Loyola Hearn

[Fisheries and Oceans, February 3rd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday's Speech from the Throne mentioned the word fishing only once in a passing manner. Not a single time was the fishery mentioned as a whole.

What priority is the government and the new minister going to give this renewable resource that affects so many Canadians?

[Business of the House, February 2nd, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Before we get into the really heavy agenda, I wish to give notice that later this week I will be raising a question of privilege concerning the government's initial response to Question No. 37 which sought details of all contracts, grants, contributions, and/or loan guarantees by the government to companies that were subject to the current Prime Minister's former blind management--

[Human Resources Development, November 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, let me try the minister responsible for HRDC. Several seniors in my district have notified me, and I am sure it is true for others across the country, that they will not receive their old age security and Canada pension plan cheques next month until December 22.

With Christmas approaching, December is a unique month, especially for people on fixed incomes. Will the minister this year be Santa and not Scrooge and make sure that these senior citizens and others get their cheques on time to prepare for Christmas?

[Marine Atlantic, November 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, the former pension plan of Marine Atlantic dockyard workers ended on November 30, 1996, with a substantial surplus. The surplus was to be shared among the individuals who contributed to the plan, many of whom would get upwards of $15,000 to $20,000.

On January 2, 2002, I wrote to the Minister of Transport on this matter and his response stated, “Implementation of this agreement will take place in early 2003”.

Now that 2003 is almost over, how can the Minister of Transport justify the long delay and will he inform the House of when Atlantic dockyard workers can expect to receive their pensions?

[Remembrance Day, November 7th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, next week we will remember those who fought and served us in the great world wars. All of them were heroes.

One of the great heroes was a young Newfoundlander, Tommy Ricketts, who lied about his age and at 15 joined the Royal Newfoundland Regiment.

In 1916, in Belgium, they came under heavy fire. He and his commander outflanked the German gun. They ran out of ammunition. He circled back, found ammunition, came back to his platoon and they drove back the enemy. He was the youngest soldier ever to be awarded the Victoria Cross.

We owe a debt of gratitude to people like Tommy Ricketts and all those who served. On November 11, let us remember them all for what they have done for us. Let us never forget that great sacrifice they paid for this country.

[Question No. 267, November 5th, 2003]

Is it the policy of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that harvesters must land at least $5,000 worth of urchins using divers only in order to have their licences renewed, and if so, does the responsibility to ensure that the divers involved in this activity remain in constant visual contact with each other remain with the divers themselves or with the holder of the licences?

[Points of Order, November 5th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, there is a real possibility that the House of Commons will be in the state of suspension after this week. It is widely rumoured that the Prime Minister will stop the House from meeting with the use of prorogation of the session.

We all know that the Auditor General has in preparation a major report covering a number of matters. If Parliament is prorogued the report would remain secret until a new session is convened. Under the Constitution that could be a year from now.

Each of the sections of the Auditor General Act governing the reporting of the Auditor General to the House contains the instruction for the conveyance of the report from the Auditor General to the Speaker and from the Speaker to the House of Commons.

It is what the Speaker does with the report that should concern each of us.

In various sections of the act it states:

--the Speaker of the House of Commons shall lay each such report before the House of Commons forthwith after receiving it or, if that House is not then sitting, on any of the first fifteen days on which that House is sitting after the Speaker receives it.

There is an obligation on the part of the Speaker to table any report. It is a matter of practice rather than statute that a report is kept confidential until it is actually tabled.

On numerous occasions we on this side of the House have argued that the House should be the first recipient of such reports in order to protect the rights of members to see the reports and to be able to respond to them inside or outside the House.

I stress that this is a matter of practice and this has been reinforced by many assertions that premature disclosure of such a document is contemptuous to the House.

However we know that the House has the ability to waive any claim if it wishes and, in this case, I think most Canadians would agree there is greater public interest to be served by getting this report into the hands of the members and the wider community, including the public servants and departments touched by the Auditor General's report.

Simply put, it is not in the public interest to have this report remain secret because of a claim that the House of Commons requires to see it first.

