Bob Mills

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, farmers were disappointed when they did not seen any direct reference in the throne speech to BSE and the crisis it has created. BSE is changing a whole way of life forever, certainly in western Canada, but also in parts of Ontario, Quebec and I am sure in Atlantic Canada. These people will no longer be in business. We need a secure food supply.

When the British had their problem, we should have sent our people over there to understand the issue. Once they understood the issue they should have come back here and erred on the side of caution to do whatever it took to make sure it did not happen here.

In 1997 we outlawed the feeding of animals to animals but we were too slow and now we are paying the price. This issue will change our whole agricultural society forever. We have lost that resource and I am not sure what will replace it. I am not sure it will be good for Canadians as a guaranteed food supply.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, this is politics and this is a blood sport that we play down here. Obviously, when mismanagement occurs and money is wasted on such things as the scandals that we see, the worst in probably 136 years, we do have to focus on that. We have to focus on that because if there is corruption in that area, where else is it occurring?

All of that money and all those interest payments that could be used for the projects I am talking about that would make us leaders in alternate energy, developing fuel cells and wind energy, is not available because it has been funneled off through political corruption.

I did a poll in my riding, and does anyone know what the number one issue was? Thirty-three per cent of my constituents said, long before this, that the corruption and waste that occurs in Ottawa has to end; 19% said health; and 17% said environment. That tells us why we have to focus on it. We have to end that before we can get to the things that will be good for this country.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak in reply to the Speech from the Throne.

Also, in this final session of the 37th Parliament, I want to thank my constituents, in particular all those people that I will be losing because of a political reorganization of my riding to remove the western portion and add an eastern portion, I guess just to make things a little difficult. I want to thank all of those people for their support over the last 11 years.

My general comment about the Speech from the Throne is that I sat in amazement thinking of the things that were being said and how much they were going to cost. Then I was amazed further at how many things were left out and I would like to talk about those. Then specifically I would like to talk about what the Speech from the Throne had to say about environmental issues.

Much of what the Prime Minister put in the Speech from the Throne we heard again on the CBC. The highlight of that had to be the grade 5 students who did such an excellent job. I would tell the Prime Minister that I enjoy answering questions from grade 5 students as well because they come right from the heart and they are really honest. Probably his best answer of the whole evening was the fact that he watches CBC news before he goes to bed at night. That was very enlightening.

The reason I came to Ottawa was that I felt that this place was corrupt. I felt that this place did not know now to spend money. I could not believe the debt that the country had built up.

Today the debt is $32 billion higher than it was in 1993. It could be said that not very much has been accomplished if that was one of the major issues and it is now $32 billion higher. That debt is being left to our children and our grandchildren. That is one of the reasons we came here.

It galls me when I hear the members across the way talk about how they have dealt with the debt. It has not grown as fast, but certainly it is now $32 billion higher than it was in 1993 when the member for LaSalle—Émard became the finance minister.

When we look at the promises in the throne speech, we see promises about health, which is the number one issue for Canadians. We see a promise that wait lists will be reduced. Red book one said that waiting lists would be reduced and of course in red book four it now says that waiting lists will be reduced. I think Canadians are starting to say that it is easy to put this rhetoric in, but when is the government going to deliver and actually do something that reforms and revises our health care system?

We see a promise of .7% for foreign aid. In red book one it said that we would increase our aid to foreign countries and of course, we are now at less than .2%. Obviously we have gone in the opposite direction there too. Many of the farmers, many of the cities, many of the students that come into our offices also ask, “What about us? If you are going to increase your foreign aid help, what about us?”

For the military, the great pride in 1993 was to cancel the helicopters. Now in red book four we are going to buy helicopters, but that is still a few years down the road. All of us still have in our minds the helicopter lying on its side on that ship. Those 40 year old helicopters are going to be 50 years old before we replace them and our young men and women are forced to fly in them.

