Alexa McDonough

[Department of Foreign Affairs Act, February 14th, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to raise a question with the member. I agreed with many of his comments, not all of them, but that will not surprise anybody.

As one of several foreign affairs critics in the House, I was extremely disappointed that the government chose to introduce Bill C-31 and Bill C-32 while not only the Minister of Foreign Affairs was abroad on an exceedingly important and sensitive mission to the Middle East, but all of the foreign affairs critics were away as well. Although I do not think the Conservative foreign affairs critic accompanied the mission, it is true that the former foreign affairs critic for the Conservative Party acquitted himself extremely well as a member of that mission.

I am disappointed not to have heard the previous debate in the House. I have not been able to fully catch up with what other points of view were presented in debate having just come home yesterday from the Middle East.

I was interested in hearing the wrap up comments from the Conservative member who just spoke, in which, if I understood correctly, he suggested that perhaps Bill C-31 and Bill C-32 were good bills in that they would give us a chance to look at how the foreign affairs' functions of the government were discharged and in what ways it may make sense for us to introduce improvements.

If I understood his comments correctly, I wonder if the member could address two questions. Does he not find it troublesome that we now find ourselves with after the fact legislation in front of us? It is now close to two years since the government separated foreign affairs and international trade. Those two departments have been functioning under that new arrangement pretty much ever since because of an order in council that allowed the government to do that before any such debate took place in the House.

We now find ourselves basically being asked to rubber stamp something that has already happened. If we stand in the way of this, it will be suggested that we are being obstructionists and that we do not get it. It will ask us why we do not just get with its program. The government has done this without any parliamentary authority and it wants us to put up or shut up.

Is it not also equally problematic that, at the very time the government purports to be in the process of launching a major review of Canada's foreign policy, we are faced with such legislation? At the very least one could say that the government appears to have put the cart before the horse when it went ahead and separated these two departments without allowing the rationale for doing so to be fully divulged and fully understood, let alone the opportunity for there to be meaningful input from the Canadian people who are about to be invited, which is what we have been told, to give meaningful input into Canada's future foreign policy for the country.

[Petitions, February 2nd, 2005]

I wish to table another petition with many hundreds of signatures. The petitioners urge that Canada finally take a clear stand in saying no to any Canadian participation in Bush's missile defence madness and instead to concentrate on working with our partners in peace toward better arms control and an end to the production and sale of weapons of mass destruction and any materials used to build them.

[Petitions, February 2nd, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, I have the privilege of tabling a petition signed by Canadians in three provinces, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, in support of the continuing campaign to press the government to increase our overseas development assistance from the current shameful level of .28% to 0.7% of GDP.

It is a very important petition at any time, particularly on the eve of a budget.

[National Defence, January 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, a one-way conversation is no kind of dialogue. What we have here is another non-answer. What we have is more dithering. In fact, we have had a whole year of non-answers from the Prime Minister. Canadians do not call him Mr. Dithers for nothing. Not only that, there is utter disregard for the excellent testimony before the foreign affairs committee that has documented the dangers in failures of missile defence.

Where is the backbone to say no to missile defence madness?

[National Defence, January 31st, 2005]

Mr. Speaker, Canadians know, despite Liberal denials, that when George Bush came to Canada he put serious pressure on us to sign on to star wars. Why would he do that? Because the Prime Minister continues to waffle. The Prime Minister wants to have it both ways and the government has not been clear on where it stands on missile defence.

With the resumption of Parliament will the Prime Minister cease his dithering and do as Canadians want and just say no to Bush's missile defence madness?

[Budget Implementation Act, 2004, No. 2, December 14th, 2004]

It is perverse.

[Maher Arar Inquiry, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the government is doing everything it can to ensure the public inquiry into the deportation and detention of Maher Arar is anything but public. Now it is blocking the release of a summary document on the inquiry's proceedings since it closed its doors to the public five months ago, a summary that government appointed commissioner Justice Dennis O'Connor declares “will not harm national security”.

When will the government quit stalling and allow the commissioner to release the Arar inquiry summary? What is this government trying to hide?

[Tax Conventions Implementation Act, 2004, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it was not my intention to speak to the bill until I heard the parliamentary secretary's attack on the Bloc member who just spoke.

I found it astounding that what we heard from the parliamentary secretary was effectively an elaborate defence of countries that make tax evasion legal. What he said was that tax avoidance was something that everyone does and that countries are a party to and so on.

However what he did not say is that we have a hemorrhage of taxes that ought to be paid by Canadian corporations to the public coffers to sustain our most important public services and programs precisely because the government refuses to do anything about the fact that the law does not capture those taxes properly.

While we heard the parliamentary secretary say that it was quite legal for people to avail themselves of tax havens, the previous member quite rightly pointed out that we needed to do something about the problem.

A great deal of analysis has been done on this but the parliamentary secretary treated the member's comment as though the member was somehow dreaming it up for some paranoid reason or some unduly partisan reason. The member was speaking of a very respectable body of research done by tax accountants and economists that points out the incredibly low levels of taxes that Canadian companies are paying in places such as Barbados and many other countries simply because they are completely free to do so.

While Canadians pay their fair share of taxes, we have examples of the major banks. It does not matter which bank but the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce happens to be the one at the centre of this particular analysis. This bank, which would have and should have been paying taxes in the amount of $844 million, was able to reduce that legally, because we do not have any tax agreements to capture this, to $239 million.

I know that seems like a lot of taxes but we have to consider the fact that instead of paying at a rate of 36.6% on the profits, the bank was actually paying only 10.4%. The result is that the government uses the fact that we do not have the tax dollars to maintain our basic programs very conveniently.

Earlier today the parliamentary secretary stood and agreed with an opposition member who said that we should do something about the problem of pensions not being indexed in the U.K.

We should also be addressing a problem that has been raised again and again by the member for Windsor—St. Clair and the member for Windsor West about completely unfair taxation, practically tax confiscation, that penalizes Canadians--

[Petitions, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have a second petition that is very straightforward. It calls upon the House of Commons to oppose the candidacy of Mr. Francisco Flores Perez for secretary general of the Organization of American States.

Canada is a member nation of the Organization of American States. Many concerns have been expressed about the inappropriateness and unacceptability of Mr. Perez being considered for secretary general. This is heartfelt by many Canadians who have taken the opportunity to sign a petition asking us to support their opposition to this appointment.

[Petitions, December 14th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I have the honour to table a large number of petitions. I think we now have received over 12,000 petitions lobbying against the taxation of aboriginal post-secondary funding.

I think it is well known to the House that the Canada Revenue Agency has announced that beginning in 2005 aboriginal post-secondary students' support funding would be treated as income, including tuition, book allowance, living allowance, scholarships, bursaries and travel dollars.

We have a disgrace in this country in terms of the limited access there has been to post-secondary education. We are talking about the poorest families in this country who desperately need the education that should be available to them. They do not need this new barrier to stand in the way.