the House to make things better in this country. At least that was my intention and I know that was the intention of many of my colleagues on this side of the House. We wanted to make things better for the whole country, not just for part of it and it was certainly not to line our own pockets or that of our friends. We did not have those intentions.

It is an embarrassment to say that has happened in this nation. We have had one scandal after another and they never stop or slow down. They are always there just below the surface and every so often they bubble out and we get a scandal involving an abuse of taxpayers' money.

What has changed? To be honest, I have not seen the rate of decay as significant as it has been over the last few months. There is the deal with the NDP to prop up the government. That is the only reason why it took place. It was not to make things better because this so-called deal has a thousand holes in it. It was just to prop up the government when it deserved to fall.

We are dealing with an eleventh hour deal to keep this corrupt government alive. Liberals included this strange little package in the budget to do it. Really, it is very deceptive to say the least. There is an old saying “desperate times call for desperate measures” and that is exactly what has happened with this arrangement between the NDP and the Liberals.

Bill C-48 commits $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money to NDP spending initiatives. No one really knows what they are. There is no plan and no accountability. When I think back to 1993, I came here for fairly significant reasons. There was no accountability with government. All we heard were messages out of Ottawa telling us this is what is good for us. There were no significant plans and proposals that would make a person in the outer reaches of the country very comfortable. The other issue was the massive debt that had accumulated over time which started under the Liberals and just went sweeping on through and the Liberals expanded on that debt.

The other issue that brought many of us into the House in 1993 was the fact that we were looking into the future of what our kids and grandkids were going to have. It was very bleak. We had a debt with massive debt servicing. We had a government that was not accountable to the people and it continued. It listened in no way, shape or form to anyone out there apart from those who were touting the Liberal message. The Liberals were spending then like drunken sailors and they are still spending like drunken sailors.

Looking at Bill C-48, how far does $4.5 billion go? Can the average taxpayer really understand that? If we were to look at it from the point of view of every man, woman and child, they would each have to fork over $140 to pay off this NDP arrangement. That is significant. Looking at it from the point of view of a family, it would be somewhere between $550 and $600. Maybe that does not sound like a lot to Liberal members, but $550 to $600 will do a lot of good in the hands of the average taxpayer in this country.

The other thing we recognize clearly is that if one puts a dollar into the hands of the average taxpayer in the country, he will make better use of it than any politician or bureaucrat. It is well known. That typifies everything that has gone on in here because the money that has been squandered over all these years is inexcusable.

I could go on and on about how we could address these issues when it comes to expenditures where they would be better placed and the like, but I have to say that Bill C-48 is a bad piece of legislation, to say the least. What makes it even worse is that it was a cooked up deal between two parties, and in fact the finance minister was not even part of it, and it has been sold in a very false way to the people of this country.

[Criminal Code, June 16th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise today to speak to Bill C-275, an act to amend the Criminal Code regarding failure to stop at scene of accident. This bill is commonly known as Carley's law and proposes stiffer sentences for those convicted of hit and run crimes. I would like to commend the members for Cariboo--Prince George and Abbotsford for bringing this bill forward.

I am sure many of us in the House know of someone who has been injured or killed by a hit and run driver. I know that we have seen many headlines. It does not matter what area of the country we are from, we have seen headlines, much like those that I am going to read here, especially for my colleague who just spoke from the Bloc. I think he misunderstood the purpose behind this bill.

These are the headlines: “Student killed in hit and run”, “Teen dies after hit and run accident”, “Hit and run driver still sought”, “Fatal hit and run driver gets slap on the wrist” and “House arrest for fatal hit and run”. Those are some of the headlines across the country dealing with hit and run accidents. Many of them, of course, have been fatal.

For the benefit of my friend in the Bloc, and I listened to his presentation carefully, the incident that brought this bill into being dealt with an offender in British Columbia that had 11 driving prohibitions and citations since 1997. In other words, he had been charged numerous times with impaired driving. He did not learn a lesson. It did not matter how many times he was charged, how many times he was convicted, he did not learn from any of those incidences. That is what brought this about.

The crowning matter was when he ran over and killed a young girl by the name of Carley Regan, a 13-year old girl. She lost her life unnecessarily at the hands of this driver. I can tell the House and the member from the Bloc who thinks this is an absurd bill that this story is being repeated and repeated across the country in just about every city. I am sure that the member of the Bloc can attest to similar types of situations that have occurred in his own province.

That is what concerns us here. It is not the fact that there are these occurrences taking place, it is the fact that they are not being addressed adequately for the seriousness of the crime, and that is the taking of someone else's life or the serious injury of another person. This bill hits those two particular points right on the head. It is a seven year minimum for loss of life and four years for severe damage or personal injury. This is what is happening here.

I will mention one other incident dealing with a Calgary situation. A young father had just come into my office last week. His daughter was killed by a hit and run driver on March 17 of this year. That hit and run driver, in spite of the low penalties associated with this crime, decided to make a run for it and he got out of town because he knew the law was on his heels. He made it all the way to Toronto and he climbed aboard a plane after dispensing some of his personal belongings. He was heading to England when the police walked on to that plane and slapped the cuffs on him. There is no question, when it comes to extradition for a charge such as this, that he would have gotten away scot free. That is how close it was. As it turns out, he is now before the courts in this country.

This family of which I speak is totally devastated by the loss of their daughter at his hands. I know from speaking with the father that he has serious concerns, as do many of us, vis-à-vis the penalties meted out to those who kill someone in a hit and run accident.

This family shares the view of a growing number of constituents and taxpayers in this country that these offenders are getting off far too lightly. The number of families is growing across this land. They are watching issues such as this come forward. They want to see parliamentarians address the matter. They know that there is a political answer to this particular problem. It is all in the legislation.

These people would like to see their concerns addressed in this House. I commend my colleagues, the members for Cariboo—Prince George and Abbotsford for bringing this matter forward. These members took some action. We are encouraging members in other parties in this House to support this particular action. It is not frivolous and not unreasonable.

If we think of it in our own situation, it may be one or our sons or daughters. I have been there. I have had fathers crying in my office over issues such as this. There was one particular case where a father's son was run over. The culprit got out of his car. The child had been eating an ice cream cone and the ice cream cone was splattered on the windshield of the car that hit him. The driver got out; he was drunk. He looked at the young boy on the pavement. He then got back in his car and ran over him again.

Tell me, is that a reasonable course of action? If the answer is no, and it should be no, then the person that is responsible should pay a price and not, as we have seen in the headlines in this country, receive a slap on the wrist or house arrest. There must be a minimum sentence brought into this picture. It has been far too long that we have not addressed this matter in the House including many other cases of drunk driving.

I beg to differ with the comments of my colleague from the Bloc that drunk driving numbers are down. If the statistics are recorded as being down, I will tell the House why they are down. It is because police departments across this country do not have the resources to put these programs forward.

The challenges in the courts for entrapment and all other charter arguments are outrageous. They are causing police departments to withdraw. It takes a great deal of effort and resource to reconstruct a hit and run accident. Bill C-275 also deals with the issue of plea bargaining on hit and run charges and it seeks to eliminate it.

We could not ask for a better bill to deal with all of the backroom negotiations that take place in a courtroom. I ask my colleagues on both sides of this House to support this bill. We owe it to Canadians to do everything possible to ensure that those who flee the scene of an accident will receive just punishment.

[Canada Border Services Agency Act, June 13th, 2005]

That does not fix it. What does it fix?