We are going to have greater intelligence services and more security. That is great to say and all of us want that security. Terrorism is a horrible threat. However, the environment minister's feeling is that it is not all that bad and not a major threat.

Then the government talks about our social programs. The gap between the rich and the poor certainly has not changed. If anything it is worse.

How long has the aboriginal issue been around? Obviously according to the throne speech we are going to fix that. There are no real details or idea of the cost or no real focus on how we would do that.

Western alienation is a really big problem and we are certainly going to fix that. Yet we find out that our elected senators are not going to be named. We find out that the Wheat Board is just fine, although only Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta are forced to sell their grain through a government agency, They are unable to sell their own grain. Farmers cannot take a bag of wheat across the border and give it to a 4-H club without going to jail for it. One of my constituents went to jail for 23 days for taking a bag of grain and donating it to a 4-H club across the border. That is western alienation and there is no mention of fixing things like that.

It was going to cost $2 million for gun control and it has now cost over $1 billion. It is not working. I received 13,000 letters in my constituency office about former Bill C-68. We are not going to fix that. We are not going to have a free vote in the House.

That is what western alienation is all about. Why did the Prime Minister not deal with those problems in the throne speech?

We are going to help the cities. That is just wonderful. We are going to give back some of the GST but we will come up with a plan later, the cheque is in the mail. We are going to help them with their infrastructure. We have been saying that for years and years. Red book one said that. Red book four says that. I assume that if we have a red book 10 it will say that, but not much will happen.

If we did all of those things, the real question is who would pay for it? Obviously we are not going to go into deficit again. We certainly would not want that to happen. I guess we are just going to increase taxes if in fact we are going to deliver on the promises in the throne speech.

More important, what was omitted? Agriculture and BSE and those young farmers were omitted. Those people are losing their way of life. They are going under. They are finished. A whole culture is gone. That is part of western alienation too but there is no mention of it. There is some fancy statement about the government being dedicated to the agricultural way of life but it is not. There is nothing in there that says the government is dedicated to helping those people out.

There is no mention about what is going to happen about taxes. There is no mention of debt reduction. Remember that every man, woman and child owes $40,000. The minute a child is born in this country, he or she owes $40,000. There is no mention of dealing with that. There is no mention of justice issues, about police, about policing problems, about gangs, about drugs.

I read a book over the holidays about how the gangs are taking over Canada. It is scary when we hear what the Hell's Angels are doing and how they have infiltrated government, how they have infiltrated business, how they have infiltrated the police, how they have infiltrated our whole society. There is no mention of that in the throne speech, but that concerns people.

Senate reform also has not been dealt with. We are going to have more free speech. We are going to have more democracy. Six days into this new session, the government used closure. It took the other prime minister over a year to do that. The government used closure again to shut down debate in the House. What are people to think when they hear that?

Turning to environmental issues, as the Conservative Party's senior critic for the environment I have been active in a number of these files. First, on the issue of contaminated sites, it is great that we are going to spend $3.5 billion over 10 years, but much of that money was already included in the 2003 budget. Is it not nice when the government announces the same money over and over again and tries to take credit for it. Let us get on with it. Let us prioritize those sites and show an action plan of what we are going to do.

It is great that we have $500 million over 10 years for other sites, even those that are not federal. It is great that we are going to help the Sydney tar ponds, but we have put $66 million into studies and we still have not done anything. When are we going to do something? Remember that this money amounts to $50 million per year. That is not going to cover a heck of a lot of cleaning up of contaminated sites.

There are brownfields in all of our cities that are going to take a lot of money. They could be productive, taxable sites within our communities. That would be a way to help out the communities. Uranium mines in the north are leaking into our rivers. These things have to be dealt with, but we need a plan. I do not see that plan.

As far as Kyoto is concerned, climate change is occurring. Climate change has always occurred and will continue to occur. There is no question about that. The big question is how much does it have to do with natural processes and how much does it have to do with humans? Let us err on the side of caution and say that humans do play a role in this, but let us get the science behind it first and use that to develop our program.