Certainly the House will want—and the act requires—the report be tabled and be received officially into the records of the House. That action triggers certain things, including the referral of the report to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts under the authority of the Standing Orders.

However it is only practice that keeps the report secret between the time it is received by the Speaker and the moment the Speaker tables it.

I am not prepared to argue that the Speaker should unilaterally release the anticipated report. I do argue that the House should give an instruction to the Speaker to make the report public if Parliament has been prorogued.

While there is an assumption that there will be a new session of this Parliament, this is only conjecture. The election could be called at any time and this report would remain secret from Canadians until after an election. This is not in the public interest.

There is a remedy, Mr. Speaker. Without altering the Speaker's statutory duty to table the report in any new session and this is important the report should be tabled in the new session so that the automatic reference to the public accounts committee is not compromised or laid open to question. Without altering the duty to table, the House could waive its claim to the right of first access and the Speaker could be empowered to make the report available to members and the public when it is received.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to move that notwithstanding any practice of the House, when the Speaker receives the report from the Auditor General during a period when Parliament has been prorogued, the Speaker shall cause the report to be made available to members and the public immediately; and that the House, in this instance, hereby waives its undoubted right to confidentiality of the report until it is laid before the House.

[Federal-Provincial Fiscal Arrangements Act, October 31st, 2003]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to say a few words on this extremely important bill. This bill is of particular importance to my region of the country.

I listened attentively to what the member for Dartmouth said. She laid it out quite clearly as to how federal funding generally affects not only the country but specifically the Atlantic region. The points she raised when she referred to her home province of Nova Scotia, I could just switch the province to Newfoundland and they would also fit. I congratulate the member on how well she understands the financial situation in which the Atlantic provinces find themselves.

I want to say from the start that we support the legislation. That is not to say that we support the present equalization funding mechanisms because we certainly do not. We are supporting what the legislation does which is to extend the present agreements for a year so that presumably the new government will put in place a type of funding program for the provinces that will really be equal. Certainly, the equalization program that we have today is not equal in any respect and I will explain that as I go on.

The proposed legislation extends the present agreement for one year, I presume in the event that the government does not have its act together. We might ask why the government would not have its act together because it has known for some time that this agreement was going to run out. The answer is it has not been paying any attention to this agreement or any other agreement because it has been too caught up in playing its own games; one Prime Minister is trying to develop a legacy and the other prime minister is trying to make an impression.

What will be interesting when the incoming prime minister in comes is the effect it will have on the incomes of the people across the country. If he delivers on half of the promises, not on all of the promises, then we will not have to worry about surpluses any more because he will have overspent tremendously. People are looking at that very carefully.

The question raised at the end of the speech by the hon. member for Dartmouth concerned the overpayment to provinces and the negative effect it is having on the Atlantic provinces in particular, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and P.E.I. perhaps in this case to a lesser extent. They have been told, “The census figures are out of whack. You owe us a lot of money and we want it”. It is funny when the provinces come to Ottawa looking for money that they are owed or which they deserve, they do not get that same quick response that the federal government is expecting from them.

Perhaps the federal government should look more closely at the census generally. We are now seeing the manipulation of a process that has existed for a number of years, that is, the process of changing the electoral boundaries every 10 years. The change is based on a close accounting of the electors and the boundaries are adjusted to make sure that there is relative equality. We could argue equality here also because trying to represent 80,000 or 90,000 people in an urban riding compared to representing that same number in rural Canada is certainly two different kettles of fish entirely.

Because of the wishes of the incoming prime minister, there is a need to have an early election. He wants to get rid of those who surround the present Prime Minister and reward some of those who have patiently sat in the backbenches, all 150 of them who think they are going to be in cabinet, so that they will live happily ever after.

In order to do that he is faced with the conflict of having two groups around him. Because he does not want to bring a lot of the backbenchers up front and he certainly does not want to keep the frontbenchers around him, the easiest thing to do is to clean house. That is exactly what he intends to do.

There is a complication in that under the existing legislation he cannot call an election under the new boundaries until August 25, 2004. In order to have the best of both worlds, the incoming prime minister was instrumental in getting the government to bring forward legislation to move the implementation date up to April 1 so he could call an election any time after that date based on the new boundaries.