The environment minister acts like Chicken Little as he runs across the country. I have listened to his speeches all over the place, and my God, the sky is falling. He says there are catastrophes occurring everywhere; there is no snow, there is drought; there is pestilence coming across the whole world. It is just terrible and if we do not do something the polar bears will drown, the native people will be swimming and the Maritimes will be flooded. The whole world is about to end. This guy should be written up in the cartoons.

What does the chief meteorologist for Environment Canada say? He says that there is no proof that extreme weather is caused by global warming. The minister says that in his view climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more severe than terrorism. I do not know how many people would agree with that. I doubt the people in Bangkok, or Afghanistan, or in other parts of the world where they are constantly worrying about threats of terrorism would agree with that.

We have agreed that we will be 6% below 1990 levels, which will be a 240 megatonne reduction in CO

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reductions. We now have a plan, so to speak, that is going to pick all the low fruit and could conceivably result in a 180 megatonne reduction by 2010. Many countries, 14 of the 15 EU countries, are saying they do not think they can reach their targets by 2010. Those guys have it easy compared to us. We have a huge country, we have a cold climate, we do not have much infrastructure, et cetera. Remember as well that the United States, China, India, Mexico and Brazil, those big polluting countries, are not part of the whole Kyoto process. Remember as well that 8 out of 10 provinces say that they would want more input before they would agree to try to achieve those targets.

All of that said, we look at the government plan and see big industries being asked to reduce by 55 megatonnes. They are saying they cannot achieve that. We are asking average Canadians to reduce their use of carbon by 20%, the one tonne challenge, 20 megatonnes is all that will be. By the way, for those 20 megatonnes so far we have spent $62 million per megatonne. That is what we have budgeted for just to reduce 20 megatonnes out of the 240 megatonnes.

The throne speech says that we are going to go the final shot and take the final 60 megatonnes. There is no plan for that. There is no budget for that. No one knows how we would ever achieve that. We have already added up a whole bunch of maybes to get to the 180 megatonnes. Where could we possibly get that other 60 megatonnes? There are only three places we could get it from.

We could get it from the electricity producers who largely use coal across the country. We could do one of two things, we could shut them down from using coal or we could decide to go totally nuclear. Something has to be done because they are the big producers of CO

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. There has to be a plan of what is to be done. That would mean higher electricity rates.

Transportation also has to be looked at. It is fine to say that when people are lined up to go into McDonald's the cars should be shut off while in line and started again to move forward and then turned off. It is fine to say that people should not drive more than 80 kilometres an hour on the highway because that will use less fuel.

I recently drove down Highway 401 at 120 kilometres an hour and I was being passed. We have to convince that whole herd of traffic to drive at 80 kilometres an hour and I do not know how that will be done.

Finally, we also have to regulate heat. We need heat in Canada. In case the Minister of the Environment has not noticed, we have had one of the coldest winters in a long time. In my area we have had more snow than we have had in a long time. I notice the minister does not call it global warming any more. He calls it climate change. That is probably wise. It is hard to sell global warming when it is minus 47 degrees Celsius. It is a tough sell and he might lose his crowd.

Our economy will be affected if we try to do all those things. What should we do? I do not like being negative all the time. We should have a plan and a made in Canada plan, not a Eurocentric bureaucratic nightmare called Kyoto. We need a plan that consists of three things. It would consist of conservation, many of the measures that the Minister of the Environment already promotes. There are all kinds of ways that we can conserve energy. If we were to give Canadians a vision there are all kinds of things they would buy into and their 20 megaton target could be achieved. They probably could double that if they really bought into the program. Canadians need to be told the reasons, they need to be given a name and they need to be shown ways to help them do it. It cannot be done through these phoney programs that nobody knows how to get and that bug all of our offices because we do not know how to access that $400 for a new furnace. The plan may be there or it may not be, we cannot get answers.

Then we need to push the transitional sources of energy, such as the hybrid vehicles, the coal gasification and the bio-gas. Exciting projects are out there in that whole area. I do not have the time to talk about them all now. I would have to take three or four days.

We also have alternate energy and that is the future. Everyone, including the oil and gas industry, can buy into that. That is where the real answers are to this whole problem of climate change and the way we can solve it. There is geo-thermal. In my riding of Red Deer we now have two very large buildings heated by geo-thermal energy. The new county office drilled 300 wells into the earth and pump water down through a heat exchanger to heat and cool their building. It is an exciting project. I am proud of this project.

My riding has a swimming pool and recreational complex heated by geo-thermal energy. This is very exciting. I am proud of this. I take people there and show them these facilities.

We have big wind generators. We have wind farms in places such as Ireland, Germany and Denmark. These countries are leaders in this whole area. We should be there also. We should be helping Canadians to achieve these benefits.

Solar energy is another area that has a great future. There are all kinds of solar cells in space that ultimately could be used to generate energy on earth.

Finally, there is the hydrogen energy. If I had more time I would tell members about a little factory that I went to in Vancouver that is creating fuel cells for motor scooters. Anyone who has been to Beijing or any of those kinds of places would have seen that when the traffic light goes red about 50 to 500 motor scooters line up and then there is a big cloud of smoke. Just think of the benefits if they were using these fuel cells.

I could describe many more options. We are so busy here talking about the culture of corruption that we have little time to talk about the environment and what we should really do. We have little time to work on our clean air, clean water and clean land policies.

In the words of the commissioner of the environment, Johanne Gélinas, there is a gap between the federal government's commitments to the environment and its actions. I think that is exactly what we see in the Speech from the Throne, which is why it is so disappointing to be the environment critic when the government has so little vision on where the environment is really going.

[Resumption Of Debate On Address In Reply, February 12th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for his intervention on the Speech from the Throne. I would like him to also note that there are a lot of other things that were missed from the speech as well, not only on auto policy, not only on those workers who are unemployed and do not know where they are going because the federal government has not taken action.

In my constituency, the farmers, the ranchers and the young families are coming into my office to say they are about to lose everything. This BSE issue, with the agriculture crisis that has gone on for years now, is about to ruin them. They literally break into tears. When we have a young 30 year old guy in front of us in tears, we can see how critical this really is.

We have to remember that the government did not include that in its throne speech, just as it did not include the auto industry. It did not include anything about those young farmers. I would like the member to reiterate what was missed in that throne speech.

[Reinstatement of Government Bills, February 10th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, it is certainly my pleasure to speak to the motion and to highlight a few of the reasons for our opposition to what the government now takes as daily routine, to use closure and shut down debate on pretty much any topic.

Having listened to question period today, I can understand why the government may want to talk about some other things and not talk about the issues with which Canadians are concerned. The people in my riding would like us to talk about some quite different issues than what the government has its emphasis on and I will talk about some of those.

Let me first deal with the closure motion and talk about it specifically. On May 2, 2000 during a discussion of the rules curtailing debate at the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, the former clerk of the House of Commons, Robert Marleau, responded to a question regarding the Speaker's authority to protect the minority in the event of an abuse. The former clerk said:

It exists intrinsically in the role of the speakership... all the time, where there can be tyranny on either side. It could be the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of the minority.

At a subsequent meeting on May 4, the former clerk suggested that with motions of time allocation or closure the Speaker is less likely to intervene. There is a reference to this on page 570 of the House of Commons Procedure and Practice . However, the clerk stopped short of suggesting that the Speaker would never intervene. He used an extreme example that if the government time allocated every bill at every stage, the Speaker might intervene.

My interpretation of what the clerk said is that there exists a limit to what a majority government can do with respect to closure and time allocation. The clerk used the extreme example in his response because he knows it is not up to him to establish this limit.