However because of the lesser amount of time that the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer has, despite what they say they cannot do justice to the census to determine the number of electors in certain areas by following such a circumvented process. Therefore we question the reliability of the figures upon which the government bases its payments or overpayments to provinces.

The member from Winnipeg asked whether the government, in light of an upcoming election, would put pressure on the provinces to pay back that money because it is not going to be a very popular political thing to do. There is another reason the government may not put pressure on the provinces to pay it back. There is an election coming, but when the government originally made that decision, it probably said, “It does not matter because the people are going to vote for us anyway as they have for the last 10 years”. That is not necessarily true anymore.

There is a major political change taking place in this country. For the first time in many years, we are seeing a party that will be front and centre, that will be taking on the Liberals head to head in the next election. Unfortunately for my friend from Winnipeg, it is not the NDP, but as I have always said, I hope members of the NDP will still hold a small presence in the House because they do present that social conscience which a place like this needs. The new Conservative Party now gives Canadians an alternative and the Liberals will not be doing anything rash between now and election time. Hopefully that will be to the benefit of provinces such as my own.

On equalization, the word itself is certainly a misnomer. There is no way that equalization describes what is happening in relation to the payments that are distributed across the country. The cap, which the government has now agreed to relax for a while, prevented that equal flow of funds from the rich to the poor, sort of a Robin Hood scenario. The whole concept based around equalization is have provinces and have not provinces, but what is the definition of a have not province? Ordinarily one would think of these poor provinces that have no resources and consequently, out of the kindness of their hearts, those of us who have will help them.

History has shown that over the years provinces across the country, or even before provinces were established, regions across the country have helped one another during the bad times. When the west was having a lot of trouble, it was helped by the east. Now perhaps the east is being helped by the west. As oil and gas dry up in the west and it becomes much more lucratively developed in the east, then undoubtedly the reverse will be true again.

Newfoundland and Labrador is referred to as a have not province and yet we have major offshore oil developments. We have the best, the cleanest and the most prolific hydro developments anywhere in the country, and they compare with any in the world, although many are undeveloped. We have great mineral resources and new ones are always being discovered. We have a rich forest industry. We had and still do have to some degree a tremendous fishery. Unfortunately, because of the federal government's complete and utter mismanagement, we have seen the stocks diminish.

A recent assessment was done by some very knowledgeable people of some 1973 landings, which was before we let the foreigners take over the resources, before we let the seal herds grow to the point where they destroyed the fish and before we completely abandoned surveillance and protection of our resource. The value of the 1973 resource in today's dollars would have been $3.38 billion on groundfish alone. One can just imagine what that could do to the economy of Newfoundland.

For the past couple of years the landed value of our total fishing resource has been roughly in the area of $1 billion, mainly because of crab and shrimp, the shellfish, which 10 or 15 years ago was only a very small part of the revenues produced. Shellfish has now become the saviour of the fishery in our province and has become a lucrative resource for those who still participate in the industry.

However, with the amount of fish that we had in 1973, if we had been able to protect and preserve the resource, as we should have been able to do with any leadership at all from the federal government, instead of trading it off for other benefits, it would have amounted to $3.38 billion. Newfoundland is not the only province that has been affected. Most of Atlantic Canada and a lot of Quebec also benefited from that resource. We have seen that resource disappear. As I said, it would have been $3.38 billion alone in what was landed in 1973 if we had been able to maintain that level.

In relation to our hydro developments, because of poor dealings in the past, when we had a government, unfortunately, a Liberal government--maybe I should say, from my perspective, fortunately a Liberal government--we negotiated a deal with Quebec with no help from Canada and somebody on our side forgot to insert an escalator clause. Quebec has benefited greatly from the deal and our revenues each year are approximately $10 million. From the sale or resale of that power I think the revenues for Quebec are somewhere in the area of $1 billion at this stage. That is another resource that has completely disappeared.