If we were to consider the current Prime Minister in the context of the former prime minister, Jean Chrétien, a prime minister who was not known to be progressive in the democratic deficit file, we see the shocking excess, an excess the Speaker should take note of, an excess that should give the Speaker reason to disallow notice and look the other way when the motion for closure is moved. On only his sixth day in the House of Commons, the current Prime Minister has given notice of closure on debate to reinstate bills from his predecessor, Jean Chrétien.

So much for that new vision. So much for that new parliamentary reform. So much for the parliamentary deficit. We have a Prime Minister who does not even know where he wants to go. He simply wants to bring back a bunch of bills from the previous government. There is no new hope there for Canadians. There is no new government dealing with the issues that the people on the streets are talking about.

Mr. Chrétien was flexible in comparison. It was five months before he could bring himself to move time allocation on debate in the House. His first full-fledged closure motion did not come until he had been at 24 Sussex for a year and a half. Add to that excess the excess of the sheer number of motions moved by the government calls for an intervention from the Speaker. The 75 time allocation motions and 10 closure motions total 85 motions.

It used to be that calling one closure motion in a term might well have brought down the government. Canadians wonder why the government does not let debate go on. If debate does not happen in the House, where is it supposed to happen? The government has demonstrated by its actions 85 times that it has shut down debate.

The current Prime Minister, six days into being in the House, has shut down debate. That is not democracy and leads people out there to ask what we are running here. Are we running a dictatorship where the PMO runs the show and where the Prime Minister is afraid to allow debate in the House?

The third excess to be considered by the Speaker is the fact that through the reinstatement motion the Prime Minister is recycling Chrétien legislation from the previous session. There is nothing new and nothing of his own. How can Canadians know where he wants to go when he simply recycles all of the legislation from the previous administration?

The Speaker has already ruled on that point. I suppose the Speaker's ruling confirms that the government is actually the old, tired government of Jean Chrétien. Otherwise, how could this procedure today even be possible?

I think the Speaker should reconsider this point in view of the fact that the debate on the motion is being closed off. If it is procedurally correct, it certainly is not morally correct. Our ability as the opposition to solicit public support for this point of view is being hampered. We simply do not have the time. We have only been here six days and we are already shutting down debate.

The naval aid bill of 1913 represented the first time in Canadian parliamentary history that closure was ever used. The proposed legislation was introduced by the Conservative government of Robert Borden and, if adopted, would have authorized a cash donation of $35 million to Great Britain for the construction of the Dreadnought class warships for the navy.

Sir Wilfrid Laurier strongly opposed the bill. The Liberals filibustered throughout second reading and committee of the whole. At one point in committee of the whole they kept the House virtually in continuous session for as long as two weeks. The House sat from 3 p.m. on Monday, March 3 until Saturday at midnight, and then again from 3 p.m. on Monday, March 10 to Saturday late in the evening. The naval bill was eventually defeated in the Liberal dominated Senate. The good old days when government actually allowed debate.

Closure was used again to close off the famous pipeline debate in 1956. Debate on the omnibus energy security act of 1982 was made famous because the opposition caused the bells to ring from 4:20 p.m. on Tuesday, March 2 until 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, March 17, at which point Bill C-94 was dropped from the agenda as a result of an agreement having been reached to split the bill into eight smaller bills. There was the GST filibuster organized by the Liberal Party in the House which turned the Senate into a real sideshow.

The point is to allow debate and filibusters to occur in the House. I would refer to the story of Kyoto and the dilemma that I was faced with as the chief environment critic. I had just watched the Grey Cup game and I saw a $250,000 ad for Kyoto during the game. I then knew that $23 million was to be spent advertising Kyoto in the next six weeks. I said to myself as the chief critic for the environment, “How will I get our position out on Kyoto? How will that be possible?”

On the plane ride back that Sunday night, I decided that maybe there was a way and that maybe I would talk in the House for a while. Talking to our leader the next morning and then to the Speaker, I found that there was a rule that allowed that to happen. If a member was the first speaker after the minister who proposed the bill, there was unlimited time to talk about the issue.

There were certain rules pointed out to me by the Speaker: I could not stray from my area, I could not go off topic, I could not read the telephone book, I must not repeat myself, and I must stay on topic. That was a challenge. Members know how that worked out.

The point is that by being able to debate that in the House and being able to get that point of view out over that period of time, we ended up by Wednesday night of that same week being on the front page of every newspaper across the country, being on many talk shows and even going to Toronto to be on Mike Bullard.

By having that opportunity in the House to express our point of view, we were able to accomplish what we needed to because we did not have $23 million to push a particular point of view as the government did. We can see the value then of having an open ability to speak in the House. I am sure that possibly the environment minister cannot see the value of that, but certainly many Canadians could and we were able to get our point of view across.

When a party uses closure and shuts down debate, that then ends discussion of the issues that Canadians should hear about and want to hear about. The government then shuts down any opportunity for debate. These debates are part of history. They are part of being opposition. They are part of what should go on in the House of Commons. They are part of that democratic deficit that obviously our new Prime Minister does not understand because if he did, he would not be using closure six days into his first session in Parliament. Obviously he does not mean what he says when he gets to that.

In 1988 Speaker Fraser said:

It is essential to our democratic system that controversial issues should be debated at reasonable length so that every reasonable opportunity shall be available to hear the arguments pro and con, and that reasonable delaying tactics should be permissible to enable opponents of a measure to enlist public support for their point of view.

We started debate on Friday and we were given a half a day yesterday. Is that a reasonable time? We are talking about a motion that has the potential to reinstate the entire agenda of the former Prime Minister, a Prime Minister who had obviously worn out his welcome, was not popular within his own party, and who was ousted from his position by the very person who is now Prime Minister.

This agenda is being advanced by using closure and shutting off debate and then using a whipped vote to make it happen. It is unconscionable to let that sort of thing happen in a democracy. How can Liberals even say it is a democracy, when they use that sort of tactic for the 86th time?

How do we explain that to people back home when they ask, why do Liberals keep using closure? It is because they do not want debate. People believe that we are in a democracy where we can debate. Try to explain that one even to a grade five class that asks those questions when it is studying the Canadian Parliament.

I know the Speaker respects this institution and would want to protect it from abuses. In his first two weeks the Prime Minister has contributed more to the democratic deficit and has done it quicker than any other Prime Minister. He has denied a free vote on the funding of the gun registry and has allowed an undemocratic closure motion introduced at undemocratic speed to adopt an undemocratic motion, shattering an undemocratic closure record.

Before we allow such excess to become a precedent, the Speaker should intervene and rule the notice of closure out of order. The former clerk indicated that the Speaker can intervene in an extreme circumstance. This is such a circumstance, Mr. Speaker. Standing Order 57 was not intended to usurp the constitutional duty of the opposition. It was not intended to upset the important balance between the government and the opposition. This was the legacy of the former Prime Minister and it will now become the legacy of the new Prime Minister.

One must start asking questions because these are the questions that I know I will get asked at home when I return there on weekends. Constituents are going to ask, what does that closure really mean? It means that we bring back the agenda--some of it, the ones we choose--of the former Prime Minister. It means that we will have something to deal with in the House that suits the government.

It means that the government can cover up things like the Auditor General's report that we heard today. It means that it does not have to deal with issues like the throne speech where there is no mention of agriculture.

I have young farmers, husbands and wives, come before me in my office and say they are desperate, they do not know what to do, they are not able to pay their bills and this is destroying them. Having a 30 year old young fellow cry in one's office is not something that any of us should be put through.