We have had no assistance whatsoever in the development of lower Churchill. Newfoundland and Quebec have talked in the past and under the new progressive government in Newfoundland, with tremendous leadership and cabinet, which will be put in place this coming week, and tremendous individuals involved, we undoubtedly will see Newfoundland dealing with Quebec again, hopefully for the development of our power, but in a way where we all benefit, not just one party, from the agreement.

With our mineral developments, again without any federal assistance or federal input, we see the resources being developed and brought out of the province to create jobs somewhere else. We are contributing to the national scene.

Some say Newfoundland is a have-not province and that it constantly takes from the centre. When we are providing Quebec with hydro and the spinoff from that is over $1 billion, when we are providing Manitoba and Ontario with our minerals for processing, when we are providing everybody around the world with our fish, how can we be a have province?

People might say that it is our own fault, and a lot of it is. A lot of the decisions were made with the lack of input from provincial governments of the past. That day is over. The resource giveaway from Newfoundland and Labrador has ended. I would issue this challenge to the rest of the provinces. The resources within our provinces should be primarily developed for the good of our provinces.

In a federation we undoubtedly will share and help wherever we can but we must look after ourselves first. However coordination and leadership is supposed to come from Ottawa but we have not seen it. Is it any wonder that provinces are upset? Is it any wonder Quebec is upset by its treatment from Ottawa? Is it any wonder Newfoundland and Labrador is upset? Not at all.

We have not seen fairness. We have not seen solid, central control. What we have seen is a whittling away of our controls and a lack of input from the government in the areas where it should be helping. The government interferes in areas where it should not and does not help in areas where it should.

When we talk about equalization let us first look at what we are trying to do. The government says that the theory behind equalization is to ensure that everyone in the country is treated fairly. What a joke. If it wants to treat us fairly, then it should let us help ourselves. We do not need handouts. We do not want to take federal money and still hold on to our own. We have never asked for that.

As we develop our finite natural resources we want to be treated the same way as Alberta was treated in the beginning. We want to hold on to enough of our revenue to reinvest so we can become a have province. If we could hold on to a larger percentage of the revenues garnered from the development of our resources we could invest in our own province and it would not take too long to create the jobs that are necessary.

We need to get legislation through that does not put provinces in the position of having to give away their resources. We need the freedom to develop and the right to reinvest until we can become a contributing partner.

Newfoundland and Labrador has only 500,000 people. With our resources we should all be millionaires. Why are we a have not province? The answer is quite simple. It is like the old days of serfdom when the lords were sitting in Ottawa and the peons were scattered throughout the country taking only what the lord giveth forth. That is not the way a Confederation is supposed to work.

Maybe we should look at the word equalization again. Maybe we should look at the fact that all areas of the country are not equal.

We should listen to the member for Dartmouth who talked about health care funding. Some time ago the federal government funded 50% of health care costs. Today in some areas the funding is down to as little as 14% of the total cost. The burden has landed in the laps of the provinces.

The member talked about what was happening in Nova Scotia. The situation is even worse in Newfoundland because we are the only province that is losing a high percentage of its residents. Over the last 10 years around 50,000 people, or 10% of our population, have gone to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and some have gone south of the border. What is left is an ageing population requiring, as the member said, more funding. Not only do we receive fewer dollars but we have greater needs. With the geography that we have, it is almost impossible to deliver that funding.

If we are going to look at the equalization situation and if we are asking for a year's extension to develop a proper program, then let us do it properly. Let us look at the entities across the country. Let us create a country where everybody is treated equally. Let us create a country where we help ourselves and the federal government lets us help ourselves by staying out of our hair.

[Question No. 254, October 31st, 2003]

With respect to the Employment Insurance Program (EI), will the Department of Human Resources Development consider: ( a ) moving forward on the long-promised review of the EI premium-setting mechanism; ( b ) bringing EI premiums into balance with EI costs; and ( c ) separating the EI fund from general revenues?

[Infrastructure, October 31st, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, deeds, not words, is what we want.

The infrastructure in the country is literally falling apart. The government is higher on grass than it is on pavement. Downloading on the provinces and eventually the municipalities has led to an inability to maintain the system.

Instead of bragging about a balanced budget, when will the government deliver treats not tricks?