We need to talk about that here. We need to talk about the solutions. All parties need to deal with issues like that. It is critical. It is literally career and life-threatening to many of these people, yet here we are reintroducing things that are not necessarily the key issues that people out on the street are talking about.

Today we have an Auditor General's report that says we had $250 million funnelled away and used by Liberal hacks who supported the party. People then say that they have to send in their cheque at the end of April to the tax department. They are senior citizens who earn $8,000 a year and can hardly buy groceries.

Students who are in university are saying that they worked all summer at three jobs, and guess what? They have a tax bill. My own daughter went to school, got a scholarship in Holland and received her Ph.D. there. She also got a tax bill from the Canadian government. Do members know how embarrassing that was for her, when she went to her professor and said she had to pay taxes on that scholarship? I sent the cheque for her because I was pretty shocked too.

The president of the university wrote to me and said that my daughter was one of the best students. That made me pretty proud, but he also said that as a member of Parliament, I should be disgraced that my government was sending a tax bill to a student who was going to school on a scholarship. We are taxing her. Why would she ever come back to this country? What about the brain drain? That is the kind of thing we should be talking about in the House. That is the kind of stuff we should be ending.

The Auditor General's report states that $250 million just went out to patronage. Well, that $250 million would go a long way to helping seniors who are earning $8,000 a year and paying tax; to helping those students who are working their butts off all summer and are paying tax; to helping that single mom out there; and to helping that husband and wife who are trying to get their kids to go to hockey practice and dance lessons, and trying to make a living and hopefully taking a week's holiday somewhere. That is what Canadians want to talk about. The young farm family who is losing the farm because of BSE is the issue we need to talk about in the House.

The government thinks that it can simply hold a general review, a public inquiry. I have been here a long time now, 11 years, and I have been through the public inquiry routine before. I remind members of the Somalia report, the Krever report, and the APEC report. All of those were inquiries. Why did we have them? What did they accomplish? They accomplished having ministers over there say that they could not answer questions about it and could not debate it in the House because there was a public inquiry going on.

Then the inquiry goes on and on. Millions and millions of dollars are spent on those inquiries, and what is the end result? They are dropped. Think about the taxpayer sending in that cheque at the end of April for those millions more dollars that are going to be spent. That is what we should be talking about in the House.

The government should have its own agenda. It should not have to bring back the old one and it sure as hell should not have to use closure.

[The Environment, November 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, Sonny Bono has not come back, so maybe the minister should check out who will be there.

Today the Minister of the Environment will appear before our committee about estimates. We requested this input on May 27. It is interesting that the estimates were deemed reported back to the House on October 24, and were voted on, on October 28. That is some input that we will have to the minister.

How can the minister totally disregard his committee in that way?

[The Environment, November 6th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, I know with interest that U2's Bono will be attending the Liberal convention next week. Given Bono's well-known interest as a humanitarian and an environmentalist, will the Minister of Environment mention to him that the new Liberal leader's shipping company is a little less than sterling in the area of environment? It has been charged and convicted with environmental infractions, like illegally dumping oil in the ocean.

[Ethics, October 28th, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, it is rather interesting that the Prime Minister forgets how he treated one of his own stalwarts of close to 40 years, Mr. Herb Gray, when he talks about how members treat each other.

My question is for the Minister of the Environment. Has the minister received any other gifts in excess of $200?

[The Environment, October 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, we are dependent on that gas from the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. The very price of it across this country is dependent upon that pipeline going ahead.

The Territorial Lands Act strictly prohibits government officers, employees or persons acting for those persons from acquiring territorial land unless they have special permission from cabinet. Either this government official had cabinet approval, or was clairvoyant or broke the law. Which is it?

[The Environment, October 23rd, 2003]

Mr. Speaker, more government corruption. The answer of the Minister of the Environment's to my colleague about the Mackenzie Valley pipeline sounds like just more internal cover-up.

Will this minister immediately ask the RCMP to investigate this very important issue?